“Yes, my dear, yes,” he said tenderly. “I know all about it, Alice; there is little about yourself that you need to tell me in words, after all these years. But we had better not talk about it, I think; for I might say something to disturb your faith once more, and I should be sorry to do that.” “I don’t think you could, _now_,” she replied. “It is no new thing, Fred; I think it has been growing within me for a long time. And it is not such faith as I thought I had once.” “As you thought you had?” “It was little more than thinking; I did not know what belief really meant. Oh, don’t say we must not talk about it, dear; I cannot bear any forbidden subjects between us _now_.” He drew her nearer, and kissed her, smiling. “Now?” he asked gently. “It seems as though I had never loved you until now,” she replied. “Years ago—oh, Fred, can you forgive me!—I believed, as I had been taught, that it was a sin to marry an infidel; but it would have killed me to give you up, and so I did what I thought wrong in defiance.” “Not quite that, I think,” he said tenderly. “It was only that your heart was stronger than your theology, that’s all.” “One was true, and therefore did the truth, and the other was false,” she replied. “But then, when trouble came, I looked upon it as punishment, or, rather, vengeance, for what was no sin at all. As if I were so much holier than you,” she cried indignantly; “you whose noble life taught me the emptiness and selfishness of my own. ‘Unequally yoked together!’ If we have been, the superiority has been on your side. If truth be life, you have more of it than I; and I have looked up to you and learned of you always.” “Until now?” he said rather sadly. “Oh! Fred, you have much to teach me yet. It is you who see things as they are, truly, purely, nobly; and I whose eyes are blinded by the mists of earth. Only in one thing I have the advantage of you.” “And that?” he asked. She rose to her feet,—for till then she had knelt beside his chair,—and, drawing his head to her bosom, kissed him with such kisses as in all their life together she had never before given him. “I _know_ that you are mine now, and always, for life and death, for time and eternity,” she cried passionately. “I am not afraid to let myself love you now that neither life nor death can ever come between us. God has given you back to me, my husband!” BOOK III. FLOOD AND FIRE. CHAPTER I. “O’ER CRAG AND TORRENT, TILL THE NIGHT IS GONE.”