Dr. Dean pondered the question for a few moments.

“No, I am not sure that I can,” he said, meditatively.  “If I did, I should have to give an evil name to the Creator who designed man and woman and ordained the law of attraction which draws, and often drags them together.  I like to be fair to everybody, the Creator included; yet to be fair to everybody I shall appear to sanction immorality.  For the fact is that our civilization has upset all the original intentions of nature.  Nature evidently meant Love, or the emotion we call Love, to be the keynote of the universe.  But apparently Nature did not intend marriage.  The flowers, the birds, the lower animals, mate afresh every spring, and this is the creed that the disciples of Naturalism nowadays are anxious to force upon the attention of the world.  It is only men and women, they say, that are so foolish as to take each other for better or worse till death do them part.  Now, I should like, from the physical scientist’s point of view, to prove that the men and women are wrong, and that the lower animals are right; but spiritual science comes in and confutes me.  For in spiritual science I find this truth, which will not be gainsaid—­namely, that from time immemorial, certain immortal forms of Nature have been created solely for one another; like two halves of a circle, they are intended to meet and form the perfect round, and all the elements of creation, spiritual and material, will work their hardest to pull them together.  Such natures, I consider, should absolutely and imperatively be joined in marriage.  It then becomes a divine decree.  Even grant, if you like, that the natures so joined are evil, and that the sympathy between them is of a more or less reprehensible character, it is quite as well that they should unite, and that the result of such an union should be seen.  The evil might come out of them in a family of criminals which the law could exterminate with advantage to the world in general.  Whereas on the other hand, given two fine and aspiring natures with perfect sympathy between them, as perfect as the two notes of a perfect chord, the children of such a marriage would probably be as near gods as humanity could bring them.  I speak as a scientist merely.  Such consequences are not foreseen by the majority, and marriages as a rule take place between persons who are by no means made for each other.  Besides, a kind of devil comes into the business, and often prevents the two sympathetic natures conjoining.  Love-matters alone are quite sufficient to convince me that there is a devil as well as a divinity that ’shapes our ends.’”

“You speak as if you yourself had loved, Doctor,” said Gervase, with a half smile.

“And so I have,” replied the Doctor, calmly.  “I have loved to the full as passionately and ardently as even you can love.  I thank God the woman I loved died,—­I could never have possessed her, for she was already wedded,—­and I would not have disgraced her by robbing her from her lawful husband.  So Death stepped in and gave her to me—­forever!” and he raised his eyes to the solemn starlit sky.  “Yes, nothing can ever come between us now; no demon tears her white soul from me; she died innocent of evil, and she is mine—­mine in every pulse of her being, as we shall both know hereafter!”