der, and deep can know--faithfulness clung to with
but the calmer steadfastness when the last glimmer of mere hope is gone.

The successive scenes in the Gypsy camp with Juan, with her father, and
with the Gypsy girl Hinda, bring before us at once the intensity of her
suffering and the depth of her steadfastness. Trembling beneath the
burden laid upon her,--laid on her by no will of another, but by the
earnestness of her own humanity,--we see her seeking through Juan
whatever of possible comfort can come through tidings of him she has
left; in the strong and noble nature of her father, the consolation of at
least hoping that her sacrifice shall not be all in vain; and in Hinda's
untutored, instinctive faithfulness to her name and race, support to her
own resolve. But no pressure of her suffering, no despondency as to the
result of all, no thought of the lonely life before her, filled evermore
with those yearnings toward the past and the vanished, can turn her back
from her chosen path.

"Father, my soul is weak,
. . . . . . . .
But if I cannot plant resolve on hope,
It will stand firm on certainty of woe.
. . . Hopes have precarious life;
But faithfulness can feed on suffering,
And knows no disappointment. Trust in me.
If it were needed, this poor trembling hand
Should grasp the torch--strive not to let it fall,
Though it were burning down close to my flesh.
No beacon lighted yet. I still should hear
Through the damp dark the cry of gasping swimmers.
Father, I will be true."

The scenes which follow, first with her lover, then with her lover and
her father together, present the culmination at once of her trial and of
her steadfastness. Hitherto she has made her choice, as it were, in the
bodily absence of that love, the abnegation of whose every hope gives its
sharpness to her crown of thorns. Now the light and the darkness, the
joy and the sorrow, the love whose earthly life she is slaying, and the
life of lonely, ceaseless, lingering pain before her, stand, as it were,
visibly and tangibly side by side. On the one hand her father, with his
noble presence, his calm unquestioning self-devotion, his fervid
eloquence, and his withering scorn of everything false and base,
represents that deepest in humanity--and in her--which impels to seek and
to cling to the highest good. On the other her lover, associated with
all the deeply-cherished life, joy, and hope of her