from her chosen path.

"Father, my soul is weak,
. . . . . . . .
But if I cannot plant resolve on hope,
It will stand firm on certainty of woe.
. . . Hopes have precarious life;
But faithfulness can feed on suffering,
And knows no disappointment. Trust in me.
If it were needed, this poor trembling hand
Should grasp the torch--strive not to let it fall,
Though it were burning down close to my flesh.
No beacon lighted yet. I still should hear
Through the damp dark the cry of gasping swimmers.
Father, I will be true."

The scenes which follow, first with her lover, then with her lover and
her father together, present the culmination at once of her trial and of
her steadfastness. Hitherto she has made her choice, as it were, in the
bodily absence of that love, the abnegation of whose every hope gives its
sharpness to her crown of thorns. Now the light and the darkness, the
joy and the sorrow, the love whose earthly life she is slaying, and the
life of lonely, ceaseless, lingering pain before her, stand, as it were,
visibly and tangibly side by side. On the one hand her father, with his
noble presence, his calm unquestioning self-devotion, his fervid
eloquence, and his withering scorn of everything false and base,
represents that deepest in humanity--and in her--which impels to seek and
to cling to the highest good. On the other her lover, associated with
all the deeply-cherished life, joy, and hope of her past, pleads with his
earnest, impassioned, almost despairing eloquence, for her return to