VII.

The next six months were the happiest time of her life, for Herminia.  All day long she worked hard with her classes; and often in the evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse and companionship.  Too free from any taint of sin or shame herself ever to suspect that others could misinterpret her actions, Herminia was hardly aware how the gossip of Bower Lane made free in time with the name of the young lady who had taken a cottage in the row, and whose relations with the tall gentleman that called so much in the evenings were beginning to attract the attention of the neighborhood.  The poor slaves of washer-women and working men’s wives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken, husband was the only “respectable” condition,—­couldn’t understand for the life of them how the pretty young lady could make her name so cheap; “and her that pretends to be so charitable and that, and goes about in the parish like a district visitor!” Though to be sure it had already struck the minds of Bower Lane that Herminia never went “to church nor chapel;” and when people cut themselves adrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of morality can you reasonably expect of them?  Nevertheless, Herminia’s manners were so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower Lane seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace.  Poor purblind Bower Lane!  A life-time would have failed it to discern for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish “respectability” was Herminia’s freedom.  In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of that, with Lambeth Palace.

But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about.  To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that perfect purity.  And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred yards off from the Carlyle Place Girl’s School, the social gulf between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters from Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught a single echo of the washerwomen’s gossip.  Herminia’s life through those six months was one unclouded honeymoon.  On Sundays, she and Alan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezy summit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulous pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with their aromatic resins.  Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing; while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of that crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it.  Gradually she was raising him to her own level.  It is impossible to mix with a lofty nature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and more generous sentiments.  Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from the world; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple hangings in all the tents of iniquity.  She was making him understand and sympathize with the motives which led her stoutly on to her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of discontent to her great renunciation.