and when they have found
him, make him two-fold more the child of hell than themselves. Go--I
forgive you: you are young, and know not yet the mystery of the world.
Science will teach you some day that the outward frame is the sacrament
of the soul's inward beauty. Such a soul I had fancied your face
expressed; but I was mistaken. Foul hearts alone harbour such foul
suspicions, and fancy others to be what they know they might become
themselves. Go! Do I look like--? The very tapering of these fingers, if
you could read their symbolism, would give your dream the lie.' And she
flashed full on him, like sun-rays from a mirror, the full radiance of
her glorious countenance.

Alas, poor Philammon! where were thy eloquent arguments, thy orthodox
theories then? Proudly he struggled with his own man's heart of flesh,
and tried to turn his eyes away; the magnet might as well struggle to
escape from the spell of the north. In a moment, he knew not how, utter
shame, remorse, longing for forgiveness, swept over him, and crushed him
down; and he found himself on his knees before her, in abject and broken
syllables entreating pardon.

'Go--I forgive you. But know before you go, that the celestial milk
which fell from Here's bosom, bleaching the plant which it touched to
everlasting whiteness, was not more taintless than the soul of Theon's
daughter.'

He looked up in her face as he knelt before her. Unerring instinct
told him that her words were true. He was a monk, accustomed to believe
animal sin to be the deadliest and worst of all sins--indeed, 'the great
offence' itself, beside which all others were comparatively venial:
where there was physical purity, must not all other virtues follow in
its wake? All other failings were invisible under the dazzling veil of
that great loveliness; and in his self-abasement he went on--

'Oh, do not spurn me!--do not drive me away! I have neither friend,
home, nor teacher. I fled last night from the men of my own faith,
maddened by bitter insult and injustice--disappointed and disgusted with
their ferocity, narrowness, ignorance. I dare not, I cannot, I will not
return to the obscurity and the dulness of a Thebaid Laura. I have a
thousand doubts to solve, a thousand questions to ask, about that great
ancient world of which I know nothing--of whose mysteries, they say, you
alone possess the key! I am a Christian; but I thirst for knowledge....
I do not promise to believe you-I do not promise