“I don’t know what I mean.  I am asking, Hugh, asking.  Haven’t you any clew?  Isn’t there any voice in you, anywhere, deep down, that can tell me? give me a hint? just a little one?”

I was wracked.  My passion had not left me, it seemed to be heightened, and I pressed her hands against her knees.  It was incredible that my hands should be there, in hers, feeling her.  Her beauty seemed as fresh, as un-wasted as the day, long since, when I despaired of her.  And yet and yet against the tumult and beating of this passion striving to throb down thought, thought strove.  Though I saw her as a woman, my senses and my spirit commingled and swooned together.

“This is life,” I murmured, scarcely knowing what I said.

“Oh, my dear!” she cried, and her voice pierced me with pain, “are we to be lost, overpowered, engulfed, swept down its stream, to come up below drifting—­wreckage?  Where, then, would be your power?  I’m not speaking of myself.  Isn’t life more than that?  Isn’t it in us, too,—­in you?  Think, Hugh.  Is there no god, anywhere, but this force we feel, restlessly creating only to destroy?  You must answer—­you must find out.”

I cannot describe the pleading passion in her voice, as though hell and heaven were wrestling in it.  The woman I saw, tortured yet uplifted, did not seem to be Nancy, yet it was the woman I loved more than life itself and always had loved.

“I can’t think,” I answered desperately, “I can only feel—­and I can’t express what I feel.  It’s mixed, it’s dim, and yet bright and shining—­it’s you.”

“No, it’s you,” she said vehemently.  “You must interpret it.”  Her voice sank:  “Could it be God?” she asked.

“God!” I exclaimed sharply.

Her hands fell away from mine....  The silence was broken only by the crackling of the wood fire as a log turned over and fell.  Never before, in all our intercourse that I could remember, had she spoken to me about religion....  With that apparent snap in continuity incomprehensible to the masculine mind-her feminine mood had changed.  Elements I had never suspected, in Nancy, awe, even a hint of despair, entered into it, and when my hand found hers again, the very quality of its convulsive pressure seemed to have changed.  I knew then that it was her soul I loved most; I had been swept all unwittingly to its very altar.

“I believe it is God,” I said.  But she continued to gaze at me, her lips parted, her eyes questioning.

“Why is it,” she demanded, “that after all these centuries of certainty we should have to start out to find him again?  Why is it when something happens like—­like this, that we should suddenly be torn with doubts about him, when we have lived the best part of our lives without so much as thinking of him?”

“Why should you have qualms?” I said.  “Isn’t this enough? and doesn’t it promise—­all?”