“So, now, Grey,” he said, cheerfully, “the story’s told.  Shall we lay that ghost of the old life, and see what these healthful new years have for us?”

Paul Blecker’s voice was never so strong or pure:  whatever of coarseness had clung to him fell off then, as he came nearer to the weak woman whom God had given to him to care for; whatever of latent manhood, of chivalry, slept beneath, some day to make him an earnest husband and father, and helpful servant of the True Man, came out in his eager face and eye, now.  He took her two hands in his:  how strong his muscles were! how the man’s full pulse throbbed healthfully against her own!  She looked up with a sudden blush and smile.  A minute ago she thought herself so strong to renounce!  She meant, this weak, incomplete woman, to keep to the shame of that foul old lie of hers, accepting that as her portion for life.  There is a chance comes to some few women, once in their lives, to escape into the full development of their natures by contact with the one soul made in the same mould as their own.  It came to this woman to-night.  Grey was no theorist about it:  all that she knew was, that, when Paul Blecker stood near her, for the first time in her life she was not alone,—­that, when he spoke, his words were but more forcible utterances of her own thought,—­that, when she thought of leaving him, it was like drawing the soul from her living body, to leave it pulseless, dead.  Yet she would do it.

“I am not fit to be any man’s wife.  If you had come to me when I was a child, it might have been,—­it ought to have been,”—­with an effort to draw her hands from him.

Blecker only smiled, and seated her gently on the mossy boll of the beech-tree.

“Stay.  Listen to me,” he whispered.

And Grey, being a woman and no philosopher, sat motionless, her hands folded, nerveless, where he had let them fall, her face upturned, like that of the dead maiden waiting the touch of infinite love to tremble and glow back into beautiful life.  He did not speak, did not touch her, only bent nearer.  It seemed to him, as the pure moonlight then held them close in its silent bound, the great world hushed without, the light air scarce daring to touch her fair, waiting face, the slow-heaving breast, the kindling glow in her dark hair, that all the dead and impure years fell from them, and in a fresh new-born life they stood alone, with the great Power of strength and love for company.  What need was there of words?  She knew it all:  in the promise and question of his face waited for her the hope and vigor the time gone had never known:  her woman’s nature drooped and leaned on his, content:  the languid hazel eye followed his with such intent, one would have fancied that her soul in that silence had found its rest and home forever.

He took her hand, and drew from it the old ring that yet bound one of her fingers, the sign of a lie long dead, and without a word dropped it in the current below them.  The girl looked up suddenly, as it fell:  her eyes were wet:  the woman whom Christ loosed from her infirmity of eighteen years might have thanked him with such a look as Grey’s that night.  Then she looked back to her earthly master.