ligion. And she was forced to admit, with
her customary honesty, that the implication was true.

The numbers who knew Alison Parr casually thought her cold. They admired
a certain quality in her work, but they did not suspect that that quality
was the incomplete expression of an innate idealism capable of being
fanned into flame,--for she was subject to rare but ardent enthusiasms
which kindled and transformed her incredibly in the eyes of the few to
whom the process had been revealed. She had had even a longer list of
suitors than any one guessed; men who--usually by accident--had touched
the hidden spring, and suddenly beholding an unimagined woman, had
consequently lost their heads. The mistake most of them had made (for
subtlety in such affairs is not a masculine trait) was the failure to
recognize and continue to present the quality in them which had awakened
her. She had invariably discovered the feet of clay.

Thus disillusion had been her misfortune--perhaps it would be more
accurate to say her fortune. She had built up, after each invasion, her
defences more carefully and solidly than before, only to be again
astonished and dismayed by the next onslaught, until at length the
question had become insistent--the question of an alliance for purposes
of greater security. She had returned to her childhood home to consider
it, frankly recognizing it as a compromise, a fall . . . .

And here, in this sanctuary of her reflection, and out of a quarter on
which she had set no watch, out of a wilderness which she had believed to
hold nothing save the ruined splendours of the past, had come one who,
like the traditional figures of the wilderness, had attracted her by his
very uncouthness and latent power. And the anomaly he presented in what
might be called the vehemence of his advocacy of an outworn orthodoxy,
in his occupation of the pulpit of St. John's, had quickened at once her
curiosity and antagonism. It had been her sudden discovery, or rather
her instinctive suspicion of the inner conflict in him which had set her
standard fluttering in response. Once more (for the last time--something
whispered--now) she had become the lady of the lists; she sat on her
walls watching, with beating heart and straining eyes, the closed helm
of her champion, ready to fling down the revived remnant of her faith as
prize or forfeit. She had staked all on the hope that he would not lower
his lance. . . . .

Saturday had passed in s