alked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the lines
of box breathing its fragrance of eternity;--for this is one of the odors
which carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past; if
we ever lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there
was box growing on it. So they walked, finding their way softly to each
other's sorrows and sympathies, each matching some counterpart to the
other's experience of life, and startled to see how the different, yet
parallel, lessons they had been taught by suffering had led them step by
step to the same serene acquiescence in the orderings of that Supreme
Wisdom which they both devoutly recognized.

Old Sophy was at the window and saw them walking up and down the
garden-alleys. She watched them as her grandfather the savage watched
the figures that moved among the trees when a hostile tribe was lurking
about his mountain.

"There'll be a weddin' in the ol house," she said, "before there's roses
on them bushes ag'in. But it won' be my poor Elsie's weddin', 'n' ol'
Sophy won' be there."

When Helen prayed in the silence of her soul that evening, it was not
that Elsie's life might be spared. She dared not ask that as a favor of
Heaven. What could life be to her but a perpetual anguish, and to those
about her but an ever-present terror? Might she but be so influenced by
divine grace, that what in her was most truly human, most purely
woman-like, should overcome the dark, cold, unmentionable instinct which
had pervaded her being like a subtile poison that was all she could ask,
and the rest she left to a higher wisdom and tenderer love than her own.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE WHITE ASH.

When Helen returned to Elsie's bedside, it was with a new and still
deeper feeling of sympathy, such as the story told by Old Sophy might
well awaken. She understood, as never before, the singular fascination
and as singular repulsion which she had long felt in Elsie's presence.
It had not been without a great effort that she had forced herself to
become the almost constant attendant of the sick girl; and now she was
learning, but not for the first time, the blessed truth which so many
good women have found out for themselves, that the hardest duty bravely
performed soon becomes a habit, and tends in due time to transform itself
into a pleasure.

The old Doctor was beginning to look graver, in spite of himself. The
fever, if such it was, went gently fo