The loneliness of intense individuality is the loneliest loneliness in the world,—­a loneliness which crowds only aggravate, and which even the closest and happiest companionship can only in part cure.  The creative faculty is the most inalienable and uncontrollable of individualities.  It is at once its own reward and its own penalty:  until it has conquered the freedom of its own city, in which it must for ever dwell, more or less apart, it is only a prisoner in the cities of others.  All this Mr. Allen felt for Mercy, recognized in Mercy.  He felt and recognized it by the instinct of love, rather than by any intellectual perception.  Intellectually, he was, in spite of his superior culture, far Mercy’s inferior.  He had been brave enough and manly enough to recognize this, and also to recognize what it took still more manliness to recognize,—­that she could never love a man of his temperament.  It would have been very easy for him to love Mercy.  He was not a man of a passionate nature; but he felt himself strangely stirred whenever he looked into her sensitive, orchid-like face.  He felt in every fibre of him that to have the whole love of such a woman would be bewildering joy; yet never for one moment did he allow himself to think of seeking it.  “I might make her think she loved me, perhaps,” he said to himself.  “She is so lonely and sad, and has seen so few men; but it would be base.  She needs a nature totally different from mine, a life unlike the life I shall lead.  I will never try to make her love me.  And he never did.  He taught her and trained her, and developed her, patiently, exactingly, and yet tenderly as if she had been his sister; but he never betrayed to her, even by a look or tone, that he could have loved her as his wife.  No doubt his influence was greater over her for this subtle, unacknowledged bond.  It gave to their intercourse a certain strange mixture of reticence and familiarity, which grew more and more perilous and significant month by month.  Probably a change must have come, had they lived thus closely together a year or two longer.  The change could have been in but one direction.  They loved each other too much to ever love less:  they might have loved more; and Mercy’s life had been more peaceful, her heart had known a truer content, if she had never felt any stronger emotion than that which Harley Allen’s love would have roused in her bosom.  But his resolution was inexorable.  His instinct was too keen, his will too strong:  he compelled all his home-seeking, wife-loving thoughts to turn away from Mercy; and, six months after her departure, he had loyally and lovingly promised to be the husband of another.  In Mercy’s future he felt an intense interest; he would never cease to watch over her, if she would let him; he would guide, mould, and direct her, until the time came—­he knew it would come—­when she had outgrown his help, and ascended to a plane where he could no longer guide her.  His greatest fear was lest, from her overflowing