laces--hallowed as no other spot in this world, could ever
be--passed out of sight, and in another week her six months' happy life
at St. Andrews had vanished, "like a dream when one awaketh."

Had she awaked? Or was her daily, outside life to be henceforth the
dream, and this the reality?

Chapter 3.

What is a "wrecked" life? One which the waves of inexorable fate have
beaten to pieces, or one that, like an unseaworthy ship, is ready to go
down in any waters? What most destroy us? the things we might well blame
ourselves for, only we seldom do, our follies, blunders, errors, not
counting actual sins? or the things for which we can blame nobody but
Providence--if we dared--such as our losses and griefs, our sicknesses of
body and mind, all those afflictions which we call "the visitation of
God?" Ay, and so they are, but not sent in wrath, or for ultimate evil.
No amount of sorrow need make any human life harmful to man or unholy
before God, as a discontented, unhappy life must needs be unholy in the
sight of Him who in the mysterious economy of the universe seems to have
one absolute law--He wastes nothing. He modifies, transmutes,
substitutes, re-applies material to new uses; but apparently by Him
nothing is ever really lost, nothing thrown away.

Therefore, I incline to believe, when I hear people talking of a
"wrecked" existence, that whosoever is to blame, it is not Providence.

Nobody could have applied the term to Fortune Williams, looking at
her as she sat in the drawing-room window of a house at Brighton, just
where the gray of the Esplanade meets the green of the Downs--a ladies'
boarding-school, where she had in her charge two pupils, left behind
for the holidays, while the mistress took a few weeks' repose. She sat
watching the sea, which was very beautiful, as even the Brighton sea can
be sometimes. Her eyes were soft and calm; her hands were folded on her
black silk dress, her pretty little tender-looking hands, unringed, for
she was still Miss Williams, still a governess.

But even at thirty-five--she had now reached that age, nay, passed
it--she was not what you would call "old-maidish." Perhaps because the
motherly instinct, naturally very strong in her, had developed more and
more. She was one of those governesses--the only sort who ought ever to
attempt to be governesses--who really love children, ay, despite their
naughtinesses and mischievousnesses and worrying ways; who feel tha