There flashed upon me in that instant’s pause a singular conviction--that these two had mated for a reason of their own. They had not known the clutch of elemental power by which Nature ensures the continuance of the race. They had not shuddered, wept, and known the awful ecstasy, but had slipped between her fingers and escaped. They had not loved. While he knew this consciously, she was aware of it unconsciously. They mated for another reason, yet one as holy, as noble, as pure--if not more so, indeed--as those that consecrate marriage in the accepted sense. And the thought, strange as it was, brought a sweet pleasure to me, though shot with a pain that was equally undeniable and equally perplexing. While my thoughts floundered between curiosity, dismay and something elusive that yet was more clamorous than either, Julius continued without a vestige of embarrassment, though obviously omitting much detail that I burned to hear. “And that very week--the next day, I think, it was--I asked Maennlich to allow me an hour’s talk with her alone----” “She--er----?” “She liked me--from the very first, yes. She felt me.” “And showed it?” I asked bluntly. “And showed it,” he repeated, “although she said it puzzled her and she couldn’t understand.” “On her side, then, it was love--love at first sight?” “Strong attraction,” he put it, “but an attraction she thought it her duty to resist at first. Her present conditions made any relationship between us seem incongruous, and when I offered marriage--as I did at once--it overwhelmed her. She made sensible objections, but it was her brain of To-day that made them. You can imagine how it went. She urged that to marry a man in another class of life, a ‘gentleman,’ a ‘wealthy’ gentleman and an educated, ‘scholar gentleman,’ as she called me, could only end in unhappiness--because I should tire of her. Yet, all the time--she told me this afterwards--she had the feeling that we were meant for one another, and that it must surely be. She was shy about it as a child.” “And you convinced her in the end!” I said to myself rather than aloud to him. There were feelings in me I could not disentangle. “Convinced her that we needed one another and could never go apart,” he said. “We had something to fulfil together. The forces that drove us together, though unintelligible to her, were yet acknowledged by her too, you see.” “I see,” my voice murmured faintly, as he seemed to expect some word in reply. “I see.” Then, after a longer pause than usual, I asked: “And you told her of your--your theories and beliefs--the purpose you had to do together?” “No single word. She could not possibly have understood. It would have frightened her.” I heard it with relief, yet with resentment too. “Was that quite fair, do you think?”