ou must remember this! If it had not been for him you would have been at
Blakely to-day."

His thoughts carried him backwards with a rush. Once more the thrall of
that quiet life of passionless sweetness held him. He looked back upon it
curiously, as a man who has passed into another country. Days of physical
exaltation, alone with the sun and the wind and all the murmuring voices
of Nature, God's life he had called it then. And now! The stress of
battle was hard upon him. He was fighting in the front ranks, a somewhat
cheerless battle, fighting for great causes with inefficient weapons. But
he could not go back. Life had become a more strenuous, a more vital, a
less beautiful thing! He felt himself ageing. All the inevitable sadness
of the man in touch with the world's great problems was in his heart. But
he could not go back.

"Yes," he said, quietly, "I owe that much to Borrowdean."

"There is a question," she said, "which I have wanted to ask you. Do you
regret, or are you glad to have been forced out once more upon the
world's stage?"

He smiled.

"How can I answer you?" he asked. "At Blakely I was as happy as I knew
how to be, and until you came I was content! But to-day, well, there are
different things. How can I answer your question, indeed? Tell me what
happiness means! Tell me whether it is an ignoble or a praiseworthy
state!"

Berenice was silent. Into her face there had come a sudden gravity.
Mannering, glancing towards her, was at once conscious of the change. He
saw the weariness so often and zealously repressed, the ageing of her
face, the sudden triumph of the despair which in the quiet moments
chilled her heart. It seemed to him that for that moment they had come
into some closer communion. He bent over towards her.

"Ah!" he murmured, "you, too, are beginning to understand. Happiness is
only for the ignorant. For you and for me knowledge has eaten its way
too far into our lives. We climb all the while, but the flowers in the
meadows are the fairest."

She shook her head.

"The little white flower which grows in the mountains is what we must
always seek," she answered. "The meadows are for the others."

"We are accursed with this knowledge, and the desire for it," he
declared, fiercely. "The suffering is for us, and the joy for the beasts
of the field. Why not throw down the cards? We are the devil's puppets in
this game of life."

"There is no place for us down there," she answered, sadl