He, better than any one else, understood that he had fallen in
love with something most hard of attainment, something that drew him to
the very edge of life, and almost beyond it. It, no doubt, was a secret
and terrible joy to him, this passionate worship from afar; only I think
he suffered more than any one guessed, and that his want of vitality was
due in large measure to the constant stream of unsatisfied yearning that
poured for ever from his soul and body. Moreover, it seemed to me, who
now saw them for the first time together, that there was an unnamable
something--an elusive quality of some kind--that marked them as
belonging to the same world, and that although the girl ignored him she
was secretly, and perhaps unknown to herself, drawn by some attribute
very deep in her own nature to some quality equally deep in his.
This, then, was the party when we first settled down into our two
months' camp on the island in the Baltic Sea. Other figures flitted from
time to time across the scene, and sometimes one reading man, sometimes
another, came to join us and spend his four hours a day in the
clergyman's tent, but they came for short periods only, and they went
without leaving much trace in my memory, and certainly they played no
important part in what subsequently happened.
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