dual man and woman
together, was mightily at work between them--a force which, terrible as
is the array of its attendant shadows, will at length appear to have
been one of the most powerful in the redemption of the world. But Juliet
did nothing, said nothing, to attract Faber. He would have cast himself
before her as a slave begging an owner, but for something in her
carriage which constantly prevented him. At one time he read it as an
unforgotten grief, at another as a cherished affection, and trembled at
the thought of the agonies that might be in store for him.

Weeks passed, and he had not made one inquiry after a situation for her.
It was not because he would gladly have, prolonged the present
arrangement of things, but that he found it almost impossible to bring
himself to talk about her. If she would but accept him, he thought--then
there would be no need! But he dared not urge her--mainly from fear of
failure, not at all from excess of modesty, seeing he soberly believed
such love and devotion as his, worth the acceptance of any woman--even
while-he believed also, that to be loved of a true woman was the one
only thing which could make up for the enormous swindle of life, in
which man must ever be a sorrow to himself, as ever lagging behind his
own child, his ideal. Even for this, the worm that must forever lie
gnawing in the heart of humanity, it would be consolation enough to
pluck together the roses of youth; they had it in their own power to die
while their odor was yet red. Why did she repel him? Doubtless, he
concluded over and over again, because, with her lofty ideal of love, a
love for this world only seemed to her a love not worth the stooping to
take. If he could but persuade her that the love offered in the agony of
the fire must be a nobler love than that whispered from a bed of roses,
then perhaps, dissolved in confluent sadness and sweetness, she would
hold out to him the chalice of her heart, and the one pearl of the world
would yet be his--a woman all his own--pure as a flower, sad as the
night, and deep as nature unfathomable.

He had a grand idea of woman. He had been built with a goddess-niche in
his soul, and thought how he would worship the woman that could fill it.
There was a time when she must, beyond question, be one whose radiant
mirror had never reflected form of man but his: now he would be content
if for him she would abjure and obliterate her past. To make the woman
who had loved