been thinking of him. We
learn to know each other sometimes in long absences. She began to
perceive in him now a humility and a pride strangely at variance with
each other and both equally at variance with the bright assurance of his
outer manner. He gave to every one; he would work early and late for
others, in his yearning sympathy and affection: yet he himself, from the
very intenseness of his desire for it, stood aloof, and drew back from
the insistence of any claim for himself. They might meet a hundred times
and grow no closer; they might grow farther and farther away.

Dosia felt that other women must have loved him--how could they have
helped it? She had a pang of sorrow for them--for herself it made no
difference. If she had pain for all her life afterward, she was glad at
this moment that he was worthy to be loved; she need never be ashamed of
loving him--he was "good." The word seemed to contain some beautiful
comfort and uplifting. No matter what experience he had passed through
in his struggle with the world, he had held some simple, honorable,
_clean_ quality intact. The Dosia who must always have some heart-warm
dream to live by had it now; for all her life she could love him, pray
for him. She had always thought that to love was to be happy; now she
was to love and be unhappy--yet she would not have it otherwise.

So slight, so young, so lightly dealt with, Dosia had the pathetically
clear insight and the power that comes to those who see, not themselves
alone, their own desires and hopes, but the universe in which they
stand, and view their acts and thoughts in relation to it. She must see
Truth, "and be glad, even if it hurt."

The sunshine fell upon her in the garden; she was bathed in it. Whether
she had nights of straining, bitter wakefulness and days of heartache
afterward, this joy of loving was enough for her to-day--the joy of
loving him. She saw in that lovely, brooding thought of him what that
first meeting had taught of his character, and molded in with it her
knowledge of him now, to make the real man far more imperfect, though
far dearer. Yet, if he ever loved her as she loved him, part of that for
which she had always sought love would have to be foregone--she could
never come to him, as she had fondly dreamed of doing, and pour out to
him all those hopes and fears, those struggles and mistakes and trials
and indignities, the shame and the penitence that had been hers. She
could never t