, while she softly stroked his hair with an absent
tenderness, though her eyes looked straight in front of her, and her
voice was as if she were talking to herself.

"We longed to tell you," he repeated.

"O I wish you had."

"We feared it, dear."

"Yes, yes, I know. I was only a little child the day before yesterday. I
have never been worthy to be your wife, dear. I have known it all the
time. I should never have taken your love. It has never been mine...."

"But ..." she continued, "I will give it all back now. It is not too
late. I have kept it pure ... for Isabel. I can give it to her, darling,
with a kind heart--for she is worthy. She was born for you, dear. We
were not born for each other, after all--were we, dear? I am the woman
of that poem, not Isabel. It is I who must say good-bye. I can do it. I
am a woman now, love--not a little child any more. 'Look in my face
and see.'"

The tangle of Theophil's emotions and thoughts, as he listened to Jenny
in silence, was a revelation to him of the strange heart of love, and of
the insufficiency of those formulas by which we image ourselves to
ourselves. How little we know of ourselves till we are tested by the
powerful reagents of love and danger, and in how many ways must those
tests be applied before we learn anything of the elements of which we
are composed!

One love will reveal to us one side of our natures and its needs,
another will reveal to us another with its needs; and till we grow old
we can never be certain that there are not other sides to us that have
never been illuminated, other needs that have never been awakened, by
an emotion.

A man may love two women equally: the woman he most needs and the woman
who needs him most,--and in a crisis of choice he will probably choose
the latter.

Again, the power of the woman we have loved first has wonderful reserves
to draw upon, humble pawns of feelings, memories, associations, not so
brilliant to the imagination as the royalties of romance and sentiment
on the other side, but incalculably useful in a battle. Too humble are
some of these to gain acknowledgment; indeed they are often so submerged
in a total of vague impulses that they escape any individualisation.

In the very hour where all seemed lost to Jenny, Theophil's love for her
was passing in the fire of this ordeal from a love whose elements had
never, perhaps, quite combined, into that miraculous metal of true love,
which can never again be