There was something in his look which agonized her, in the rush of
his thoughts, accelerating their speed from minute to minute. He
seemed to be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet--
erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable.
Grace's distraction was almost as great as his. In a few moments
she firmly believed he was dying. Unable to withstand her
impulse, she knelt down beside him, kissed his hands and his face
and his hair, exclaiming, in a low voice, "How could I? How could
I?"
Her timid morality had, indeed, underrated his chivalry till now,
though she knew him so well. The purity of his nature, his
freedom from the grosser passions, his scrupulous delicacy, had
never been fully understood by Grace till this strange self-
sacrifice in lonely juxtaposition to her own person was revealed.
The perception of it added something that was little short of
reverence to the deep affection for him of a woman who, herself,
had more of Artemis than of Aphrodite in her constitution.
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