“We love each other,” repeated Helen, holding out her hands, “and I trust you. Let us live on that a little while, till we--till you”-- But she faltered, and her courage forsook her when she looked up into his face. All the anguish of the man that the woman cannot share, and may not understand, started out in visible lines and signs upon his features; all the solemn responsibility for her, for himself, and for the unknown consequences of their sacred passion; the solitary burden, which it is his to wear in the name of love, and which presses hardest upon him whose spirit is higher and stronger than mere human joy. But at this moment a sound was heard upon the stone steps of the Queen Anne house. It was the footfall of the Professor himself, returning from his closing lecture of the series on Eschatology. Mrs. Carruth pattered behind him with short, stout steps. She had wound the affairs of the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with Blankets, to a condition in which they could run along without her till the exegetical trip to the German Professor’s in Berlin should be over, and the slush of Cesarea should know her again. XXIV. The summer slid, Bayard knew not how. They separated as so many confused lovers do in the complicated situations of our later life; wherein we love no longer in the old, outright, downright way, when men and women took each other for better, for worse, and dared to run the risk of loving, without feeling responsible for the consequences. We are past all that; and whether it is the worse or the better for us, who shall say? At least, these two had the healthy ring to their love; in that great and simple feeling was no delinquency or default. Bayard did not hesitate or quibble--one day a lover, the next a prudential committee, after the fashion of such feeble mathematicians as go by the name of men, to-day. He was incapable of calculating his high passion; there was no room in his soul or body for a doubt to take on lease of life. He loved her; as the greatest of women might be proud and humble to be loved; as the smallest would be vain to be. He loved her too much to make her miserable; and he knew, with that dreary, practical perception of the truth sometimes but rarely granted to men of the seer’s temperament, that he could not make her happy. Between love and joy a dead wall shut down; it seemed to him to reach from the highest heavens to the waters under the earth. What elemental chaos could rend it? What miracle was foreordained to shatter it? Would the busy finger of God stretch out to touch it?