“It seems to me better to live on in the hope that someone may yet—­in some far-off age it may only be, but what a thing if it should be!—­discover the law of death, learn how to meet it, and, with its fore-runners, disease and decay, banish it from the world.  Would you crush the dragonfly, the moth, or the bee, because its days are so few?  Rather would you not pitifully rescue them, that they might enjoy to their natural end the wild intoxication of being?”

“Ah, but they are happy while they live!”

“So also are men—­all men—­for parts of their time.  How many, do you think, would thank me for the offered poison?”

Talk after talk of this kind, which the scope of my history forbids me to follow, took place between them, until at length Juliet, generally silenced, came to be silenced not unwillingly.  All the time, their common humanity, each perceiving that the other had suffered, was urging to mutual consolation.  And all the time, that mysterious force, inscrutable as creation itself, which draws the individual man and woman together, was mightily at work between them—­a force which, terrible as is the array of its attendant shadows, will at length appear to have been one of the most powerful in the redemption of the world.  But Juliet did nothing, said nothing, to attract Faber.  He would have cast himself before her as a slave begging an owner, but for something in her carriage which constantly prevented him.  At one time he read it as an unforgotten grief, at another as a cherished affection, and trembled at the thought of the agonies that might be in store for him.

Weeks passed, and he had not made one inquiry after a situation for her.  It was not because he would gladly have, prolonged the present arrangement of things, but that he found it almost impossible to bring himself to talk about her.  If she would but accept him, he thought—­then there would be no need!  But he dared not urge her—­mainly from fear of failure, not at all from excess of modesty, seeing he soberly believed such love and devotion as his, worth the acceptance of any woman—­even while-he believed also, that to be loved of a true woman was the one only thing which could make up for the enormous swindle of life, in which man must ever be a sorrow to himself, as ever lagging behind his own child, his ideal.  Even for this, the worm that must forever lie gnawing in the heart of humanity, it would be consolation enough to pluck together the roses of youth; they had it in their own power to die while their odor was yet red.  Why did she repel him?  Doubtless, he concluded over and over again, because, with her lofty ideal of love, a love for this world only seemed to her a love not worth the stooping to take.  If he could but persuade her that the love offered in the agony of the fire must be a nobler love than that whispered from a bed of roses, then perhaps, dissolved in confluent sadness and sweetness, she would hold out to him the chalice of her heart, and the one pearl of the world would yet be his—­a woman all his own—­pure as a flower, sad as the night, and deep as nature unfathomable.