ver dared to
imagine. It was then that her stern control of herself began to slip
away. Wilfully she shut her eyes to all that she understood only too
well, and surrendered herself to the spell and wonder of the vista that
opened before her. It was the best thing that life had brought her, she
told herself, and in an impulse of pagan desire she was impelled to
wring from it the last drop of passionate happiness it could afford her.
Her love for him reached out into new depths; the dull, despairing,
impossible love of before became a fever, a frenzy, a great yearning
passion that must pour itself out or kill her.

Then came the supreme moment in which she let the belief that he loved
her seize entire possession of her. Must he not have for his mate a
woman who would love him and make him a perfect wife? He was a being
apart from his own world, devoted to serener and higher ambitions. Had
she not seen the glow with which he expounded his ideas and purposes,
forgetting she was a humble, uninstructed listener, and surrounding her
soul with the sweet unction of the implied perfect equality? Perhaps it
had dawned upon him at last that devotion greater than hers the world
could not hold. In his consecration to his high calling he did not need
a wife to figure brilliantly amid social pleasures and functions, but a
helpmeet whom perhaps he could not so easily find in those exalted
spheres; one who needed no pleasures for herself, no triumphs; who had
no purposes of her own, no desires, save the supreme end of
self-sacrifice on the altar of his happiness and achievement. Only a
woman absolutely capable of such self-effacement could understand the
perfect bliss of it. If every man could find such faithfulness at his
own hearth, how the world would thrive and grow blessed! And she thanked
Heaven for the little fortune she could bring him, for this precious
money to establish his life on a safe and sure footing.

And when he had spoken at last, she, casting away the last doubt, had
thrown herself headlong into the dream. With her arms round him, and her
lips to his, she felt that she had always been destined for this high
bliss, that rendered by contrast the quiet stream of her life a mockery
of life.

The joyous period of intoxication was all too short. With the sobering
of the world to its work again in the new year, she, too, sobered a
little, and the old questioning revived in her. Was it really the truth
that he loved her? W