re had also
been the lure of another passion of the heart, which was too perilously
dear to contemplate. Eyes that were beautiful, and their beauty was not
for him; a spirit that was bright and glowing, but the brightness and
the glow might not renew his days. It was hard to fight alone. Alone he
was, for only to one may the doors within doors be opened-only to one
so dear that all else is everlastingly distant may the true tale of the
life beneath life be told. And it was not for him--nothing of this;
not even the thought of it; for to think of it was to desire it, and to
desire it was to reach out towards it; and to reach out towards it was
the end of all. There had been moments of abandonment to the alluring
dream, such as when he wrote the verses which Lacey had sent to Hylda
from the desert; but they were few. Oft-repeated, they would have filled
him with an agitated melancholy impossible to be borne in the life which
must be his.

So it had been. The deeper into life and its labours and experiences he
had gone, the greater had been his temptations, born of two passions,
one of the body and its craving, the other of the heart and its desires:
and he had fought on--towards the morning.

"Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will love thee to mortal
sorrow, if thou goest without care to thy end too soon?" The desert, the
dark monastery, the acacia tree, the ancient palm, the ruinous garden,
disappeared. He only saw a face which smiled at him, as it had done 'by
the brazier in the garden at Cairo, that night when she and Nahoum and
himself and Mizraim had met in the room of his house by the Ezbekieh
gardens, and she had gone out to her old life in England, and he had
taken up the burden of the East--that long six years ago. His head
dropped in his hands, and all that was beneath the Quaker life he
had led so many years, packed under the crust of form and habit, and
regulated thought, and controlled emotion, broke forth now, and had its
way with him.

He turned away staggering and self-reproachful from the first question,
only to face the other--"And that will love thee to mortal sorrow, if
thou goest without care to thy end too soon." It was a thought he had
never let himself dwell on for an instant in all the days since they
had last met. He had driven it back to its covert, even before he could
recognise its face. It was disloyal to her, an offence against all that
she was, an affront to his manhood to let