and
God-fearing ancestors, overlaid by selfish living, and now revived under
the stress, the purification partly of deepening passion, partly of a
high responsibility. The letter was incoherent, illogical; it showed now
the meaner, now the nobler elements of character; but it was human; it
came from the warm depths of life, and it had exerted in the end a
composing and appeasing force upon the woman to whom it was addressed.
He had loved her--if only at the moment of parting--he had loved her! At
the last there had been feeling, sincerity, anguish, and to these all
things may be forgiven.

And, indeed, what in her eyes there was to forgive, Julie had long
forgiven. Was it his fault if, when they met first, he was already
pledged--for social and practical reasons which her mind perfectly
recognized and understood--to Aileen Moffatt? Was it his fault if the
relations between herself and him had ripened into a friendship which in
its turn could only maintain itself by passing into love? No! It was
she, whose hidden, insistent passion--nourished, indeed, upon a tragic
ignorance--had transformed what originally he had a perfect right to
offer and to feel.

So she defended him; for in so doing she justified herself. And as to
the Paris proposal, he had a right to treat her as a woman capable of
deciding for herself how far love should carry her; he had a right to
assume that her antecedents, her training, and her circumstances were
not those of the ordinary sheltered girl, and that for her love might
naturally wear a bolder and wilder aspect than for others. He blamed
himself too severely, too passionately; but for this very blame her
heart remembered him the more tenderly. For it meant that his mind was
torn and in travail for her, that his thoughts clung to her in a
passionate remorse; and again she felt herself loved, and forgave with
all her heart.

All the same, he was gone out of her life, and through the strain and
the unconscious progress to other planes and phases of being, wrought by
sickness and convalescence, her own passion for him even was now a
changed and blunted thing.

Was she ashamed of the wild impulse which had carried her to Paris? It
is difficult to say. She was often seized with the shuddering
consciousness of an abyss escaped, with wonder that she was still in the
normal, accepted world, that Evelyn might still be her companion, that
Therese still adored her more fervently than any saint in the c