whom she had instinctively tried to serve and to please; and he had sufficient imagination to understand and take advantage of the feeling aroused in her when she had met one of the same descent, and bearing the same name, in himself. He had run through the gamut of many emotions and sentiments,--he had joined one or two of the new schools of atheism and modernism started by certain self-opinionated young University men, and in the earlier stages of his career had in the cock-sure impulse of youth designed schemes for the regeneration of the world, till the usual difficulties presented themselves as opposed to such vast business,--he had associated himself with men who followed what is called the "fleshly school" of poetry and art generally, and had evolved from his own mentality a comfortable faith of which the chief tenet was "Self for Self"--a religion which lifts the mind no higher than the purely animal plane;--and in its environment of physical consciousness and agreeable physical sensations, he was content to live. With such a temperament and disposition as he possessed, which swayed him hither and thither on the caprice or impulse of the moment, his intentions toward Innocent were not very clear even to himself. When he had begun his "amour" with her he had meant it to go just as far as should satisfy his own whim and desire,--but as he came to know her better, he put a check on himself and hesitated as one may hesitate before pulling up a rose-bush from its happy growing place and flinging it out on the dust-heap to die. She was so utterly unsuspicious and unaware of evil, and she had placed him on so high a pedestal of honour, trusting him with such perfect and unquestioning faith, that for very manhood's sake he could not bring himself to tear the veil from her eyes. Moreover he really loved her in a curious, haphazard way of love,--more than he had ever loved any one of her sex,--and, when in her presence and under her influence, he gained a glimmering of consciousness of what love might mean in its best and purest sense.