come
into contact with anything that could stain her whiteness of soul.

She had told Sydney that she loved him no longer, and in the deadness of
emotion which had followed on the first acuteness of her grief for her
lost idol, and the physical exhaustion caused by her late illness, she
had thought she spoke the truth. But, after all, what was this yearning
over him, in spite of all his errors, but love? what this continual
thought of him, this aching sense of loss, even this intense desire that
he should suffer for his sin, but an awakening within her of the deep,
blind love that, as a woman has said, sometimes

"Stirreth deep below"

the ordinary love of common life, with a

"Hidden beating slow,
And the blind yearning, and the long-drawn breath
Of the love that conquers death"?

For the first time she was conscious of the existence of love that was
beyond the region of spoken words, or caresses, or the presence of the
beloved: love that intertwined itself with the fibres of her whole
being, so that if it were smitten her very life was smitten too. This
was the explanation of her weariness, her weakness, her distaste for
everything: the best part of herself was gone when her love seemed to be
destroyed. The invisible cords of love which bind a mother to her child
are explicable on natural grounds; but not less strong, not less
natural, though less common, are those which hold a nature like Nan's to
the soul of the man she loves. That Sydney was unworthy of such a love,
need not be said; but it is the office of the higher nature to seek out
the unworthy and "to make the low nature better by its throes."

Nan lay still and looked her love in the face, and was startled to find
that it was by no means dead, but stronger than it had been before. "And
he is my husband," she said to herself; "I am bound to be true to him. I
am ashamed to have faltered. What does it matter if he has erred? I may
be bitterly sorry, but I will not love him one whit the less. I could
never leave him now."

But a thought followed which was a pain to her. If she loved him in
spite of error, what of her own sense of right and wrong? Was she not in
danger of paltering with it in order to excuse him? would she not in
time be tempted to say that he had not erred, that he had done only as
other men do?--and so cloud the fair outlines of truth which had
hitherto been mapped out with ethereal clearness for her by