In this mood Keith found her. She was standing, still fully dressed, before the chimney-piece, where he had sat one night and dreamed at once of her and Gertrude Ingraham. Her hands were clasped and hanging before her; her face was slightly pale, and her eyes strangely large and luminous. Standing before her, Keith took her clasped hands between his, and looked at her with a questioning smile.
“Well, dear,” he said, “what is it?”
“You know,” she answered softly. “Was it not to you what it was to me? Is it not the very chance we wish, to redeem our poor lost hopes of service?—to leave all the luxuries and privileges and advantages, and share the world’s sorrows? to become poor and humble as our Master was? to give what we have received? Oh, Keith, is it to be, or must another hope go by?”
As Anna thus cried out, the solemn appeal of her nature, austere, and yet full-charged with noble passion, breaking at last through the barriers which had long held it back, gave her an extraordinary spiritual grandeur. There was something of awe in the look with which her husband regarded her. Weapons of fear and doubt and cavil fell before that celestial sternness in her eyes,—a look we see sometimes in the innocent eyes of young children.
“It is to be, Anna. You shall have your way this time, my wife.”
The words were spoken reverently, with grave gentleness, and Keith’s own sweet courtesy. Was it Anna’s fault that she failed, in the exaltation of her mood, to catch the sadness in them?
Keith was hardly conscious of it himself. He was thinking, on an unspoken parallel, that he would rather be privileged to adore Anna Mallison in a moment like this, even though she led him in a rough and lonely path, than to dally with another woman in smoothness and ease.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I took the power in my hand
And went against the world;