She has her love, has not been false
thereto, and one day will through suffering find the path to the door of
rest. When she left him, her soul was endlessly richer than his. The
music, of which he said she knew nothing, in her soul moved a deep wave,
while it blew but a sparkling ripple on his; the poetry they read
together echoed in a far profounder depth of her being, and I do not
believe she came to loathe it as he did; and when she read of Him who
reasoned that the sins of a certain woman must have been forgiven her,
else how could she love so much, she may well have been able, from the
depth of such another loving heart, to believe utterly in Him--while we
know that her poor, shrunken lover came to think it manly, honest,
reasonable, meritorious to deny Him.

Weeks, months, years passed, but she never sought him; and he so far
forgot her by ceasing to think of her, that at length, when a chance
bubble did rise from the drowned memory, it broke instantly and
vanished. As to the child, he had almost forgotten whether _it_ was a
boy or a girl.

But since, in his new desolation, he discovered her, beyond a doubt, in
the little Amanda, old memories had been crowding back upon his heart,
and he had begun to perceive how Amanda's mother must have felt when she
saw his love decaying visibly before her, and to suspect that it was in
the self-immolation of love that she had left him. His own character had
been hitherto so uniformly pervaded with a refined selfishness as to
afford no standpoint of a different soil, whence by contrast to
recognize the true nature of the rest; but now it began to reveal itself
to his conscious judgment. And at last it struck him that twice he had
been left--by women whom he loved--at least by women who loved him. Two
women had trusted him utterly, and he had failed them both! Next
followed the thought stinging him to the heart, that the former was the
purer of the two; that the one on whom he had looked down because of her
lack of education, and her familiarity with humble things and simple
forms of life, knew nothing of what men count evil, while she in whom he
had worshiped refinement, intellect, culture, beauty, song--she who, in
love-teachableness had received his doctrine against all the prejudices
of her education, was--what she had confessed herself!

But, against all reason and logic, the result of this comparison was,
that Juliet returned fresh to his imagination in all the first w