But, with Cyprian dwelling still in her heart, and refusing to be ejected even during this complete reaction, she had been forced to seek a more modified code than that of the professed nun.
Quite by chance, she discovered it in Chrysostom's outcry against the anti-pagan, but, as he considered it, also the anti-Christian, custom, which had become known among some of his contemporary ascetics; who lived at the side of virgins in uplifting and intimate companionship, the chastity of which was never called in question. More than one Father of the Church, cast in sterner mould, had felt it his duty to reprove and deplore this method of cheating the devil. Among them, and the fact had caused Ferlie some amusement, leavened with a queer aching, there was Cyprian's own namesake insistent on the "weakness" of her sex and the "wanton" tendencies of youth.
But it was significant that even Chrysostom acknowledged that in such seemingly unnatural friendships there was room for a love deeper and more lasting than any found in the fulfilment of legitimate bodily passion.
Upon such an admission Ferlie had built her temple to Love, and in the lonely turret at Black Towers learnt something of the power of concentrated thought.
Of her studies Cyprian remained unaware.
Sex-psychology had never obsessed him as it has so many modern minds. He knew that Tolstoy, for whom he retained a very real admiration, had developed into a married ascetic, but had been inclined to smile at the humour presented in the situation of a man, married and with his own quiver quite literally full, advocating a higher life, rooted in celibacy, to his fellows.
The apple eaten, where the merit of flinging away the core and informing the world that the fruit was sour?
But for that abnormally sensitive streak in him, which forced him to respond to the suggestion of an idealistic love as naturally as the sunflower to the sun, Cyprian might have degenerated into the egotistical scholar, thick-visioned as to the needs of Humanity, and justly derided by ribald undergraduates as "the product of a long line of maiden aunts."
This, supposing Muriel Vane had not wounded him in time and sent him fleeing into the desert to hide his hurt.
The same streak, unsatisfied and hungry, had enabled him to close his eyes, temporarily, to the tenets of the rigid creed natural to this type, when Hla Byu smiled up at him in the pitiless sunlight; the same streak, legacy perhaps of some long-dead Tristrannic ancestor—hardening at the sight of Ferlie's suffering, had inspired the courage preparing him to set at defiance every other normally narrow instinct of his senses which shrank from the abnormal, and had led him to accept a position at her side, for which, once, more bitterly than the severe Cyprian of bygone centuries, he would have condemned a fellow-man.