A smile lit up the clouded sadness of her face.
"If I only thought that," she said. "Still it's more than sweet to hear you say so. Tell me, Laurence, what was the strange sympathetic magnetism that existed between us from the very first—yes, long before we talked together? I was conscious of it, if you were not—a sympathy that makes it easy for me to follow you, when you talk so darkly that nobody else could."
"Oh, there is such a sympathy, then?"
"Of course there is, and you know it."
"Perhaps. Tell me, Lilith, do you still cherish certain fusty and antiquated superstitions which make that good results and beneficial can never come out of abstract wrong? Abstract wrong being for present purposes a mere conventionality."
She looked at him for a moment. The interchange of that steady silent glance was sufficient.
"No, I do not," she said.
"I thought not. Well, that being so, you can perhaps realize of what 'use,' as you put it, that sweetest gift of your deepest, most heartfelt sympathy may be to its object, and in its results wholly beneficial. Do you follow?"
"Why, of course. And is it really in my power to brighten life for you ever so little? Ah, that would be happiness indeed."
"Continue to think so, then, for it is in your power to do just that, and you are doing it at this moment. And, child, when you feel that sense of boundless elation with the joy of living, add this to the happiness you are feeling, not to lessen but to enhance it."