past, pleads with his
earnest, impassioned, almost despairing eloquence, for her return to
_happiness_. More nobly beautiful by far in her sad steadfastness than
when she glowed before us as the "child of light" upon the Placa,--

"Her choice was made.
. . . . . . .
Slowly she moved to choose sublimer pain,
Yearning, yet shrinking: . . .
. . . firm to slay her joy,
That cut her heart with smiles beneath the knife,
Like a sweet babe foredoomed by prophecy."

To all the despairing pleadings and appeals of her lover she has but one
answer:--

"You must forgive Fedalma all her debt.
She is quite beggared. If she gave herself,
'Twould be a self corrupt with stifled thoughts
Of a forsaken better. . . .
Oh, all my bliss was in our love, but now
I may not taste it; some deep energy
Compels me to choose hunger."

What that energy is, we surely do not need to ask. It is that deep
principle of all true life which represents the affinity--latent,
oppressed by circumstances, repressed by sin, but always there--between
our human nature and the Divine, and through subjection to which we
reassume our birthright as "the sons of God"; conscience to see and will
to choose--not what shall please ourselves, but--the highest and purest
aim that life presents to us.

It is the same "deep energy," the same inexorable necessity of her
nature, that she should put away from her all beneath the best and
purest, which originates the sudden terror that smiles upon her when Don
Silva, for her sake, breaks loose from country and faith, from honour and
God. There is no triumph in the greatness of the love thus displayed; no
rejoicing in prospect of the outward fulfilment of the love thus made
possible; no room for any emotion but the dark chill foreboding of a
separation thus begun, wider than all distance, and more profound and
hopeless than death. The separation of aims no longer single, of souls
no longer one; of his life falling, though for her sake, from its best
and highest, and therefore ceasing, inevitably and hopelessly, fully to
respond to hers.

"What the Zincala may not quit for you,
I cannot joy that you should quit for her."

The last temptation has now been met and conquered. Henceforth we see
Fedalma only in her calm, sad, unwavering steadfastness, bearing, without
moan or outward sign, the burden of her cross. Not even her father's
dying charge is needed to c