CHAPTER XI.

Were I a father I would saint thee;
Were I an artist I would paint thee;
Were I a poet I'd express thee.
Alas! I only can caress thee :

I cannot paint, or saint, or phrase thee,
Nor all my raisings can upraise thee.

Were I a bird I'd hide me near thee,
Trill out strains that should endear thee;
A flower, and I would bloom for thee;
A star, and I'd consume for thee.
Alas! I only can endear thee,

I cannot burn, bloom, warble near thee.

From an Unpublished Drama.

As Florence Dalgleish retired into the background into shadow, Maurice and Mabel, with their startling precocity of intellect, stood out in bolder outline. They grew up into young manhood and young womanhood to all appearance noble, and good, and wise, as they promised they would be. They flattered themselves that they had chosen the path of self-abnegation, and were walking in it, Maurice the most notably so, as his study of saintly lives and characters kept the ardent desire for holiness alive within him. But for the foun

dation on which they had built, would it bear the test? Was the religion they professed of the heart or of the head? We shall see. Both had their wish. Both were respected and beloved, and the divine echoes they had caught and vibrated to in their childhood were being passed on from them to others. They were both sought unto, and, in the spirit of their early vow, they both delighted to seek. Something in the tone and manner of each seemed to adjure persons they met with on this wise: "Have you accepted the patent for your own nobility? Do you know how high is your destiny? Have you thought how immensely God has endowed you in giving you a soul?"

And there was a magnetic attraction about Maurice which drew, and a majesty about Mabel, in her glorious beauty, which compelled. No one cared to resist their sway. They became the centre of little literary cliques among the young, guides of self-improvement classes and scientific réunions.

Maurice, for all his supposed self-abnegation, was intensely ambitious; yet his ambition was only that of one who, knowing he had a " gift divine," was determined to beat it into the drum of the world's ear, if it were possible. There was no self-conceit in it. Notwithstanding the weakness of his voice for an orator, notwithstanding his uncertain health, his aim was to

have sway on platform and in pulpit. And his stern face grew more stern in its resolution as he addressed himself to those difficult studies and that hard reading which should fit him for his high career. All Maurice's thoughts and imaginations seemed, from childhood, to take a purely spiritual tinge. Religion, as he understood it, was his life. No creature-love, as yet, either interfered with it or assisted him in it.

"His heart' was like a holy house of prayer,

When evening worshippers assemble there."

With Mabel it was far otherwise. Her religiousness was imbibed from intercourse with Maurice. Nay, love for Maurice was her religion, could she but have known it. She had a grand intellect, but it was not in its design so like a Christian temple as a heathen one. Wandering down its mysterious and softly-lighted aisles, one saw not in the niches the calm faces of the saints, but the Graces and Psyches, the gods and goddesses of classic Greece and imperial Rome. Her physical beauty cor

responded with her mental:

"Her hyacinth hair, her classic face,
Her Naiad air,' might bring one' home

To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome."

But as yet Maurice and she neither knew themselves

nor each other. There needed the proof, the trial, the

fire which, in waking careless sleepers, makes revelation of that in the house which would otherwise have

remained hidden.

For long periods now they were separated. Their paths diverged, as need be, when Maurice entered on his college life, but the interchange of thought and feeling between them was constant. The outpouring of Mabel's soul to him, was like the outpouring of a libation of red wine at the feet of a white-stoled priest, while his was distilled to her like the consecrated chrism, in cool, but careful drops.

Well might each preserve the other's letters. These might, had the treasure been lighted on, have proved a joyful surprise to either sage or poet, though to themselves they were the most natural, unstudied things in the world. It was wonderful, too, what a help Maurice found in Mabel during the long vacations. With her he discussed the plan of his lectures. She suggested how they should be thrown into form; she collected materials for him; she sought out for him beautiful illustrations and quotations; she suggested little finishing touches or amendments, which he either accepted or declined just as he pleased. And, in his hours of pain, he could bear now that she should look upon his anguish, that her hand should apply the ice to his burning temples.

"Oh, how I love you! thank you, sister of my heart!" he frequently exclaimed, and he never said anything sweeter.

Perhaps her

No one ever teased her about Maurice. queenliness restrained would-be triflers. Only Hetty, who had grown into a fine, sparkling girl, with a deeper tone of character and finer-edged sympathy than might have been predicted, said to her one day, putting her arm round her neck,

"Mabel, if ever you marry Maurice, you'll keep a little of his love for me, though I'm not the sister of his heart."

Mabel laughed, and told her many flattering things she had heard Maurice say of her. Hetty was comforted, for she, with the rest of her family, so far from verifying the axiom that "a prophet is not without honour save in his own country and among his own kindred," believed that Maurice would, like a comet, burst one day upon the intellectual horizon, and sweep the world on with him in his fiery train. They little calculated all the dark eclipse which must o'ershadow him, ere his emergence into light could make men gaze upon him.

Maurice matriculated successfully at college. During his few years of college life he won several scholarships.