the Infinite.

He was accompanying her piano with his violin. He made blunders, and
her playing was out of heart. They stopped as by consent, and a moment's
silence followed. All at once she broke out with something Robert had
never heard before. He soon found that it was a fantasy upon Ericson's
poem. Ever through a troubled harmony ran a silver thread of melody from
far away. It was the caverns drinking from the tempest overhead, the
grasses growing under the snow, the stars making music with the dark,
the streams filling the night with the sounds the day had quenched, the
whispering call of the dreams left behind in 'the fields of sleep,'--in
a word, the central life pulsing in aeonian peace through the outer
ephemeral storms. At length her voice took up the theme. The silvery
thread became song, and through all the opposing, supporting harmonies
she led it to the solution of a close in which the only sorrow was in
the music itself, for its very life is an 'endless ending.' She found
Robert kneeling by her side. As she turned from the instrument his
head drooped over her knee. She laid her hand on his clustering curls,
bethought herself, and left the room. Robert wandered out as in a dream.
At midnight he found himself on a solitary hill-top, seated in the
heather, with a few tiny fir-trees about him, and the sounds of a wind,
ethereal as the stars overhead, flowing through their branches: he heard
the sound of it, but it did not touch him.

Where was God?

In him and his question.

CHAPTER XX. ERICSON LOSES TO WIN.

If Mary St. John had been an ordinary woman, and if, notwithstanding,
Robert had been in love with her, he would have done very little in
preparation for the coming session. But although she now possessed him,
although at times he only knew himself as loving her, there was such a
mountain air of calm about her, such an outgoing divinity of peace, such
a largely moulded harmony of being, that he could not love her otherwise
than grandly. For her sake, weary with loving her, he would yet turn to
his work, and, to be worthy of her, or rather, for he never dreamed of
being worthy of her, to be worthy of leave to love her, would forget her
enough to lay hold of some abstract truth of lines, angles, or symbols.
A strange way of being in love, reader? You think so? I would there were
more love like it: the world would be centuries nearer its redemption
if a millionth part of the love in it were of th