Therefore I feared that, while Julia had produced in him an aberration grave enough but still only of the second magnitude, Jennie might now unwittingly bring about a cataclysm indeed. For he himself had said that his chances of stability lay in an even and unexciting tenor of life. He must sail, so to speak, on an even keel. Calmly and equably he must pick his way through this beautiful and passionate wonder. He must lash the wheel of his will lest the lightest of her sighs should drive him rail-under. A glance might mean the loss of years to him, a kiss death.... Others than I have told of loves between two normal creatures, if such in love there be. I am the first, since a mortal fell in love with a god, to tell of lovers whose lives met as they approached each other from opposite directions. Yet--only to see one another, only to speak to one another! Who with a heart could refuse them that? Who, only looking at them, he serious and radiant, she as I had seen her among the marguerites that afternoon? Love was first invented for such as they. Could he but have slept, like Endymion, in his loveliness for ever!... You see what had already become of my momentary anger against him. It was quite, quite gone. He was once more my son, outside whose door I had paused with a sick dread that very morning. And as love of him re-possessed me the marvel grew that he should so have survived that shock of beauty and emotion that had been his where the cars had stood parked in the transparent gloom. "Who was that with you in the garden, George?" his ardent whisper seemed to sound again. Was it possible that there were _two_ loves, the one shattering, ruinous, destructive of the few years of his life, but the other full of security, healing and rest? Was there indeed a Love Sacred and a Love Profane? (Yet who would call Julia Oliphant's love for him profane? He himself, since he had always refused it? Surely none other.) And I remembered his own halting surmises as to the origin of his singular fate. He had known heaven and hell--had "been too close to the balm or the other thing." God (he had said) was more than a gland; not a knock on the head in the war, but the contending angels themselves of Good and Evil had brought him to this. The one principle had fetched down his years all clattering about him on that moonlit night when the cracking of a cone on my balcony had brought me out of my bed. Was the opposite principle now about to expunge that other ill, to restore him, and to make him a whole and forward-living man again? He believed that there was a chance of it. Was it too utterly beyond belief after all?