isins. In her own room
she sat down before the fire and loosened her hair from the low coil on
her neck. She drew out the hairpins one by one, until her hands were
full, and the thick black rope fell across her bosom. Then she tossed
the pins upon her bureau and shook a veil over her face and shoulders.
As she settled herself into her chair she glanced impatiently at the
clock. Dudley was late, and she listened for his footsteps with the
composure of a woman from whom the flush of marriage has passed away.
His footsteps were as much a part of her days as the ticking of the
clock upon the mantel. If the clock were to stop, she would miss the
accustomed sound, but so long as it went on she was almost unconscious
of its presence. Her affection for Dudley had grown so into her nature
that it was like the claim of kinship--quiet, unimpassioned, full of
service--the love that is the end of many happy marriages, the beginning
of few.

As she sat there she fell vaguely to wondering what her lot would have
been had her pulses fluttered to his footsteps as they came and went.
She would have known remorseless waitings and the long agony of jealous
nights--all the passionate self-torture that she had missed--that she
had missed, thank God! She made the best of her life to-day, as she
would have made the best of blows and bruises. It was the old buoyant
instinct of the Battle blood--the fighting of Fate on its ground with
its own weapons. She had insisted strenuously upon her own
happiness--and she had found it not in the great things of life, but in
the little ones. She was happy because happiness is ours in the cradle
or not at all--because it is of the blood and not of the environment.

During the first years of her marriage she had intensely sought the
relief of outside interests. She had worked zealously on hospital boards
and had exhausted herself in the service of the city mission. Then a new
call had quivered in her life, and she had let these things go. With the
passion of her nature she had pledged herself to motherhood, and that,
too, had foiled her--for the child had died. Looking back upon the years
she saw that those months of tranquil waiting were the happiest of her
life--those monotonous months when each day was as the day before it,
when her hands were busy for the love that would come to her, and her
heart warmed itself before the future. The child was hers for a single
week, and afterwards she had put her grief