whom she could have
grown pure and womanly and good. For Flaxman Reed had loved her, though
up to that evening he had been in complete ignorance of the fact, being
already wedded to what the world considers an impossible ideal.

Such is the power of suggestion, that Audrey's confession of her
weakness had revealed to him his own. If she had been all that he
believed her to be, he might not have regarded his feeling for her as in
itself of the nature of sin; but his sensitive soul, made morbid by its
self-imposed asceticism, recoiled from the very thought of impurity in
the woman he loved. Hence his powerlessness to help her. He knew, none
better, that a stronger man would not have felt this difficulty. He had
trembled before his own intellect; now he was afraid of his own heart.

Audrey--it was for such that his Christ had died. And he could not even
speak a word to save her.

He became almost blasphemous in his agony. Christ had died on _his_
cross. He, Christ's servant, had crucified self--and it could not die.
Was this the ironic destiny of all ideals too austere for earth, too
divine for humanity?

Not long afterwards Flaxman Reed was received into the communion of the
Church of Rome. He had done with compromise.

CHAPTER XXVII

It was Audrey's fate to be condemned by those whom she had most cared
for. Ted and Vincent, Langley and Katherine, and lastly Mr. Flaxman
Reed, they had all judged her--harshly, imperfectly, as human nature
judges. Of the five, perhaps Vincent, because he was a child of Nature,
and Katherine, because she was a good woman, alone appreciated the more
pathetic of Audrey's effects. She presented the moving spectacle of a
small creature struggling with things too great for her. Love, art,
nature, religion, she had never really given herself up to any one of
them; but she had called upon them all in turn, and instead of
sustaining, they had overwhelmed her.

And it seemed that Mr. Flaxman Reed, as the minister of the religion in
which she had sought shelter for a day, had failed her the most
unexpectedly, and in her direst necessity. And yet he had done more for
her than any of the others. She had lied to all of them; he had made it
possible for her to be true. Flaxman Reed would certainly not have
called himself a psychological realist; but by reason of his one
strength, his habit of constant communion with the unseen, he had
solved Langley Wyndham's problem. It would never have