of Humanity.  Man triumphs by asserting his right to do so.  Self-consciousness he claims as a good thing, and embraces the world as his birthright.  Here, you see, there is no room for the crushing sense of sin.  Sin, if anything, is weakness.  Let us rejoice in our strength, whilst we have it.  The end of course will come, but it is a wise man’s part not to heed the inevitable.  Let us live whilst it is called to-day; we shall go to sleep with all the better conscience for having used the hours of daylight.”

Maud listened with head bent.

“My own temperament,” Waymark went on, “is, I suppose, exceptional, at all events among men who have an inner life.  I never knew what goes by the name of religious feeling; impulses of devotion, in the common sense of the phrase, have always been strange to me.  I have known fear at the prospect of death; religious consolation, never.  Sin, above all, has been a word without significance to me.  As a boy, it was so; it is so still, now that I am self-conscious.  I have never been a deep student of philosophy, but the doctrine of philosophical necessity, the idea of Fate, is with me an instinct.  I know that I could not have acted otherwise than I did in any juncture of my life; I know that the future is beyond my control.  I shall do this, and avoid that, simply owing to a preponderance of motives, which I can gauge, but not control.  Certain things I hate and shrink from; but I try to avoid, even in thought, such words as vice and crime; the murderer could not help himself, and the saint has no merit in his sanctity.  Does all this seem horrible to you?”

Maud raised her eyes, and looked steadily at him, but did not speak.  It was the gaze of one who tries humbly to understand, and longs to sympathise.  But there was a shadow of something like fear upon her face.

Waymark spoke with more earnestness.

“You will not think me incapable of what we call noble thought and feeling?  I have in me the elements of an enthusiast; they might have led me to strange developments, but for that cold, critical spirit which makes me so intensely self-conscious.  This restless scepticism has often been to me a torment in something the same way as that burden of which you speak.  Often, often, I would so gladly surrender myself to my instincts of passion and delight.  I may change; I may perhaps some day attain rest in an absolute ideal.  If I do, it will be through the help of one who shall become to me that ideal personified, who shall embody all the purer elements of my nature, and speak to me as with the voice of my own soul.”

She hung upon his words, and an involuntary sigh, born of the intensity of the moment, trembled on her lips.

“I have spoken to you,” he said, after what seemed a long silence, “with a sincerity which was the due return for your own.  I could have shown myself in a more pleasing light.  You see how little able I am to help you; the centre-thought of your being is wholly strange to me.  And for all that—­may I speak my thought?—­we are nearer to each other than before.”