"I'll make you!" he cried, fiercely. "You cannot cling to the memory of a man so base and false." "He is my husband. I love him." King flushed with anger. "He is not your husband. He has deserted you, lured by the beauty of another woman." A gleam of fire flashed from her eyes, melting into a soft light. "Yes, I know, marriage is an ideal, the noblest, most beautiful. We have not yet attained its purity in life. Man is only struggling toward its perfection. We will not attain it by lowering the ideal, but by lifting up those who are struggling toward it. Another marriage while Frank lives would be possible for me only when I ceased to feel the meaning of sin and shame. I will never regret my life. I have cast all bitterness out of my heart. Better the happiness and pain of a glorious love than never to have known its joy. I have lived." "And I will yet teach you to live more deeply," he firmly said. She shook her head and looked at him sadly out of her dark eyes from which the storm had cleared at last. They beamed now with the steady light of a deep spiritual tenderness. CHAPTER XXI FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP The six months abroad which Gordon and Kate had spent in love's dreaming and drifting had been the fulfilment to the man of the long-felt yearnings of his fierce subconscious nature. To the woman it had been the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. She had found herself, the real self, at whose first meeting in the kiss of a man she had trembled. She was no longer afraid. The elemental clear-eyed goddess had taken possession. She had claimed her own, the throne of a queen, and the man who had dreamed of kingship was her courtier. She was smiling at him in conscious power, her violet eyes flashing with mystery and magic, the sunlight of Italy gleaming through her dark red hair, her full lips half parted with dreamy tenderness, and her sinuous body moving with indolent grace. "To be your slave is crown enough for man," he cried. "And I am in heaven," she answered, proudly. "Only, thus, in perfect freedom," he said, in rapture, "is the fulness of life. Beauty and harmony and love are of God. Surely this is communion with Him--the joy of embraces, the touch of sunlight, the glory of form and colour, the magic of music, the poetry of love, the ecstacy of passion, the kiss of the senses--He is in all and over all." "Can such happiness be eternal?" she asked, under her breath. He kissed her softly. "If God be infinite." They reached New York the first week in November, and Gordon returned to his work with renewed zeal. The success of his movement was a source of continued surprise and fear to the more thoughtful students of social and religious life.