uld reap. In this great crisis of her fortunes he had been nothing to
her. Other voices and other hands had guided and directed her. Her
kindly, grateful messages only stung and tortured him. They seemed to him
the merest friendly commonplace. In reality her life had passed out of
his ken; her nature had flowered into a new perfection, and he had not
been there to see or to help. She would never connect him with the
incidents or the influences which had transformed existence to her, and
would probably irrevocably change the whole outline of her future. Once
he had wounded and startled her, and had despaired for awhile of undoing
the impression made upon her. But now he felt no quick anxiety, no fear
how things might turn, only a settled flat consciousness of division, of
a life that had once been near to his swept away from him for ever, of
diverging roads which no kindly fate would ever join again.

For, by the end of this time of solitary waiting, his change of attitude
was complete. It was evident to him that his anticipation of her failure,
potent as it had been over his life, had never been half so real, half so
vivid, as this new and strange foreboding of her true success. Marie must
be right. He had been a mere blind hair-splitting pedant, judging Isabel
Bretherton by principles and standards which left out of count the inborn
energy, the natural power of growth, of such a personality as hers. And
the more he had once doubted the more he now believed. Yes, she would be
great--she would make her way into that city of the mind, in which he
himself had made his dwelling-place; she, too, would enter upon the
world's vast inheritance of knowledge. She would become, if only her
physical frame proved equal to the demands upon it, one of that little
band of interpreters, of ministers of the idea, by whom the intellectual
life of a society is fed and quickened. Was he so lost in his own selfish
covetous need as not to rejoice?

Oh, but she was a woman, she was beautiful, and he loved her! Do what he
would, all ideal and impersonal considerations fell utterly away from
him. Day by day he knew more of his own heart; day by day the philosopher
grew weaker in him, and the man's claim fiercer. Before him perpetually
were two figures of a most human and practical reality. He saw a great
actress, absorbed in the excitement of the most stimulating of lives, her
power ripening from year to year, her fame growing and widening with