ht names."

There was silence till he murmured:

"Isn't it strange? I had quite given up prayer--till these last weeks. To
pray for any definite physical or material thing would seem to me now--as
it always has done--absurd. But to reach out--to the Power beyond our
weakness!"

He paused a moment and resumed:

"Boden did that for me. He came to me--at the worst. He never preached to
me. He has his black times--like the rest of us. But something upholds
him--and--oh! so strangely--I don't think he knew--through him--I too
laid hold. But for that--I might have put an end to myself--more than
once--these last weeks."

She clung to him--whispering:

"Neither of us--can ever suffer--again--without the other--to help."

They kissed once more, love and youth welling up in them, and drowning
out of sight, for the moment at least, the shapes and images of pain.
Then recovering his composure, hand fast in hand, Faversham began to talk
more calmly, drawing out for her as best he could, so that it need not be
done again--and up to the very evening of the murder--the history of the
nine months which had, so to speak, thrown his whole being into the
melting-pot, and through the fusing and bruising of an extraordinary
experience, had remade a man. She listened in a happy bewilderment. It
struck her newly--astonishingly. Her love for him had always included a
tenderly maternal, pitying element. She had felt herself the maturer
character. Sympathy for his task, flattered pleasure in her Egeria role,
deepening into something warmer and intenser with every letter from him
and every meeting, even when she disputed with and condemned him; love in
spite of herself; love with which conscience, taste, aspiration, all
quarrelled; but love nevertheless, the love which good women feel for the
man that is both weaker and stronger than themselves--it was so she might
have read her own past, if the high passion of this ultimate moment had
not blurred it.

But "Life at her grindstone" had been busy with Faversham, and in the
sifted and sharpened soul laid bare to her, the woman recognized her
mate indeed. Face to face with cruelty and falsehood, in others, and with
the potentialities of them in his own nature; dazzled by money and power;
and at last, delivered from the tyranny of the as though by some fierce
gaol-delivering angel, Faversham had found himself; and such a self as
could never have been reasonably prophesied for the discontented