“Not quite that, I think,” he said tenderly. “It was only that your heart was stronger than your theology, that’s all.”
“One was true, and therefore did the truth, and the other was false,” she replied. “But then, when trouble came, I looked upon it as punishment, or, rather, vengeance, for what was no sin at all. As if I were so much holier than you,” she cried indignantly; “you whose noble life taught me the emptiness and selfishness of my own. ‘Unequally yoked together!’ If we have been, the superiority has been on your side. If truth be life, you have more of it than I; and I have looked up to you and learned of you always.”
“Until now?” he said rather sadly.
“Oh! Fred, you have much to teach me yet. It is you who see things as they are, truly, purely, nobly; and I whose eyes are blinded by the mists of earth. Only in one thing I have the advantage of you.”
“And that?” he asked.
She rose to her feet,—for till then she had knelt beside his chair,—and, drawing his head to her bosom, kissed him with such kisses as in all their life together she had never before given him.
“I know that you are mine now, and always, for life and death, for time and eternity,” she cried passionately. “I am not afraid to let myself love you now that neither life nor death can ever come between us. God has given you back to me, my husband!”
BOOK III.
FLOOD AND FIRE.
CHAPTER I.
“O’ER CRAG AND TORRENT, TILL THE NIGHT IS GONE.”
By the time the spring came again, it had become quite customary for Mr. Clare to preach at least once on Sunday at St. Andrew’s, and the rector had been nearly satisfied that such Socialism as his colleague was at all likely to preach was very harmless Socialism, indeed, scarcely deserving the name. Also, the rector was inclined to look through very rose-colored glasses at one who could bring to church such a stiff-necked generation as Dr. Richards and Karl Metzerott, even though the former might come partly for love of his wife and son, and the latter chiefly through jealousy of the preacher’s influence on Louis and at “Prices,” where the Emperor had begun to feel bitterly conscious of a rival.