now of the world, was improbable,--yet at any rate it could
never allow that he himself had acted from any but the vilest and
most unworthy reasons. Base souls would see in the sacrifice he
made to Herminia's ideals, only the common story of a trustful
woman cruelly betrayed by the man who pretended to love her, and
would proceed to treat him with the coldness and contempt with
which such a man deserves to be treated.

As the morning wore on, this view of the matter obtruded itself
more and more forcibly every moment on Alan. Over and over again
he said to himself, let come what come might, he must never aid and
abet that innocent soul in rushing blindfold over a cliff to her
own destruction. It is so easy at twenty-two to ruin yourself for
life; so difficult at thirty to climb slowly back again. No, no,
holy as Herminia's impulses were, he must save her from herself; he
must save her from her own purity; he must refuse to be led astray
by her romantic aspirations. He must keep her to the beaten path
trod by all petty souls, and preserve her from the painful crown of
martyrdom she herself designed as her eternal diadem.

Full of these manful resolutions, he rose up early in the morning.
He would be his Herminia's guardian angel. He would use her love
for him,--for he knew she loved him,--as a lever to egg her aside
from these slippery moral precipices.

He mistook the solid rock of ethical resolution he was trying to
disturb with so frail an engine. The fulcrum itself would yield
far sooner to the pressure than the weight of Herminia's
uncompromising rectitude. Passionate as she was,--and with that
opulent form she could hardly be otherwise,--principle was still
deeper and more imperious with her than passion.

V.

He met her by appointment on the first ridge of Bore Hill. A sunny
summer morning smiled fresh after the rain. Bumble-bees bustled
busily about the closed lips of the red-rattle, and ripe gorse pods
burst with little elastic explosions in the basking sunlight.

When Alan reached the trysting-place, under a broad-armed oak, in a
glade of the woodland, Herminia was there before him; a good woman
always is, 'tis the prerogative of her affection. She was simply
dressed in her dainty print gown, a single tea-rosebud peeped out
from her bodice; she looked more lily-like, so Alan thought in his
heart, than he had ever yet seen her. She held out her hand to him
with parted lips and a consc