When he came to the end, and to all that little Hesper had proved to him, all the strength and illumination she had brought him, he fairly broke down and sobbed, as one may in a brother’s arms.  For, of course, he had come out of the ordeal a man; and Hesper had consented to be his wife.  Often she had dreamed as he had passed her by with such heedless air:  ’If I love him so, can it be that my love shall have no power to make him mine, somehow, some day?  Can I call to him so within my soul and he not hear?  Can I wait and he not come?’ And her love had been strong, strong as a destiny; her voice had reached him, for it was the voice of God.

When I next saw her, what a strange brightness shone in her face, what a new beauty was there!  Ah, Love, the great transfigurer!  And why, too, was it that his friends began to be dissatisfied with their old photographs of Narcissus, though they had been taken but six months before?  There seemed something lacking in the photograph, they said.  Yes, there was; but the face had lacked it too.  What was the new thing—­’grip’ was it, joy, peace?  Yes, all three, but more besides, and Narcissus had but one name for all.  It was Hesper.

Strange, too, that in spite of promises we never received a new one.  Narcissus, who used to be so punctual with such a request.  Perhaps it was because he had broken his looking-glass.

CHAPTER X

‘IN VISHNU-LAND WHAT AVATAR?’

‘If I love you for a year I shall love you for ever,’ Narcissus had said to his Thirteenth Maid.  He did love her so long, and yet he has gone away.  Do you remember your Les Miserables, that early chapter where Valjean robs the child of his florin so soon after that great illuminating change of heart and mind had come to him?  Well, still more important, do you remember the clue Hugo gives us to aberration?  There is comfort and strength for so many a heart-breaking failure there.  It was the old impetus, we are told, that was as yet too strong for the new control; the old instinct, too dark for the new light in the brain.  It takes every vessel some time to answer to its helm; with us, human vessels, years, maybe.  Have you never suddenly become sensitive of a gracious touch in the air, and pondered it, to recognise that in some half-unconscious act you had that moment been answering for the first time the helm of an almost forgotten resolution?  Ah me, blessed is it to see the prow strongly sweeping up against the sky at last!

‘Send not a poet to London,’ said Heine, and it was a true word.  At least, send him not till his thews are laced and his bones set.  He may miss somewhat, of course; there is no gain without a loss.  He may be in ignorance of the last nuance, and if he deserves fame he must gain it unaided of the vulgar notoriety which, if he have a friend or two in the new journalism, they will be so eager to bestow; but he will have kept his soul intact, which,