ss. But as yet he had no
such vision; his one thought was, 'She will do it! will she draw back?'
and the feeble warnings he was obliged to utter to keep his own terms,
by assuring his conscience of 'her free-will,' were they not
half-fearfully whispered, and with an inward haste, lest they should
give her pause? 'But the world, my dear--think!' 'It will have cruel
names for thee.' 'It will make thee outcast--think!'

'I know all,' she had answered; 'but I love you, and two years of your
love would pay for all. There is no world for me but you. Till to-night
I have never lived at all, and when you go I shall be as dead. The world
cannot hurt such a one.'

Ah me, it was a wild, sweet dream for both of them, one the woman's, one
the poet's, of a 'sweet impossible' taking flesh! For, do not let us
blame Narcissus overmuch. He was utterly sincere; he meant no wrong. He
but dreamed of following a creed to which his reason had long given a
hopeless assent. In a more kindly-organised community he might have
followed it, and all have been well; but the world has to be dealt with
as one finds it, and we must get sad answers to many a fair calculation
if we 'state' it wrongly in the equation. That there is one law for the
male and another for the female had not as yet vitally entered into his
considerations. He was too dizzy with the dream, or he must have seen
what an unequal bargain he was about to drive.

At last he did awake, and saw it all; and in a burning shame went to
Hesper, and told her that it must not be.

Her answer was unconsciously the most subtly dangerous she could have
chosen: 'If I like to give myself to you, why should you not take me? It
is of my own free-will. My eyes are open.' It was his very thought put
into words, and by her. For a moment he wavered--who could blame him?
'Am I my brother's keeper?'

'Yes! a thousand times yes!' cried his soul; for he was awake now, and
he had come to see the dream as it was, and to shudder at himself as he
had well-nigh been, just as one shudders at the thought of a precipice
barely escaped. In that moment, too, the idea of her love in all its
divineness burst upon him. Here was a heart capable of a great tragic
love like the loves of old he read of and whimpered for in sonnets, and
what had he offered in exchange? A poor, philosophical compromise,
compounded of pessimism and desire, in which a man should have all to
gain and nothing to lose, for

'The light, lig