had no such meaning; for, besides, did she not scorn the soiled ‘tie’ also?  Were not their theories at one in that?  He would be doing her no wrong; it was her own desire.  Yet his kiss did mean more than he could have imagined it meaning a week before.  She had grown to be genuinely desirable.  If love tarried, passion was awake—­that dangerous passion, too, to which the intellect has added its intoxication, and that is, so to say, legitimised by an ‘idea.’

Her woman’s intuition read the silence and answered to his thought.  ‘Have no fear,’ she said, with the deep deliberation of passion; ’I love you with my whole life, but I shall never burden you, Narcissus.  Love me as long as you can, I shall be content; and when the end comes, though another woman takes you, I shall not hinder.’

O great girl-soul!  What a poltroon, indeed, was Narcissus beside you at that moment.  You ready to stake your life on the throw, he temporising and bargaining as over the terms of a lease.  Surely, if he could for one moment have seen himself in the light of your greatness, he had been crushed beneath the misery of his own meanness.  But as yet he had no such vision; his one thought was, ‘She will do it! will she draw back?’ and the feeble warnings he was obliged to utter to keep his own terms, by assuring his conscience of ‘her free-will,’ were they not half-fearfully whispered, and with an inward haste, lest they should give her pause?  ‘But the world, my dear—­think!’ ’It will have cruel names for thee.’  ‘It will make thee outcast—­think!’

‘I know all,’ she had answered; ’but I love you, and two years of your love would pay for all.  There is no world for me but you.  Till to-night I have never lived at all, and when you go I shall be as dead.  The world cannot hurt such a one.’

Ah me, it was a wild, sweet dream for both of them, one the woman’s, one the poet’s, of a ‘sweet impossible’ taking flesh!  For, do not let us blame Narcissus overmuch.  He was utterly sincere; he meant no wrong.  He but dreamed of following a creed to which his reason had long given a hopeless assent.  In a more kindly-organised community he might have followed it, and all have been well; but the world has to be dealt with as one finds it, and we must get sad answers to many a fair calculation if we ‘state’ it wrongly in the equation.  That there is one law for the male and another for the female had not as yet vitally entered into his considerations.  He was too dizzy with the dream, or he must have seen what an unequal bargain he was about to drive.

At last he did awake, and saw it all; and in a burning shame went to Hesper, and told her that it must not be.

Her answer was unconsciously the most subtly dangerous she could have chosen:  ’If I like to give myself to you, why should you not take me?  It is of my own free-will.  My eyes are open.’  It was his very thought put into words, and by her.  For a moment he wavered—­who could blame him?  ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’