"What is it, dear Agnes?"
He spoke with a softness of tone little in keeping with his unfeeling, vigilant face.
"Oh, give me love! Now, if ever, it is love! Love only, that can lift me up and cleanse my soul!"
"Love lies everywhere around you," said the young man. "You trample it under your feet. My heart—many hearts—have felt the cruel treatment. Agnes, you must love also."
"I try to do so," she exclaimed, "but it is not the perfect love that casteth out fear! God knows I wish it was."
Her eyes glanced down, and a blush, sudden and deep, spread over her features. The young man lost nothing of all this, but with alert analysis took every expression and action in.
"May I become your friend if greater need arises, Agnes? Do not repulse me. At the worst—I swear it!—I will be your instrument, your subject."
Agnes sat in the renewed pallor of profound fear. God, on whom she had but a moment before called, seemed to have withdrawn His face. Her black ringlets, smoothed upon her noble brow in wavy lines, gave her something of a Roman matron's look; her eyebrows, dark as the eyes beneath that now shrank back yet shone the larger, might have befitted an Eastern queen. Lips of unconscious invitation, and features produced in their wholeness which bore out a character too perfect not to have lived sometime in the realms of the great tragedies of life, made Agnes in her sorrow peerless yet.
"Go, Calvin!" she said, with an effort, her eyes still upon the floor; "if you would ever do me any aid, go now!"
As he passed into the passageway Calvin Van de Lear ran against a man with a crutch and a wooden leg, who looked at him from under a head of dark-red hair, and in a low voice cursed his awkwardness. The man bent to pick up his crutch, and Calvin observed that he was badly scarred and had one eyebrow higher than the other.