“Down!” he said, as if he had been speaking to dogs. And now--what? It seemed to his quivering sensibility a proof that he had fallen to a far depth, that the first, bare instinct of his anguish was not to say, “What is my duty in this thing?” but, “How shall I bear it?” With that automatism of Christian habit which time and trouble may teach the coldest scoffer to respect, Bayard’s hand groped for his Bible. We have seen this touching movement in the sick, the aged, the bereaved, and in the utterly alone; and who of us has been so poor in spirit as to do it irreverence? In so young a man this desolate instinct had a deep significance. Bayard’s Bible opened at the New Testament, whose worn pages moved apart, at a touch, like lips that would answer him. As he took the book something fell from it to the floor. He stooped, holding his finger between the open leaves, and picked the object up. It was a flower--a pressed flower--the saxifrage that he had gathered from the hem of her dress on the sand of the beach, that April day. The Bible fell from his knee. He snatched the dead flower to his lips, and kissed it passionately. “There was another, too,” he hungrily said. “There was a pansy. She left it on the sofa pillow in this room. The pansy! the pansy!” He took up the Bible, and searched feverishly. But he could not find the pansy; the truth being that Jane Granite had seen it on the study-table, and had dusted it away. He laid the Bible down upon the table, and seized the saxifrage. He kissed it again and again; he devoured it over and over; he held it in the palm of his hand, and softly laid his cheek upon it.... Behind the white gauze, the Christ on the wall looked down. Suddenly Bayard raised his haggard face. The eyes of the picture and the eyes of the man met. “Anything but this--everything but this--Thou knowest.” Aloud, Bayard uttered the words as if he expected to be heard. “Only _this_--the love of man for woman--how canst THOU understand?” Bayard arose to his full height; he lifted his hands till they touched the low, cracked ceiling; it seemed to him as if he lifted them into illimitable heaven; as if he bore on them the greatest mystery and the mightiest woe of all the race. His lips moved; only inarticulate whispers came from them. Then his hands fell, and his face fell into them. * * * * * Bayard went to her like a man, and at once. At an hour of the morning so early that he felt obliged to apologize for his intrusion, his sleepless face appeared at the door of her father’s cottage.