ms, he would start from his lonely bed, and pace the room
for hours, or saddle his horse, and ride all night long aimlessly
through the awful woods, vainly trying to escape himself. How
gladly, at those moments, he would have welcomed centuries of a
material hell, to escape from the more awful spiritual hell within
him,--to buy back that pearl of innocence which he had cast
recklessly to be trampled under the feet of his own swinish
passions! But, no; that which was done could never be undone,--
never, to all eternity. And more than once, as he wandered
restlessly from one room to another, the barrels of his pistols
seemed to glitter with a cold, devilish smile, and call to him,--

'Come to us! and with one touch of your finger, send that bursting
spirit which throbs against your brow to flit forth free, and
nevermore to defile her purity by your presence!'

But no, again: a voice within seemed to command him to go on, and
claim her, and win her, spite of his own vileness. And in after
years, slowly, and in fear and trembling, he knew it for the voice
of God, who had been leading him to become worthy of her through
that bitter shame of his own unworthiness.

As One higher than them would have it, she took a fancy to read
Homer in the original, and Lancelot could do no less than offer his
services as translator. She would prepare for him portions of the
Odyssey, and every day that he came up to the Priory he used to
comment on it to her; and so for many a week, in the dark wainscoted
library, and in the clipt yew-alleys of the old gardens, and under
the brown autumn trees, they quarried together in that unexhausted
mine, among the records of the rich Titan-youth of man. And step by
step Lancelot opened to her the everlasting significance of the
poem; the unconscious purity which lingers in it, like the last rays
of the Paradise dawn; its sense of the dignity of man as man; the
religious reverence with which it speaks of all human ties, human
strength and beauty--ay, even of merely animal human appetites, as
God-given and Godlike symbols. She could not but listen and admire,
when he introduced her to the sheer paganism of Schiller's Gods of
Greece; for on this subject he was more eloquent than on any. He
had gradually, in fact, as we have seen, dropped all faith in
anything but Nature; the slightest fact about a bone or a weed was
more important to him than all the books of div