"What is it, dear Agnes?"
He spoke with a softness of tone little in keeping with his unfeeling,
vigilant face.
"Oh, give me love! Now, if ever, it is love! Love only, that can lift me
up and cleanse my soul!"
"Love lies everywhere around you," said the young man. "You trample it
under your feet. My heart--many hearts--have felt the cruel treatment.
Agnes, _you_ must love also."
"I try to do so," she exclaimed, "but it is not the perfect love that
casteth out fear! God knows I wish it was."
Her eyes glanced down, and a blush, sudden and deep, spread over her
features. The young man lost nothing of all this, but with alert
analysis took every expression and action in.
"May I become your friend if greater need arises, Agnes? Do not repulse
me. At the worst--I swear it!--I will be your instrument, your subject."
Agnes sat in the renewed pallor of profound fear. God, on whom she had
but a moment before called, seemed to have withdrawn His face. Her black
ringlets, smoothed upon her noble brow in wavy lines, gave her something
of a Roman matron's look; her eyebrows, dark as the eyes beneath that
now shrank back yet shone the larger, might have befitted an Eastern
queen. Lips of unconscious invitation, and features produced in their
wholeness which bore out a character too perfect not to have lived
sometime in the realms of the great tragedies of life, made Agnes in her
sorrow peerless yet.
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