“How can I pretend to value what no longer even interests me?” she thought, “and if I attempt to explain—­if I tell him that my whole nature has changed because I have chosen one thing from out the many—­what possible good, after all, could come of putting this into words?  Suppose I say to him quite frankly:  ’I am content to let everything else go since I have found happiness?’ And yet is it true that I have found it? and how do I know that this is really happiness, after all?”

It seemed to her, as she asked the question, that her whole life dissolved itself into the answer; and she became conscious again of the two natures which dwelt within her—­of the nature which lived and of the nature which kept apart and questioned.  She remembered the night after her first meeting with Kemper and the conviction she had felt then that her destiny lay mapped out for her in the hand of God.  Her soul on that night had seemed, in the words of the quaint old metaphor, a vase which she held up for God to fill.  The light had run over then, but now, she realised with a pang, it had ceased to shine through her body, and her vase was empty.  Even love had not filled it for her as her dream had done.

Again she asked if it were happiness, and still she could find no answer.  The quickened vibration of the pulses, the concentration of thought upon a single presence, the restless imagination which leaped from the disappointment of to-day to the possible fulfilment of to-morrow—­these things were bound up in her every instant, and yet could she, even in her own thoughts, call these things happiness?  She told off her minutes by her heartbeats; but there were brief suspensions of feeling when she turned to ask herself if in all its height and force and vividness there was still no perceptible division between agony and joy.

For at times the way grew dark to her and she felt that she stumbled blindly in a strange place.  From the heights of the ideal she had come down to the ordinary level of the actual; and she was as ignorant of the forces among which she moved as a bird in the air is ignorant of a cage.  Gerty alone, she knew, was familiar with it all—­had travelled step by step over the road before her—­yet, she realised that she found no help in Gerty, nor in any other human being—­for was it not ordained in the beginning that every man must come at last into the knowledge of the spirit only through the confirming agony of flesh?

“No, I am not happy now because he is not utterly and entirely mine,” she thought, “there are only a few hours of the day when he is with me—­all the rest of the twenty-four he leads a life of which I know nothing, which I cannot even follow in my thoughts.  Whom does he see in those hours? and of what does he think when I am not with him?  Next week in the Adirondacks we shall be together without interruption, and then I shall discern his real and hidden self—­then I shall understand him as fully as I wish to be understood.”  And that coming month appeared to her suddenly as luminous with happiness.  Here, now, she was dissatisfied and incapable of rest, but just six days ahead of her she saw the beginning of unspeakable joy.  An impatient eagerness ran through her like a flame and she began immediately the preparations for her visit.