ame a melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force. The giant
in him loved her warmly. Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her
lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender
eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying
shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted
water, swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers
distinctly beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of
spirit in his passion than before this tempest. A giant going through a
giant's contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse,
dreadful, likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs,
Alvan was great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and
lay down life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion
was not heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often;
or for the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites. He
was true man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge
personality to pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a
soul wedged in the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving
mighty sound of timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he
suffered, as he loved, to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man.
Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the
hungry instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is
indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald
harmonies have been heard. But Love, which purifies and enlarges us,
and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and
space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance
that the man is a temple fit for the rites. Out of romances, he is not
melodiously composed. And in a giant are various giants to be slain,
or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader. It is not
done by miracle.

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant
indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery
stedfastness. His plucking her from another was neither wonderful
nor indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the
handsome boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her
slave, and she required for her mate