timate and
personal concern had happened to Prince Max. That young man, whose head
was so crowded with ideals for others, had discovered--or glimpsed, it
would be more correct to say--an ideal of his own, in the shaping of
which he had nothing whatever to do. Goddess-like she had descended upon
him from skies in which previously he had held no faith at all; and even
yet it was a tussle for his conscience to accept anything coming from
that quarter as really divine. He was agnostic; he did not like the
Church, and he rather despised that attitude of mind which accepted
miracle as a directing power in human affairs, and looked to an unseen
world for the inspirations of life. It was as though some modern
Endymion gazing up at the round and prosaic surface of the moon, and
refusing to admit that there entered into its composition anything even
of so low a vitality as green cheese--it was as though such an one had
seen the affirmed negation suddenly take to itself life and form, and
disclose from afar a whole heaven of thoughts, beauties, and aspirations
which he had not believed existent. And then, having seen that gracious
form so well defined that it must for ever remain imprinted upon his
consciousness, he had watched it steal from him into obscurity, wilfully
concealing its whereabouts, though ever since the silver haze of that
hidden presence had permeated his world.

Concealment and flight are, we know, the very arrows of love when
directed with subtle intent against the hunter's heart in man; and they
are scarcely less powerful to kindle his ardor when undirected and
without purpose, or, as in this case, of a purpose wholly negative and
without lure.

His lady had disappeared, because in very truth parting was her intent;
and in haunting for a while the dark and crooked ways which her feet had
blessed, he had but the poor satisfaction of knowing that he was
depriving of her ministrations lives inconceivably more miserable than
his own. That consciousness when it came touched him in a point of
honor, and forced him to relinquish the quest; but there remained with
him thenceforth a maddening sense that if, accepting his withdrawal, she
had resumed her avocations, he now knew daily where she was, and had
only to break with his scruples in order to find her.

They had met less than half-a-dozen times; and he, driven by his mental
pugnacity to test so unreasonable an apparition, had spared neither
himself nor her. The