. . And all at once, as he vaguely ponders the song, the deep
mysterious import of its sounding in this hour dawns on him.

"Here is a woman with utter need of me--
I find myself queen here, it seems! How strange!"

He turns and looks again at the white, quiet child who stands awaiting
her dismissal. Her soul is on her silent lips--

"Look at the woman here with the new soul . . .
This new soul is mine!"

And then, musing aloud, he comes upon the truth of it--

"Scatter all this, my Phene--this mad dream!
What's the whole world except our love, my own!"

To-night (he told her so, did he not?), aye, even before to-night, they
will travel for her land, "some isle with the sea's silence on it"; but
first he must break up these paltry attempts of his, that he may begin
art, as well as life, afresh. . . .

"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

* * * * *

And you are ever by me while I gaze,
--Are in my arms as now--as now--as now!
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"

That is what Lutwyche, under the window, hears for his revenge.

In this Passing of Pippa, silence and song have met and mingled into
one another, for Phene is silence, as Pippa is song. Phene will speak
more when Jules and she are in their isle together--but never will she
speak much: she _is_ silence. Her need of him indeed was utter--she had
no soul until he touched her into life: it is the very Pygmalion and
Galatea. But Jules' soul, no less, had needed Pippa's song to waken to
its truest self: once more the man is the one moved by the direct
intervention. Not that Phene, like Ottima, could have saved herself;
there _was_ no self to save--she had that awful, piercing selflessness
of the used flesh and ignored soul. If Pippa had not passed, if Jules
had gone, leaving money in her hand . . . I think that Phene would have
killed herself--like Ottima, yet how unlike! For Phene (but one step
upon the way) would have died for her own self's sake only, because till
now she had never known it, but in that strangest, dreadfullest, that
least, most, sacred of offerings-up, had "lived for others"--the others
of the smile which girls like her are used to bear,

"But never men, men cannot stoop so low."

Were ever scorn and irony more blasting, was ever pity more profound,
than in that line which Bro