friendship by distracting and bewildering emotions? It was, Hugh grew to discern, a real blot in his character; it was a prudence, a caution in emotional things, a terror, no doubt, in a sensitive spirit, of giving pledges, of making vows, of surrendering the will and the spirit. It did not indeed bring him unhappiness--that was the saddest part of it; but it left him involved in a kind of selfish isolation. His soul, he felt, was like a smiling island, which with its green glades and soft turf invites the wayfarer to set foot therein, with a smiling welcome from the spirit of the place. But the wood once penetrated, then at the back of the paradise ran a cliff-front of sad-coloured crags, preventing further ingress. If indeed the shrine of the island had stood guarded within a temple which, in its deep columned and shadowed recesses, had shielded a holy presence, it would have been different; but the land beyond was bare and desolate. That was, Hugh thought, the solution. The bright foreshore, the waving trees, the shelter and fountains, seemed to promise a place of delicate delights; and there were some of those who landed there, who, on seeing the pale cliff behind, believed, with a deep curiosity, that some very sacred and beautiful thing must there be enshrined. But it was the emptiness of the further land, Hugh thought, that made it imperative to guard the mystery. In that bare land indeed he himself seemed to pace, bitterly pondering; he would even kneel on the bare rocks, and hold out his hands in intense entreaty to the God who had made him, and who withdrew Himself so relentlessly within the blank sky, that a blessing might tall upon the stony wilderness. But this blessing was withheld; whether by his own fault, or through the just will of the Father, Hugh could not wholly discern. The hard fact remained that the inner fortress was blank and bare, and that no friend or lover could be invited thither.