Gabriel was an imaginative man. His heart’s cords were subtle, swift, and mystical. Songs born of the infinite strangeness of beauty were ever throbbing at his ear. His senses were as godly as Apollo’s. The scent of a pinewood smote him from afar. He could watch a hawk hovering a glimmering speck beneath the clouds. He was quick and virile, strung to the tense tones of beauty, red and blithe with the blood of June. With too precocious a wisdom in the vanities of earth, a semi-Byronic cynicism had marred his manhood. Like Joan, he had supped too richly in his April days. Knowledge had bred contempt. To Gabriel women were so many roses, each with a canker under the petals. He had been unfortunate in his experimental philosophy. No superb contradiction had as yet given his shallow pessimism the lie. He had met women, but not a woman. No Shakespearian divinity had shamed the cynicism out of his manhood. To him Sarah Golightly of the Gayety, or Mrs. Marjoy of Saltire, or the numberless worthy daughters of uninteresting neighbors were equally null and unlovable. A melancholy being, he had brought himself to the belief that there were no Britomarts in the woman’s world of the day. He believed in the possibility of womanly loveliness, adored the ideal Beatrice devoutly, but never prognosticated the flitting of a goddess athwart his earthly path. On the identical afternoon that Mrs. Marjoy was waxing charitable over the moral deficiencies of her acquaintances, Gabriel and his sister Judith were sessioned in the little red drawing-room at the hall. John Strong had driven into Rilchester, leaving the pair to no unwelcome solitude. Saltire Hall seemed to breathe anew through its quaint casements and antique galleries when its most Victorian master had vanished for a season. Now Judith Strong was the one woman in the world who reclaimed her brother from the charge of callow pessimism. She was one of those grave, lovable, stately beings who shed over the world a lustre of truth. With hair of red gold, eyes dark and contemplative, a complexion delicately pale, she bore upon her face the benign and tender divineness of a young Madonna. Her soul was clear and calm as a crystal sky. A sympathetic wisdom had dowered her with a charm that graced her womanhood like a crown of pearls. To Gabriel she was sister, friend, and mother. The two loved each other with an inseparable tenderness that was, indeed, Christian. Judith had learned to comprehend the subtler instincts of her brother’s nature. He was no ordinary man, in her opinion, and she was jealous for his happiness as for her own faith. But for Judith Saltire would have been a dry desert to the man’s soul.