thought.
This is a thing which runs up into eternity, Agnes. It had to be. We
needn't try to justify it."

"I cannot--I dare not regard it as you do."

"But you have come! Let me look at you!"

"Does it require much looking to see that I am really unhappy?"

"I see that you are beautiful, that you are here--with me. Ah, don't be
unhappy! When we take into account our scanty time together"--he grew
pale at the thought--"and the danger we have just missed of losing each
other, perhaps for ever----" She caught his hand for a second and he
kept it.

"What is to be done?" she asked, after an agitated silence. "What will
people say? Not that I can think of _anything_ to do."

"Darling, I know I have asked you to make an impossible sacrifice--to
break off a most brilliant marriage, to marry me and share the despair,
hardships, tortures of a life very different to any you have seen. Well
has Goethe said--

_'Love not the sun too much, nor yet the stars,
Come, follow me to the realms of night.'_

This is what I offer you, dearest. You can hardly realise what a
wretched, desolate existence mine has been. Resignation is a miserable
refuge. They say work gives one contentment, but unless one is servile
and gives in to the spirit of the age, it is rarely understood till one
is dead. And so the discouragement is perpetual. Even your sympathy
would pain me at such times. I feel then--as I feel now--that I will
grasp Fate by the throat; it shall not utterly crush me."

"But," said Agnes, a little frightened at this outburst, "do you never
think of God and His Will?"

He returned her anxious glance with gloomy, almost compassionate
amazement.

"Does God think of me?" he asked. "Really, I cannot feel that the
salvation of my soul is so important. Indeed, any idea of immortality is
awful How could it ever be a consolation--except to a smug, very
self-satisfied egoism? Call it the burden--or the cross of
immortality--if you call it anything. I wish it could be proved that we
end when we die. But physicians dissect _dead_ bodies to find the soul.
It would not be a soul if they could find it in the dead. And imagine
one becoming penitent when the day of grace is over!"

"I keep Clement's words before me, '_The Lord who died for us is not our
enemy_.' Surely that is a splendid thought against final despair."

"Many thoughts are splendid," he replied, "if we could believe them now
as the early Christians did in the fi