t would
consume the beholder; it would even scorch under the flame of its own
being. It withdraws, only to appear again, like the god from the brake,
when it is greatly summoned. But always it is there, and the two that
hold high fealty remember what they have seen. When the flame sinks,
they say: "But it is the flame on the altar. It must not die." So they
renew it. When the outer habit of life fails in one of them, to grow
poor and mean, the other remembers that one glimpse of the soul, and
calls upon it tenderly.

"Revive," says his patient love, "I stay you with the flagons of my
hope, I comfort you with the apples of my great belief." And always it
is an interchange of life, the one feeding the other with eternal
succor.

And now, to come back to the old question: Say a woman loved a man like
this man. Osmond seemed not to be debating now, but hastening along the
thread of a perfect certainty. Something had put a clue in his hand.
Wherever it might lead him, he was running fast. It came upon him, like
the lighting of a great fire, that this was a call for high emprise. He
loved nothing so much as courage. Here was the summons to the world-old
battle where all but a few fail and none are said to succeed unless they
die for passion and so life drops a curtain on the after-fight. The
great lovers--chiefly they are those for whom the fight never was
finished, who chose death rather than endure. He had bitten his teeth
all his life on the despair of adventure, but now it came upon him that
life itself is the great adventure, and love the crown of it. Say he,
loving a woman, went out to fight the dragons of the way. He had no
armor such as youth delights in. He was not a Prince Charming, who wooes
the eye even before he speaks. He had only the one treasure--love. Say
he crowned the woman with it, and then challenged God to give their
hungers food, be the unseen combatant and fight out the fight beside
them? Say he vowed himself like a knight to her service, and their
mutual worship scorned the body save as the instrument of life, and
glorified the soul? "I am the soul," something cried out in him. "Do not
deny me, or you blaspheme the God that also lives. Give me food, the
large liberty to be faithful. Lay bonds upon me, patience and loyalty,
and I shall rejoice in them and grow strong enough to break them, and
delight in perfect liberty."

It all resolved itself, he found, into this question of the soul. Was
the mar