The next six months were the happiest time of her life, for

Herminia. All day long she worked hard with her classes; and often

in the evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse and

companionship. Too free from any taint of sin or shame herself

ever to suspect that others could misinterpret her actions,

Herminia was hardly aware how the gossip of Bower Lane made free in

time with the name of the young lady who had taken a cottage in the

row, and whose relations with the tall gentleman that called so

much in the evenings were beginning to attract the attention of the

neighborhood. The poor slaves of washer-women and working men's

wives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken, husband

was the only "respectable" condition,--couldn't understand for the

life of them how the pretty young lady could make her name so

cheap; "and her that pretends to be so charitable and that, and

goes about in the parish like a district visitor!" Though to be

sure it had already struck the minds of Bower Lane that Herminia

never went "to church nor chapel;" and when people cut themselves

adrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of morality can you

reasonably expect of them? Nevertheless, Herminia's manners were

so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower Lane

seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poor

purblind Bower Lane! A life-time would have failed it to discern

for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish "respectability"

was Herminia's freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was

no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of

that, with Lambeth Palace.

But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about.

To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that

perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred

yards off from the Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulf

between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters

from Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught a

single echo of the washerwomen's gossip. Herminia's life through

those six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she and

Alan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezy

summit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulous

pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with their

aromatic resins. Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing;

while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of that

crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it. Gradually she was

raising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix with a lofty

nature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and more

generous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from the

world; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral

earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple

hangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making him

understand and sympathize with the motives which led her stoutly on

to her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of

discontent to her great renunciation.




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