n the world,--a
loneliness which crowds only aggravate, and which even the closest and
happiest companionship can only in part cure. The creative faculty is the
most inalienable and uncontrollable of individualities. It is at once its
own reward and its own penalty: until it has conquered the freedom of its
own city, in which it must for ever dwell, more or less apart, it is only
a prisoner in the cities of others. All this Mr. Allen felt for Mercy,
recognized in Mercy. He felt and recognized it by the instinct of love,
rather than by any intellectual perception. Intellectually, he was, in
spite of his superior culture, far Mercy's inferior. He had been brave
enough and manly enough to recognize this, and also to recognize what it
took still more manliness to recognize,--that she could never love a man
of his temperament. It would have been very easy for him to love Mercy. He
was not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself strangely
stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive, orchid-like face. He felt
in every fibre of him that to have the whole love of such a woman would be
bewildering joy; yet never for one moment did he allow himself to think of
seeking it. "I might make her think she loved me, perhaps," he said to
himself. "She is so lonely and sad, and has seen so few men; but it would
be base. She needs a nature totally different from mine, a life unlike the
life I shall lead. I will never try to make her love me. And he never did.
He taught her and trained her, and developed her, patiently, exactingly,
and yet tenderly as if she had been his sister; but he never betrayed to
her, even by a look or tone, that he could have loved her as his wife. No
doubt his influence was greater over her for this subtle, unacknowledged
bond. It gave to their intercourse a certain strange mixture of reticence
and familiarity, which grew more and more perilous and significant month
by month. Probably a change must have come, had they lived thus closely
together a year or two longer. The change could have been in but one
direction. They loved each other too much to ever love less: they might
have loved more; and Mercy's life had been more peaceful, her heart had
known a truer content, if she had never felt any stronger emotion than
that which Harley Allen's love would have roused in her bosom. But his
resolution was inexorable. His instinct was too keen, his will too strong:
he compelled all his home-seeking, wife-loving th