Glance and kiss, when two love, are as body and soul, supremely human and transcendently divine.  The look alone, when the lips cannot meet, is but the disembodied spirit, beautiful even in its sorrow, sad, despairing, saying “ever,” and yet sighing “never,” tasting and knowing all the bitterness of both.  The kiss without the glance?  The body without the soul?  The mortal thing without the undying thought?  Draw down the thick veil and hide the sight, lest devils sicken at it, and lest man should loathe himself for what man can be.

Truth or untruth, their love was real, hers as much as his.  She remembered only what her heart had been without it.  What her goal might be, now that it had come, she guessed even then, but she would not ask.  Was there never a martyr in old times, more human than the rest, who turned back, for love perhaps, if not for fear, and said that for love’s sake life still was sweet, and brought a milk-white dove to Aphrodite’s altar, or dropped a rose before Demeter’s feet?  There must have been, for man is man, and woman, woman.  And if in the next month, or even the next year, or after many years, that youth or maid took heart to bear a Christian’s death, was there then no forgiveness, no sign of holy cross upon the sandstone in the deep labyrinth of graves, no crown, no sainthood, and no reverent memory of his name or hers among those of men and women worthier, perhaps, but not more suffering?

No one can kill Self.  No one can be altogether another, save in the passing passion of a moment’s acting.  I—­in that syllable lies the whole history of each human life; in that history lives the individuality; in the clear and true conception of that individuality dwells such joint foreknowledge of the future as we can have, such vague solution as to us is possible of that vast equation in which all quantities are unknown save that alone, that I which we know as we can know nothing else.

“Bury it!” she said.  “Bury that parting—­the thing, the word, and the thought—­bury it with all others of its kind, with change, and old age, and stealing indifference, and growing coldness, and all that cankers love—­bury them all, together, in one wide deep grave—­then build on it the house of what we are—­”

“Change?  Indifference?  I do not know those words,” the Wanderer said.  “Have they been in your dreams, love?  They have never been in mine.”

He spoke tenderly, but with the faintest echo of sadness in his voice.  The mere suggestion that such thoughts could have been near her was enough to pain him.  She was silent, and again her head lay upon his shoulder.  She found there still the rest and the peace.  Knowing her own life, the immensity of his faith and trust in that other woman were made clear by the simple, heartfelt words.  If she had been indeed Beatrice, would he have loved her so?  If it had all been true, the parting, the seven years’ separation, the utter loneliness, the hopelessness, the despair, could she have been as true as he?  In the stillness that followed she asked herself the question which was so near a greater and a deadlier one.  But the answer came quickly.  That, at least, she could have done.  She could have been true to him, even to death.  It must be so easy to be faithful when life was but one faith.  In that chord at least no note rang false.