his life, but his whole life. Every
impulse and passion of his being had yielded itself up to it. Ambition,
intellectual visions, imaginative fancies, all these had been not indeed
driven out by this passion, but more fatal still, they had opened their
arms to receive it, they had bidden it welcome, and heart and brain and
imagination had glowed with a new significance and a new-born power. A
lesser love would have had a lesser effect; it would have made rivals of
these other parts of himself. Not so the love of Bernard Maddison. Every
fiber of his deep, strong nature was strengthened and beautified by this
new-kindled fire. At that moment, had he been free to write, he would
have been conscious of a capacity beyond any which he had ever before
possessed. For a great nature is perfected by a great love, as the
blossoms of spring by the April showers and May sun. The dry dust of
scholarship sometimes chokes up the well of fancy. The perfect humanity
of love acts like a sweet, quickening impulse upon it, breathing sweet
soft life into dry images, and rich coloring into pallid visions. Such
love, which is at once spiritual and passionate, of heaven and of the
earth, absorbing and concentrative, widening and narrowing, is to a
man's nature, if he be strong enough to conceive and appreciate it, the
very food, the essence of sublimated life.

To Bernard Maddison it had been so. To its very depths he realized it as
he sat in his prison cell with something of the deep passive resignation
of the man who stands with one foot in the grave. The latter part of his
life--nay, the whole of it--had been full of noble dreams and pure
thoughts. His genius had never run riot over the whole face of nature,
to yield its fruits in a sickly sweet realism with only faint flashes of
his deeper power. Always subordinated by the innate and cultured
healthiness of his mind, he had sent it forth a living power for good.
Great joy had been his as he had watched his message to the world
listened to, and understood, and appreciated. Another age might witness
its fruits, it was sufficient for him that the seed was rightly planted.

Oh, the horror of it--the burning, unspeakable horror! In his ears there
seemed to come ringing from the world without the great hum of gossip
and lies which were dragging his name down into hell. A murderer! The
time might come when she too would think thus of him, when the tragedy
of her first love might fade away, and the