was
no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of
that, with Lambeth Palace.

But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about.
To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that
perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred
yards off from the Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulf
between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters
from Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught a
single echo of the washerwomen's gossip. Herminia's life through
those six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she and
Alan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezy
summit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulous
pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with their
aromatic resins. Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing;
while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of that
crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it. Gradually she was
raising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix with a lofty
nature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and more
generous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from the
world; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral
earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple
hangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making him
understand and sympathize with the motives which led her stoutly on
to her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of
discontent to her great renunciation.

As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom.
On the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. It
was a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomforts
of domestic life; she saw Alan too seldom for either ever to lose
the keen sense of fresh delight in the other's presence. When she
met him, she thrilled to the delicate fingertips. Herminia had
planned it so of set purpose. In her reasoned philosophy of life,
she had early decided that 'tis the wear and tear of too close daily
intercourse which turns unawares the lover into the husband; and she
had determined that in her own converse with the man she loved that
cause of disillusion should never intrude itself. They conserved
their romance through all their plighted and united life. Herminia
had afterwards no recollections of Alan to look back upon save
ideally happy on