as is the case with the Church, with medicine, with the politician, and with the schoolmaster.  But Alan could not help thinking all the same how people would misinterpret and misunderstand his relations with the woman he loved, if he modelled them strictly upon Herminia’s wishes.  It was hateful, it was horrible to have to con the thing over, where that faultless soul was concerned, in the vile and vulgar terms other people would apply to it; but for Herminia’s sake, con it over so he must; and though he shrank from the effort with a deadly shrinking, he nevertheless faced it.  Men at the clubs would say he had seduced Herminia.  Men at the clubs would lay the whole blame of the episode upon him; and he couldn’t bear to be so blamed for the sake of a woman, to save whom from the faintest shadow of disgrace or shame he would willingly have died a thousand times over.  For since Herminia had confessed her love to him yesterday, he had begun to feel how much she was to him.  His admiration and appreciation of her had risen inexpressibly.  And was he now to be condemned for having dragged down to the dust that angel whose white wings he felt himself unworthy to touch with the hem of his garment?

And yet, once more, when he respected her so much for the sacrifice she was willing to make for humanity, would it be right for him to stand in her way, to deter her from realizing her own highest nature?  She was Herminia just because she lived in that world of high hopes, just because she had the courage and the nobility to dare this great thing.  Would it be right of him to bring her down from that pedestal whereon she stood so austere, and urge upon her that she should debase herself to be as any other woman,—­even as Ethel Waterton?  For the Watertons had brought him there to propose to Ethel.

For hours he tossed and turned and revolved these problems.  Rain beat on the leaded panes of the Waterton dormers.  Day dawned, but no light came with it to his troubled spirit.  The more he thought of this dilemma, the more profoundly he shrank from the idea of allowing himself to be made into the instrument for what the world would call, after its kind, Herminia’s shame and degradation.  For even if the world could be made to admit that Herminia had done what she did from chaste and noble motives,—­which considering what we all know of the world, was improbable,—­yet at any rate it could never allow that he himself had acted from any but the vilest and most unworthy reasons.  Base souls would see in the sacrifice he made to Herminia’s ideals, only the common story of a trustful woman cruelly betrayed by the man who pretended to love her, and would proceed to treat him with the coldness and contempt with which such a man deserves to be treated.