e regarded and who regarded him less as a feudal lord than
as a father and a comrade. He had pictured her as a nervous, angular
woman with a pale, ascetic face, and with the restless eyes of an
enthusiast, dressed in black and badly dressed, and with a severe and
narrow intelligence. But he had prepared himself to forgive her
personality, for the sake of the high and generous impulse that
inspired her. And when he was presented to her as she really was, and
found her young, lovable, and nobly fair, the shock of wonder and
delight had held him silent during the whole course of her interview
with the priest, and when she had left them his brain was in a tumult
and was filled with memories of her words and gestures, and of the
sweet fearlessness of her manner. Beautiful women he had known before
as beautiful women, but the saving grace in his nature had never before
been so deeply roused by what was fine as well as beautiful. It seemed
as though it were too complete and perfect. For he assured himself
that she possessed everything--those qualities which he had never
valued before because he believed them to be unattainable, and those
others which he had made his idols. She was with him, mind and heart
and soul, in the one desire of his life that he took seriously; she was
of his religion, she was more noble than his noble sisters, and she was
more beautiful than the day. In the first glow of the meeting it
seemed to him as though fate had called them to do this work
together,--she from the far shore of the Pacific, and he from his rocky
island in the Middle Sea. And he saw with cruel distinctness, that if
there were one thing wanting, it was himself. He worshipped her before
he had bowed his first good-by to her, and that night he walked for
miles up and down the long lengths of the avenue of the Champs-Elysees,
facing the great change that she had brought into his life, but knowing
himself to be utterly unfit for her coming. He felt like an unworthy
steward caught at his master's return unprepared, with ungirt loins,
and unlighted lamp. Nothing he had done since he was a child gave him
the right to consider himself her equal. He was not blinded by the
approaches which other daughters and the mothers of daughters had made
him. He knew that what was enough to excuse many things in their eyes
might find no apology in hers. He looked back with the awakening of a
child at the irrevocable acts in his life that coul