"Calvin," replied Agnes, "I do not object to your necessary visits here. Your father is very dear to me."
"But can't I return to the subject we last talked of?" asked the young man, shrewdly.
"Agnes," continued Calvin, "you must know I love you!"
Agnes sank to her seat again with a look of resignation.
"Calvin," she said, "this is not the time. I am not the person for such remarks. I have just risen from my knees; my eyes are not in this world."
"You will be turning nun if this continues."
"I am in God's hands," said Agnes. "Yet the hour is dark with me."
"Agnes, let me lift some of your burden upon myself. You don't hate me?"
"No. I wish you every happiness, Calvin."
"Is there nothing you long for--nothing earthly and within the compass of possibility?"
"Yes, yes!" Agnes arose and walked across the floor almost unconsciously, with the palms of her hands held high together above her head. As she walked to and fro the theological student perceived a change so extraordinary in her appearance since his last visit that he measured her in his cool, worldly gaze as a butcher would compute the weight of a cow on chance reckoning.
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 God, on whom she had but a moment before called, seemed to have withdrawn His face.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.