It is the same "deep energy," the same inexorable necessity of her
nature, that she should put away from her all beneath the best and
purest, which originates the sudden terror that smiles upon her when Don
Silva, for her sake, breaks loose from country and faith, from honour and
God. There is no triumph in the greatness of the love thus displayed; no
rejoicing in prospect of the outward fulfilment of the love thus made
possible; no room for any emotion but the dark chill foreboding of a
separation thus begun, wider than all distance, and more profound and
hopeless than death. The separation of aims no longer single, of souls
no longer one; of his life falling, though for her sake, from its best
and highest, and therefore ceasing, inevitably and hopelessly, fully to
respond to hers.

"What the Zincala may not quit for you,
I cannot joy that you should quit for her."

The last temptation has now been met and conquered. Henceforth we see
Fedalma only in her calm, sad, unwavering steadfastness, bearing, without
moan or outward sign, the burden of her cross. Not even her father's
dying charge is needed to confirm her purpose, to fix her life in a self-
devotedness already fixed beyond all relaxing and all change. With his
death, indeed, the last faint hope fades utterly away that his great
purpose shall be achieved; and she thenceforth is

"But as the funeral urn that bears
The ashes of a leader."

But necessity lies only the more upon her--that most imperious of all
necessities which originates in her own innate nobleness--that she should
be _true_. When first she accepted this burden of her nobleness and her