"But--shall I thank you, Veronica?
Or do you understand without words?
We have known each other so long, that perhaps you may." "I think I understand," she answered.
She put out her hand again and pressed his, and again he kissed her fingers.

The action was reverential, and had nothing in it of the man who loves and is accepted.

Her gentle hand, maidenly and innocent, was stretched down into the hell of word and thought and deed in which his real self had its being, and he touched it with his lips, and in his heart he knelt to kiss it, as something too holy to be in this world--just because it was innocent, and his own was not.

For herself he set her on no pedestal, he did not worship her, he did not love her, he admired her with the cold judgment of a man of taste.

It is the purity of the unblemished and unspotted victim that makes the outward holiness of the sacrifice.