"Nay, rather," cried Kophetua, "leave them and sin perforce. For how shall a man find the path of virtue if he cease to try and better his neighbours' lot."
"God has shown us the way," exclaimed the abbot, as one inspired; "join us, and thou shalt see it too. To this end woman was given to man, and man to woman. Take thou a woman to thyself, and find in her food to feed thy yearning. Take one soul, and live for it. To desire more is but vanity and ambition. Men will think themselves so great that one is not enough for their devotion; but God meant otherwise. Man and woman He made to be together, one perfect being. To cement this unity He gave us the noble yearning of unselfishness, which has gone so wide astray. In their pride men let it dissipate itself in ambitious philanthropy. Love for the race is a dream. It is love of man and wife that is the only truth."
Kophetua could not but be moved by the man's earnestness, so strangely unhinged as he was by his surroundings and his troubles. The evils that the old knight's grandest fancy had bred came vividly before him. Did this hermit give the key of the mystery why his own life had been as great a failure as the beggar-guild? The hermit's solution of the great problem was easy; and sweet as it was easy.
"But I have no wife," objected the King, as he felt himself yielding.
"Ay, but there is one within thy reach," said the abbot. "Take her whom thou broughtest hither last night."
"But there is none to wed us here," answered Kophetua, still seeking an escape from the influence around him; "we will depart, and come again as man and wife."
"There is no need," said the hermit. "It is not ceremonies that unite two half-souls into one. Stay here the period of probation. Consecrate thy life to her; sacrifice thine every hour to her greater comfort; offer to her thine every thought and every action till the months of thy noviciate be expired. By such ennobling service shalt thou find thyself more truly wed to her than by the grandest and most solemn rites that ever priests devised. Why, thou knowest it is true! Didst thou not feel it last night, when thou couldst not deny she was thy wife?"
Then the King could answer nothing; he wandered away without a word, and talked with other hermits. All had the same doctrine to preach, and each time its truth sank deeper into Kophetua's heart. Day after day went by, and still he did not depart. All day long the King and the beggar-maid wandered by the side of the busy river like lovers, and never were parted, save when the night fell and the abbess came to call Penelophon to the cell beside her own, or when Kophetua climbed up into the hanging woods to trap a deer and snare her a bird.