Then came the supreme moment in which she let the belief that he loved her seize entire possession of her. Must he not have for his mate a woman who would love him and make him a perfect wife? He was a being apart from his own world, devoted to serener and higher ambitions. Had she not seen the glow with which he expounded his ideas and purposes, forgetting she was a humble, uninstructed listener, and surrounding her soul with the sweet unction of the implied perfect equality? Perhaps it had dawned upon him at last that devotion greater than hers the world could not hold. In his consecration to his high calling he did not need a wife to figure brilliantly amid social pleasures and functions, but a helpmeet whom perhaps he could not so easily find in those exalted spheres; one who needed no pleasures for herself, no triumphs; who had no purposes of her own, no desires, save the supreme end of self-sacrifice on the altar of his happiness and achievement. Only a woman absolutely capable of such self-effacement could understand the perfect bliss of it. If every man could find such faithfulness at his own hearth, how the world would thrive and grow blessed! And she thanked Heaven for the little fortune she could bring him, for this precious money to establish his life on a safe and sure footing. And when he had spoken at last, she, casting away the last doubt, had thrown herself headlong into the dream. With her arms round him, and her lips to his, she felt that she had always been destined for this high bliss, that rendered by contrast the quiet stream of her life a mockery of life. The joyous period of intoxication was all too short. With the sobering of the world to its work again in the new year, she, too, sobered a little, and the old questioning revived in her. Was it really the truth that he loved her? Where was the note of passion she herself had poured out so recklessly? His personal magnetism, his urbane, affectionate friendliness, the caressing vibrations of his voice, his delicate and considerate dealing with the gaps of ignorance she daily revealed--all this held her in an invincible spell. But the deep, irresistible conviction for which her heart yearned was unmistakably absent in his whole relation to her. Perhaps some terrible struggle was going on within him. Was he recoiling in terror sometimes from the thought of the mate he had chosen? Surely at times he was arguing himself into acceptance and contentment. What meant the strange, furtive glances he sometimes directed at her?--not the soft glances of love, but glances bewildering, baffling! She watched him with a supernaturally sensitive insight, appraising his every expression, following the imagined see-saw of his doubts and reassurances.