once yielding and changing under the breath of thought and feeling as a field of flowers when the west wind blows, was now set, as though for ever, in a death-like fixity.  The delicate features were drawn and pinched, the nostrils contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of the lines of beauty into the mould of a lifeless mask.  It was the face of a dead woman, but it was her face still, and the Wanderer knew it well; in the kingdom of his soul the whole resistless commonwealth of the emotions revolted together to dethrone death’s regent—­sorrow, while the thrice-tempered springs of passion, bent but not broken, stirred suddenly in the palace of his body and shook the strong foundations of his being.

During the seconds that followed, his eyes were riveted upon the beloved head.  Then, as the Creed ended, the vision sank down and was lost to his sight.  She was seated now, and the broad sea of humanity hid her from him, though he raised himself the full height of his stature in the effort to distinguish even the least part of her head-dress.  To move from his place was all but impossible, though the fierce longing to be near her bade him trample even upon the shoulders of the throng to reach her, as men have done more than once to save themselves from death by fire in crowded places.  Still the singing of the hymn continued, and would continue, as he knew, until the moment of the Elevation.  He strained his hearing to catch the sounds that came from the quarter where she sat.  In a chorus of a thousand singers he fancied that he could have distinguished the tender, heart-stirring vibration of her tones.  Never woman sang, never could woman sing again, as she had once sung, though her voice had been as soft as it had been sweet, and tuned to vibrate in the heart rather than in the ear.  As the strains rose and fell, the Wanderer bowed his head and closed his eyes, listening, through the maze of sounds, for the silvery ring of her magic note.  Something he heard at last, something that sent a thrill from his ear to his heart, unless indeed his heart itself were making music for his ears to hear.  The impression reached him fitfully, often interrupted and lost, but as often renewing itself and reawakening in the listener the certainty of recognition which he had felt at the sight of the singer’s face.

He who loves with his whole soul has a knowledge and a learning which surpass the wisdom of those who spend their lives in the study of things living or long dead, or never animate.  They, indeed, can construct the figure of a flower from the dried web of a single leaf, or by the examination of a dusty seed, and they can set up the scheme of life of a shadowy mammoth out of a fragment of its skeleton, or tell the story of hill and valley from the contemplation of a handful of earth or of a broken pebble.  Often they are right, sometimes they are driven deeper and deeper into error by the complicated imperfections of their