for which all his life is a search.  There is a maiden who dwells in all the music that he hears, and who calls to him in the sunrise, and flings wide the flowers upon the meadows; she treads before him on the moonlit waters and strews them with showers of fire.  If his soul be only strong enough, perhaps he waits long years for that perfect woman, that woman who loves not herself, but loves love; and all the time the yearning of his heart is growing, so that those who gaze at him wonder why his eyes are dark and sunken.  He knows that his heart is a treasure-house which he himself cannot explore, and that in all the world he seeks nothing but some woman before whom he might fling wide its doors.”

Helen had been leaning on the table, holding her hands in front of her; towards the end they were trembling so much that she took them away and clasped them in her lap.  When he ceased her eyes were lowered; she could not see how his were fixed upon her, but she knew that her bosom was heaving painfully, and that there were hot tears upon her cheeks.  He added slowly:  “I have told you all that I think about life, my dear friend, and all that I think about love; so I think I have told you all that I know.”  And Helen lifted her eyes to his and gazed at him through her tears.

“You tell me of such things?” she asked.  “You give such advice to me!”

“Yes,” said the other, gently, “why not to you?”

“Mr. Howard,” Helen answered, “do you not know what I have done, and how I must feel while I listen to you?  It is good that I should hear such things, because I ought to suffer; but when I asked you for your advice I wished for something hard and stern to do, before I dared ever think of love, or feel myself right again.”

Mr. Howard sat watching her for a moment in silence, and then he answered gently, “I do not think, my dear friend, that it is our duty as struggling mortals to feel ourselves right at all; I am not even sure that we ought to care about our rightness in the least.  For God has put high and beautiful things in the world, things that call for all our attention; and I am sure that we are never so close to rightness as when we give all our devotion to them and cease quite utterly to think about ourselves.  And besides that, the love that I speak of is not easy to give, Miss Davis.  It is easy to give up one’s self in the first glow of feeling; but to forget one’s self entirely, and one’s comfort and happiness in all the little things of life; to consecrate one’s self and all that one has to a lifetime of patience and self-abnegation; and to seek no reward and ask for no happiness but love,—­do you not think that such things would cost one pain and bring a good conscience at last?”