somehowfailed to affirm their merit publicly.  She understood that he had tasted an earlier moment of success:  a mention, a medal, something official and tangible; then the tide of publicity had somehow setthe other way, and left him stranded in a noble isolation.  It was extraordinary and unbelievable that any one so naturally eminent and exceptional should have been subject to the same vulgar necessities that governed her own life, should have known povertyand obscurity and indifference.  But she gathered that this had been the case, and felt that it formed the miraculous link between them.  For through what medium less revealing than that of sharedmisfortune would he ever have perceived so inconspicuous an object as herself?  And she recalled now how gently his eyes had rested on her from the first—­the gray eyes that might have seemed mocking if they had not been so gentle.

She remembered how he had met her the first day, when Mrs. Deering’s inevitable headache had prevented her from receiving the new teacher, and how his few questions had at once revealed his interest in the little stranded, compatriot, doomed to earn a precarious living so far from her native shore.  Sweet as the moment of unburdening had been, she wondered afterward what had determined it:  how she, so shy and sequestered, had found herselfletting slip her whole poverty-stricken story, even to the avowalof the ineffectual “artistic” tendencies that had drawn her to Paris, and had then left her there to the dry task of tuition.  She wondered at first, but she understood now; she understood everything after he had kissed her.  It was simply because he wasas kind as he was great.

She thought of this now as she mounted the hill in the spring sunshine, and she thought of all that had happened since.  The intervening months, as she looked back at them, were merged in a vast golden haze, through which here and there rose the outline of a shining island.  The haze was the general enveloping sense of his love, and the shining islands were the days they had spent together.  They had never kissed again under his own roof.  Lizzie’s professional honor had a keen edge, but she had been spared the vulgar necessity of making him feel it.  It was of theessence of her fatality that he always “understood” when his failing to do so might have imperiled his hold on her.

But her Thursdays and Sundays were free, and it soon became a habit to give them to him.  She knew, for her peace of mind, onlytoo much about pictures, and galleries and churches had been the one bright outlet from the grayness of her personal atmosphere.  For poetry, too, and the other imaginative forms of literature, she had always felt more than she had hitherto had occasion to betray; and now all these folded sympathies shot out their tendrils to the light.  Mr. Deering knew how to express with unmatched clearness and competence the thoughts that trembled in her mind:  to talk with him was to soar up into the azure on