He had not let his hair and beard grow, knowing nothing of such practices, but in heart he had been a Nazarite from his youth up,--serving God in his harsh, unloving way; loving God, as he thought; certainly loving nothing else, if it were not the dumb creatures, to whom he was always kind and just.

And now--what had happened to him?
He asked himself the question sternly, sitting there before the cheerful blaze, yet neither seeing nor feeling it.

The answer seemed to cry itself in his ears, to write itself before his eyes in letters of fire.

The thing had happened that happens in the story books, that really comes to pass once in a hundred years, they say.

He had seen the one woman in the world that he wanted for his own, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish.