eart, and not the brain, enshrines the priceless pearl of
womanhood, the oracular jewel, the 'Urim and Thummim,' before which
gross man can only inquire and adore.

And, in the meantime, a change was passing upon Lancelot. His
morbid vanity--that brawl-begotten child of struggling self-conceit
and self-disgust--was vanishing away; and as Mr. Tennyson says in
one of those priceless idyls of his, before which the shade of
Theocritus must hide his diminished head,--

'He was altered, and began
To move about the house with joy,
And with the certain step of man.'

He had, at last, found one person who could appreciate him. And in
deliberate confidence he set to work to conquer her, and make her
his own. It was a traitorous return, but a very natural one. And
she, sweet creature! walked straight into the pleasant snare,
utterly blind, because she fancied that she saw clearly. In the
pride of her mysticism, she had fancied herself above so commonplace
a passion as love. It was a curious feature of lower humanity,
which she might investigate and analyse harmlessly as a cold
scientific spectator; and, in her mingled pride and purity, she used
to indulge Lancelot in metaphysical disquisitions about love and
beauty, like that first one in their walk home from Minchampstead,
from which a less celestially innocent soul would have shrunk. She
thought, forsooth, as the old proverb says, that she could deal in
honey, without putting her hand to her mouth. But Lancelot knew
better, and marked her for his own. And daily his self-confidence
and sense of rightful power developed, and with them, paradoxical as
it may seem, the bitterest self-abasement. The contact of her
stainless innocence, the growing certainty that the destiny of that
innocence was irrevocably bound up with his own, made him shrink
from her whenever he remembered his own guilty career. To remember
that there were passages in it which she must never know--that she
would cast him from her with abhorrence if she once really
understood their vileness? To think that, amid all the closest
bonds of love, there must for ever be an awful, silent gulf in the
past, of which they must never speak!--That she would bring to him
what he could never, never bring to her!--The thought was
unbearable. And as hideous recollections used to rise before him,
devilish caricatures of his former self, mopping and mowing at him
in his drea