nature had flowered into a new perfection, and he had not been there to see or to help.  She would never connect him with the incidents or the influences which had transformed existence to her, and would probably irrevocably change the whole outline of her future.  Once he had wounded and startled her, and had despaired for awhile of undoing the impression made upon her.  But now he felt no quick anxiety, no fear how things might turn, only a settled flat consciousness of division, of a life that had once been near to his swept away from him for ever, of diverging roads which no kindly fate would ever join again.

For, by the end of this time of solitary waiting, his change of attitude was complete.  It was evident to him that his anticipation of her failure, potent as it had been over his life, had never been half so real, half so vivid, as this new and strange foreboding of her true success.  Marie must be right.  He had been a mere blind hair-splitting pedant, judging Isabel Bretherton by principles and standards which left out of count the inborn energy, the natural power of growth, of such a personality as hers.  And the more he had once doubted the more he now believed.  Yes, she would be great—­she would make her way into that city of the mind, in which he himself had made his dwelling-place; she, too, would enter upon the world’s vast inheritance of knowledge.  She would become, if only her physical frame proved equal to the demands upon it, one of that little band of interpreters, of ministers of the idea, by whom the intellectual life of a society is fed and quickened.  Was he so lost in his own selfish covetous need as not to rejoice?

Oh, but she was a woman, she was beautiful, and he loved her!  Do what he would, all ideal and impersonal considerations fell utterly away from him.  Day by day he knew more of his own heart; day by day the philosopher grew weaker in him, and the man’s claim fiercer.  Before him perpetually were two figures of a most human and practical reality.  He saw a great actress, absorbed in the excitement of the most stimulating of lives, her power ripening from year to year, her fame growing and widening with time; and beside this brilliant vision he saw himself, the quiet man of letters, with the enthusiasms of youth behind him, the calm of middle-age before him.  What possible link could there be between them?

At last Wallace’s letter cleared still further the issues of the conflict; or rather, it led to Kendal’s making a fatalist compact with himself.  He was weary of the struggle, and it seemed to him that he must somehow or other escape from the grip in which his life was held.  He must somehow deaden this sense, this bitter sense of loss, if it were only by postponing the last renunciation.  He would go back to his work and force himself not to hate it.  It was his only refuge, and he must cling to it for dear life.  And he would not see her again till the night of the first performance of Elvira.