forever engaged in the tearful contemplation of her own tragic
fate; wrapt up in those she has lost, like the mourners in a Pieta.
Whenever you have thought of her, you have connected her in your
mind with that one fact in her history, which perhaps may have
happened a great many years ago. But to you, it is as yesterday.
You forget that since then many things have occurred to her. She
has lived her life; she has learned to smile; human nature itself
cannot feed for years on the continuous contemplation of its own
deepest sorrows. It even jars you to find that the widow of a
patriotic martyr, a murdered missionary, has her moments of
enjoyment, and must wither away without them.

So, just at first, Harvey Kynaston was afraid to let Herminia see
how sincerely he admired her. He thought of her rather as one
whose life is spent, who can bring to the banquet but the cold dead
ashes of a past existence. Gradually, however, as he saw more and
more of her, it began to strike him that Herminia was still in all
essentials a woman. His own throbbing heart told him so as he sat
and talked with her. He thrilled at her approach. Bit by bit the
idea rose up in his mind that this lonely soul might still be won.
He set to work in earnest to woo and win her.

As for Herminia, many men had paid her attentions already in her
unwedded widowhood. Some of them, after the fashion of men, having
heard garbled versions of her tragic story, and seeking to gain
some base advantage for themselves from their knowledge of her
past, strove to assail her crudely. Them, with unerring womanly
instinct, she early discerned, and with unerring feminine tact,
undeceived and humbled. Others, genuinely attracted by her beauty
and her patience, paid real court to her heart; but all these fell
far short of her ideal standard. With Harvey Kynaston it was
different. She admired him as a thinker; she liked him as a man;
and she felt from the first moment that no friend, since Alan died,
had stirred her pulse so deeply as he did.

For some months they met often at the Fabian meetings and
elsewhere; till at last it became a habit with them to spend their
Sunday mornings on some breezy wold in the country together.
Herminia was still as free as ever from any shrinking terror as to
what "people might say;" as of old, she lived her life for herself
and her conscience, not for the opinion of a blind and superstitious
majority. On one such August mornin