h the wondrous music of immortal
love and longing, reaching out to glad fruition? Was that sudden rare
peace, creating a reverential atmosphere about him, an earnest of days
to come? He experienced a vivid lightness as if he were being borne on
clouds, while fragments of delicious remembrances floated through his
brain. The very refinement of his nature seemed to exalt him to that
high heaven of love, whose solemn mysteries it is not lawful to utter.

"I cannot quite understand"--in a curious dreamy tone, still spelled by
the mastery of impassioned emotion--"how you could miss loving Sylvie;
how she, woman-like, could help adoring you for your strength and
heroism. Jack, if I were a woman, your very power would compel me to
worship you. I should love you, whether or no."

Jack gave a bright, cheerful laugh. "It is that kind of strength you
like in Sylvie," he made answer. "She will always spur a man up to his
best. Her well-trained ear is quick to detect a false note in honor,
ambition, or love. She will never be any kind of dead weight, and yet
she is so deliciously womanly. There was a time--don't be vexed,
Fred,"--in a tender, pleading tone,--"when I thought you were not going
to be worthy of her. But that is past."

"She rejected me then," Fred Lawrence said simply. "I offered her my
father's wealth, the home he had made, my own folly and arrogance and
self-conceit; and then, Jack, she boldly admitted that you were her
hero! When I consider the sort of man my training and surroundings made
me, I am filled with disgust. And yet I was no worse than hundreds of
others at the present day. When I look at my mother, Irene, and myself,
I feel that we were the product of the so-called culture of the day,
which substitutes shallow creeds, conventional manners, and systems, for
all that is pure, strong, and noble in manhood or womanhood. It is the
sort of Greek temperament on which we pride our intellectual selves. We
revel in a glowing, sensuous enjoyment, that intoxicates the brain, and
leads us to disdain the real work of the world. We are trained to
consider what society demands of us; we are polished and refined, and in
too many instances left morally weak and ignorant. No wonder so many of
us have not the strength to buffet across the stormy sea of hard
experience, but are lost in the great whirlpool!"

Jack peered into the pale, handsome face by the faint light. Surely this
man had to make a tremendous effort for sa