distinctly beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in his passion than before this tempest.  A giant going through a giant’s contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful, likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was great-hearted:  he could love in his giant’s fashion, love and lay down life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for the public cause—­which was to minister to his appetites.  He was true man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved, to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man.  Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry instrument are not all so rough that Love’s touch on them is indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald harmonies have been heard.  But Love, which purifies and enlarges us, and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that the man is a temple fit for the rites.  Out of romances, he is not melodiously composed.  And in a giant are various giants to be slain, or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader.  It is not done by miracle.

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery stedfastness.  His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and she required for her mate a master:  she felt it and she sided to him quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of a mutual fitness.  Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again, she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his physical influence.  Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.

‘They are undermining her now—­now—­now!’