hat is all of life."

"Do you mean--that we should renounce?" I faltered.

"I don't know what I mean. I am asking, Hugh, asking. Haven't you any
clew? Isn't there any voice in you, anywhere, deep down, that can tell
me? give me a hint? just a little one?"

I was wracked. My passion had not left me, it seemed to be heightened,
and I pressed her hands against her knees. It was incredible that my
hands should be there, in hers, feeling her. Her beauty seemed as fresh,
as un-wasted as the day, long since, when I despaired of her. And yet and
yet against the tumult and beating of this passion striving to throb down
thought, thought strove. Though I saw her as a woman, my senses and my
spirit commingled and swooned together.

"This is life," I murmured, scarcely knowing what I said.

"Oh, my dear!" she cried, and her voice pierced me with pain, "are we to
be lost, overpowered, engulfed, swept down its stream, to come up below
drifting--wreckage? Where, then, would be your power? I'm not speaking of
myself. Isn't life more than that? Isn't it in us, too,--in you? Think,
Hugh. Is there no god, anywhere, but this force we feel, restlessly
creating only to destroy? You must answer--you must find out."

I cannot describe the pleading passion in her voice, as though hell and
heaven were wrestling in it. The woman I saw, tortured yet uplifted, did
not seem to be Nancy, yet it was the woman I loved more than life itself
and always had loved.

"I can't think," I answered desperately, "I can only feel--and I can't
express what I feel. It's mixed, it's dim, and yet bright and
shining--it's you."

"No, it's you," she said vehemently. "You must interpret it." Her voice
sank: "Could it be God?" she asked.

"God!" I exclaimed sharply.

Her hands fell away from mine.... The silence was broken only by the
crackling of the wood fire as a log turned over and fell. Never before,
in all our intercourse that I could remember, had she spoken to me about
religion.... With that apparent snap in continuity incomprehensible to
the masculine mind-her feminine mood had changed. Elements I had never
suspected, in Nancy, awe, even a hint of despair, entered into it, and
when my hand found hers again, the very quality of its convulsive
pressure seemed to have changed. I knew then that it was her soul I loved
most; I had been swept all unwittingly to its very altar.

"I believe it is God," I said. But she continued to gaze at me, her lips
parted