had taken pains to give little
clue to her identity. Well, he would answer her from behind the same
veil of impersonality. She need never know how widely she had missed
her guess in her picture of him. She might keep her poor little
illusions--yes, "elderly gentleman" and all. He would speak to her, as
one soul might speak to another, unhampered by all the trammels of
outward circumstance. It was his to offer help, sympathy,
encouragement, and he dispensed it in no stinted measure.

As he drew pen and paper towards him, there swept over him a sense of
the oneness of humanity, and a vision of what the world might be, if
man were tenderer, and woman held the wider vision. Such a training as
hers, he wrote to Amy Bell, might give her something of both, might
grant her a standpoint from which she could see clearer than most
women, just because she saw life in larger outlines, undimmed by
detail,--a life as different from that of the average woman as the
sweep of the garments of the Greek caryatides from the fussy,
beruffled gowns of the nineteenth-century women. The question, the
vital pressing question in her case, was how she would use this
freedom. Should it slip into the hardness of the new woman, on the one
hand, or, on the other, allow itself to be fettered to the dulness of
every-day decorum, her opportunity would be lost; but if she could
hold the delicate equilibrium where she stood,--self-poised, and yet
swaying to the influences which must work on every soul for its
highest development, plastic yet firm,--then he believed, firmly
believed, that there might lie in her a power for which the world
would be the better and the richer.

"There!" said he, as he blotted and sealed the letter. "That, I should
say, is as prosy and didactic as a discourse of my venerated ancestor.
I wonder if the tendency to sermonize runs in the blood. I dare say if
I had the good fortune to have any religious convictions, I should
dogmatize over them in the pulpit, and pound the cushions as
vigorously as any itinerant evangelist. Well, well! heredity is a
queer thing. We think we get away from it, but it is always cropping
up in unexpected places. Our ancestors are like _atra cura_, and ride
behind every man's saddle."

The clock struck three as he finished his musings. He pushed away his
chair, and set back the lamp on the mantel. The light, flaring a
little in the draught from the open window, lent a startling look of
life to the p