He drew her gently to him; he kissed her on the forehead.
‘Why should you share my degradation?’ he said. ‘A minister who rejects or is rejected by his Church is a broken man, broken and despised. In these days martyrdom has no glory, no honour. You yourself would be the first to feel the ignominy of my situation, the wretchedness of a petty persecution. It would be better, perhaps, for us to part.’
But with a look of ineffable sweetness and devotion she crept closer to him, and laid her head upon his breast.
‘We shall not part,’ she said. ‘Where you go I shall follow, as Rachel followed her beloved. Your country shall be my country, dearest, and—your God my God!’
All the troubled voices of the night responded to that loving murmur. The moon rose up luminous into the open heaven above the abbey ruins, and flashed upon the two clinging frames, in answer to the earth’s incantation.
CHAPTER II.—OLD LETTERS.
What’s an old letter but a rocket dark—
Once fired i’ the air and left without a spark