Melville came one day to AmyÔt.

‘You have followed my advice,’ he said to Othmar. ‘You have made yourself a home. It is the nearest likeness to heaven that men get on earth. Believe a homeless man when he tells you so.’

Othmar smiled.

‘It is odd that you, the purest priest I know, and my uncle, the worldliest of philosophers and money-makers, should coincide in your counsels. Perhaps to make a home is as difficult as to make a discovery in astronomy or mathematics, or to appreciate a sunrise or sunset.’

‘Do you mean to say?——’

‘I mean to say nothing in especial; except that one’s life, as the world goes, does not fit one to be the hourly companion of a perfectly virginal mind. My dear Melville, she makes me ashamed; my society seems infinitely too coarse for her. I have never seemed to myself such a brute.’

‘That is, I fear, because you are not very much in love, and so are at liberty to analyse your own sensations: a lover would not feel those scruples,’ reflected Melville; but he merely said aloud: ‘If a woman have not a little of the angelic, she goes near to having something of the diabolic. Women are always in extremes.’

‘Her soul is like a crystal,’ said Othmar. ‘But in it I see my own soul, and it looks unworthy.’

He could not say even to Melville, tried physician of sick souls as he was, that there were moments when the perfect purity of the young girl wearied him, when her innocent tenderness fretted him, and failed to supply all the stimulant to his senses that women less lovely but more versed in amorous arts could have given, when he was, in a word—the most fatal word love ever hears—wearied.