“Rhoda, you are such a dear girl!” he murmured fondly. Her hands were imprisoned, one in each of his, but he did not attempt to lessen the distance between them. The earthly side of their love was fading out of their mutual consciousness, for the moment, as their thoughts mounted to the things of the spirit. “It’s such a wide gulf between us, although we are so near,” she went on. “Your letters have shown me that. To the bottom of your heart you believe that all that the South is struggling for is right and good and is her just right and will be for the good of the world.” He threw back his head and his eyes shone. “I do, Rhoda,” he exclaimed with emphasis. “I love the South, and her ideals are mine and her ambitions are mine! They are just and right and the more widely they are spread the better it will be for civilization and the whole world!” She nodded. “Yes, I understand how you feel, though I didn’t at first. And I believe to the bottom of my heart that the enslavement of man by man”--her face was glowing now with the inner fires of conviction and her low voice thrilled with the intensity of her feeling--“is wrong and degrades both of them and is the cause of no end of horrible things. And I don’t believe that anything good can ever come out of it.” “But you don’t know, Rhoda--you never have seen--” he began earnestly. “Ah, but I have seen, Jeff,” she broke in sadly. “I’ve seen the poor negroes that my father and I have helped on their way to Canada taking such desperate risks and enduring such awful sufferings in the hope of winning their freedom that I don’t need to see anything else. Divided like that, dear, on a matter that goes so deep with both of us, there could be no real understanding and sympathy between us, no true marriage. I think your convictions and your ideals are wrong--they are hateful to me--but I honor you for being true to them. I honor you more and love you more than I would if you gave them up, while you still believed in them, for love of me.” “You are right, dear heart,” he said, the pain of baffled and hopeless love sounding in his voice. “I could not be false to my convictions and my principles, even for you, my sweet, any more than you could be false to yours. You make me understand, as I haven’t before, what this means to you.” “No, Jeff, I can’t see that there’s any hope for us, for our happiness, on this earth, as long as this thing lasts that lies between us. Perhaps, in heaven--” Their eyes met, and her voice trembled and ceased. They stood with hands clasped, looking through open windows into each other’s souls, gazing deep into the warm and lovely depths of love, which they were putting behind them, and turning their vision upward along the heights where material aims crumbled away and hope and aspiration became only the essence of the soul’s ideals. And as they gazed it seemed to them that somewhere up in that dim region of eternal truth their spirits met and were joined.