He stood silent, almost abashed, before her, marvelling alike at her eloquence and at the insight displayed of a union of spirit, of which Eustace was forced to admit that he had not thought. To win Bride as his wife, to set her up as his object of adoring love, had seemed all-sufficient to him hitherto. Now it suddenly dawned upon him that with such a woman as this, that would be but the travesty and mockery of happiness. She was right and he was wrong: without a deeper sympathy and love than any which had come into his philosophy as yet, marriage would be a doleful blunder. He would be no nearer to her than before--perhaps farther away. He must learn to share with her that inner and mystic life of which he saw glimpses from time to time when she opened out for a moment and showed him what lay below the calm surface of her nature. Either he must share that with her, or wean her away from it; replacing mysticism with philanthropy, fanaticism with practical benevolence, objective with subjective religion. One of those two ends must be accomplished before he could hope to win the desire of his heart. As he stood in the bright spring sunshine facing her, he became suddenly aware of that, and a new light leaped into his eyes--the light of battle and of resolve. He would win her yet, but it must be by slower steps than any he had contemplated hitherto. She was worthy of better things than becoming a mere dreamer and nunlike recluse. It should be his to lead her steps to surer ground, to show her that there was a higher Christianity than any of which she had hitherto dreamed. Not now--not all at once, but he would come again and begin upon a surer foundation. He looked into her eyes, and gently taking her hand before she had time to draw it away, he said quietly-- “Do not be afraid, Bride; I see that you judged more wisely than I. You are right and I am wrong, and I will go away and trouble you no more in the present; but the time will come when I shall return, and I trust that by slow and sure degrees we shall draw so closely together that you will no longer shrink from me in fear and trembling. You are very young, sweet cousin, and there are many things you have yet to learn. It is a beautiful thing, I doubt not, to hold commune in the spirit with the higher world; but we are set in our place here below for something I hold to be more truly noble than that. We are set in a world of sin and misery that we may gird our armour upon us and fight the battle with this sin and misery--fight it for our poor and afflicted brethren, as they cannot fight it for themselves. That is the true Christianity; that is the highest form of religious devotion. You can read it for yourself in your Bible--‘True religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the widows and orphans in their affliction’--to be ministers, in fact, of mercy and blessing in any sphere, of which one is given as the type.”