ing than this baseness skulking under the superstition of
morality. If a man has no other feeling for an innocent woman than
that, better that a mill-stone should be hanged about his neck than
that he should offend by marrying her.

And yet there had been something finer and purer in this later love
than in the first infatuation of his youth. On that day, seven days
ago, the last day it had to live, he had been touched by something
more sacred, more immortal than desire. There had been no illusion in
the poetry that clothed the figure of a woman standing in an empty
room, dearer to her than the bridal chamber; a woman whose face grew
soft as her instinct outran the bridal terror and the bridal joy,
divining beyond love the end that sanctifies it.

But beyond all that again he could see that, whereas the love of all
other women had torn him asunder, the love of Lucia made him whole.
Poppy had drawn him by his senses; Flossie by his senses and his
heart; Lucia held him by his senses, his heart, his intellect, his
will, by his spirit, by his genius, by the whole man. Long after his
senses had renounced their part in her, the rest of him would cling to
her, satisfied and appeased. And but for Flossie it would have been so
even now. Though his senses had rest in Lucia's presence, their
longing for her was reawakened, not only by the thought of his
approaching marriage, but by the memory of that one moment when he had
realized the mystery of it, the moment of poor Flossie's
transfiguration, when he had seen through the thick material veil,
deep into the spiritual heart of love. With Lucia the veil had been
transparent from the first. It was not with her as it was with those
women who must wait for the hour of motherhood to glorify them. Of
those two years of his betrothal what was there that he would care to
keep? Only one immortal moment, that yet knew of the mortality before
and after it. While of the last seven days Lucia had made a whole
heavenly procession of ascending hours, every moment winged with the
immortal fire. Flying moments; but flame touched flame in flying, and
they became one life.

But he was going to marry Flossie.

And she, the child that was to have borne the burden of his genius and
his passion, poor little blameless victim of the imagination that
glorifies desire, how would it be with her in this empty house, empty
of the love she had looked for and would never find? How would it be
with him? Had