ecomes one with that vast element of unrest, so the little flame of
her girl's nature was absorbed at last into the great fire underlying
all humanity. Was she in love? she asked herself. When she was with
Rennes she became silent, incapable of conversation, of thought. All she
asked was to be near him, to watch him, to hear him.

Was this love? Was it love to press his letter to her heart, to read it
again and again, to keep it under her pillow at night? Was it love to
think of him every moment of the day, to compare all others to him and
find them wanting, to see his face always before her eyes? Was it love
to know that if he called her, as he called her now, she would leave
home, father, mother, friends, all things, all people, and follow him to
the world's end, to the beginning of hell, or--further? At
one-and-twenty such questions need no answer. They belong to the
innocent rhetoric of youth which will cry out to June, "Are you fair?"
and to the autumnal moon in mist, "Must there be rain?" Neither June nor
the moon make reply, but youth has no doubts. The girl, weeping tears of
joy over Rennes's perilous words, had but one clear regret in her
mind--she could not see him for some hours. His declaration dispelled
the terrible bitterness, scepticism, and indifference to all sentiment
which had gradually permeated, during their acquaintance, her whole
heart. Repulsed affection may turn to hatred in haughty, impatient
souls. But in Agnes it produced a moral languor--a mental indolence--the
feeling that no one was in earnest, and nothing ought to matter. The
more this feeling deepened, the more attentively did she observe the
mere outward etiquette of all that passes for seriousness, attending
scrupulously to the minor obligations of existence and exhausting her
courage in those petty matters which die with the day and yield no
apparent fruit. How different now seemed the colourless, harsh fabric
which she had mistaken for duty and wrapped--as a shroud--about her
secret hopes! She had held every aspiration implying happiness as a
"proverb of reproach"; she had endeavoured to believe that all
poetry--except hymns--was false prophecy leading one to hard
entanglements and grievous falls.

And what had been the impoverishment of her soul under this grim
discipline? How could she tell the many thoughts which had travelled
unquestioned over the highway of her heart during that process of
disillusion? But all was changed now,