moonlight, crouched the figure of a woman,
huddled with her head against her knees, and careless hair falling to the
summer's dust. Evan came upon this sight within a few miles of
Fallowfield. At first he was rather startled, for he had inherited
superstitious emotions from his mother, and the road was lone, the moon
full. He went up to her and spoke a gentle word, which provoked no reply.
He ventured to put his hand on her shoulder, continuing softly to address
her. She was flesh and blood. Evan stooped his head to catch a whisper
from her mouth, but nothing save a heavier fall of the breath she took,
as of one painfully waking, was heard.

A misery beyond our own is a wholesome picture for youth, and though we
may not for the moment compare the deep with the lower deep, we, if we
have a heart for outer sorrows, can forget ourselves in it. Evan had just
been accusing the heavens of conspiracy to disgrace him. Those patient
heavens had listened, as is their wont. They had viewed and had not been
disordered by his mental frenzies. It is certainly hard that they do not
come down to us, and condescend to tell us what they mean, and be
dumb-foundered by the perspicuity of our arguments the argument, for
instance, that they have not fashioned us for the science of the shears,
and do yet impel us to wield them. Nevertheless, they to whom mortal life
has ceased to be a long matter perceive that our appeals for conviction
are answered, now and then very closely upon the call. When we have cast
off the scales of hope and fancy, and surrender our claims on mad chance,
it is given us to see that some plan is working out: that the heavens,
icy as they are to the pangs of our blood, have been throughout speaking
to our souls; and, according to the strength there existing, we learn to
comprehend them. But their language is an element of Time, whom primarily
we have to know.

Evan Harrington was young. He wished not to clothe the generation. What
was to the remainder of the exiled sons of Adam simply the brand of
expulsion from Paradise, was to him hell. In his agony, anything less
than an angel, soft-voiced in his path, would not have satisfied the poor
boy, and here was this wretched outcast, and instead of being relieved,
he was to act the reliever!

Striving to rouse the desolate creature, he shook her slightly. She now
raised her head with a slow, gradual motion, like that of a wax-work,
showing a white young face, tearless,-dr