sery of all--the misery of suspense.

The passion of love, so hedged about with curious and unreal
conventions, is a strangely protean thing. The dear old proverb,
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder," is far truer than those who
believe its many cynical counterparts would have us think, and
especially is this true of an impulsive and imaginative nature.

It was the sudden, dramatic withdrawal of Major Guthrie from her life
which first made the woman he had dumbly loved realise all that his
constant, helpful presence had meant to her. And then his worldly old
mother's confidences had added just that touch of jealousy which often
sharpens love. Lastly, his letter, so simple, so direct, and yet, to one
who knew his quiet, reserved nature, so deeply charged with feeling, had
brought the first small seed to a blossoming which quickened every pulse
of her nature into ardent, sentient life. This woman, who had always
been singularly selfless, far more interested in the lives of those
about her than in her own, suddenly became self-absorbed.

She looked back with a kind of wonder to her old happy, satisfied, and
yes, unawakened life. She had believed herself to be a woman of many
friends, and yet there was now not one human being to whom she felt even
tempted to tell her wonderful secret.

Busily occupied with the hundred and one trifles, and the eager,
generally successful little excursions into philanthropy--for she was an
exceptionally kind, warm-hearted woman--which had filled her placid
widowhood, she had yet never made any real intimate. The only exception
had been Major Guthrie; it was he who had drawn her into what had seemed
for so long their pleasant, quiet garden of friendship.

And now she realised that were she to tell any of the people about her
of the marvellous change which had taken place in her heart, they would
regard her with great surprise, and yes, even with amusement. All the
world loves a young lover, but there is not much sympathy to spare in
the kind of world to which Mary Otway belonged by birth, position, and
long association, for the love which appears, and sometimes only attains
full fruition, later in life.

As the days went on, each bringing its tale of exciting and momentous
events, there came over Mrs. Otway a curious apathy with regard to the
war, for to her the one figure which had counted in the awful drama now
being enacted in France and Flanders had disappeared from the vast stage