e longer to myself. I'm honest, you see; as you say, we have
always been honest with each other--for all our sakes, we'll leave
letters alone. When it is settled--it _will_ be settled, I feel
that--you can write and let me know, and tell me her name, and send me
her photograph. I'm so poor and mean a thing that I am glad she is
not pretty; glad that for the last time you called me your `dearest
love.'

"I am quite well, and Jean is good to me, and so--good-bye...!"

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

THE SUPREME SECRET.

On the evening of her thirty-eighth birthday Vanna Strangeways said
adieu to her last patient, and slowly traversed the streets leading
towards Jean Gloucester's home. It was a dull and dreary evening, but
her thoughts were not sad. The years which had passed by since the
receipt of Piers Rendall's farewell letter, and the subsequent news of
his engagement and marriage, had marked the various stages which attend
all great griefs. First the storm, with the roar of the wind, which
threatens to destroy the very foundations of life; then the desert;
loneliness; an outlook of flat, colourless sand; finally, slowly and
surely, the inflowing calm. Hopeless, long-cherished grief is
impossible to a soul who has tasted of love for God and its fellow-men.
However severely a tree has been pruned, its leaves shoot forth bravely
at the call of the spring, and in a few years' time strength is gathered
for another blossoming.

Vanna had put much good hard work into these last years. In the great
metropolis of the world, a woman who is willing to work for others, and
to work without pay, need never know a moment's idleness, and Dr
Greatman had always a list of patients who were in dire need of help--
patients belonging to that section of humanity to whom in especial
Vanna's sympathies went out. Every day of her life she was brought into
contact with women compared with whom her own lot was unspeakably calm
and happy--poor waifs on life's ocean, perishing not only for lack of
physical help, but also for the want of love, and sympathy, and
brightness; and Vanna, as a free agent, blessed with health and means,
had it in her power to minister to mind as well as body. She was that
rare thing, a voluntary worker on whom one might depend for regular,
systematic service; and in her work she found her best and sweetest
comfort.

Jean's old epithet, "Consolation Female," was truly descriptive of Vanna
in the