ntirely satisfied.
And nothing had ever shattered this ideal. She clung to it, as we cling
to the memory of our dead children, who are children forever.

With a passionate fidelity she remembered all Robert Roy's goodness, his
rare and noble qualities, resolutely shutting her eyes to what she might
have judged severely, had it happened to another person--his total,
unexplained, and inexplicable desertion of herself. It was utterly
irreconcilable with all she had ever known of him; and being powerless to
unravel it, she left it, just as we have to leave many a mystery in
heaven and earth, with the humble cry, "I can not understand--I love."

She loved him, that was all; and sometimes even yet, across that desert
of despair, stretching before and behind her, came a wild hope, almost a
conviction, that she would meet him again, somewhere, somehow. This day,
even, when, after an hour's delicious idleness, she roused herself to
take her little girls down to the beach, and sat on the shingle while
they played, the sound and sights of the sea brought old times so vividly
back that she could almost have fancied coming behind her the familiar
step, the pleasant voice, as when Mr. Roy and his boys used to overtake
her on the St. Andrews shore--Robert Roy, a young man, with his life all
before him, as was hers. Now she was middle-aged, and he--he must be
over forty by this time. How strange!

Stranger still that there had never occurred to her one possibility--that
he "was not," that God had taken him. But this her heart absolutely
refused to accept. So long as he was in it, the world would never be
quite empty to her. Afterward--But, as I said, there are some things
which can not be faced and this was one of them.

All else she had faced long ago. She did not grieve now. As she walked
with her children, listening to their endless talk with that patient
sympathy which made all children love her, and which she often found was
a better help to their education than dozens of lessons, there was on her
face that peaceful expression which is the greatest preservative of
youth, the greatest antidote to change. And so it was no wonder that a
tall lad, passing and re-passing on the Esplanade with another youth,
looked at her more than once with great curiosity, and advanced with
hesitating politeness.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am, if I mistake; but you are so like a lady I
once knew, and am now looking for. Are you Miss Willi