dangerous magnetism of the man who had irretrievably marred her fair,
ambitious youth.

To-day, twenty-one, full statured in womanhood, prematurely scorched
and scarred in spirit by fierce ordeals, she saw the pale ghost of her
girlhood flitting away amid the ruins of the past; and knew that
instead of making the voyage of life under silken sails gilded with the
light, and fanned by the breath of love and happiness, she had been
swept under black skies before a howling hurricane, into an unexpected
port,--where, lashed to the deck with "torn strips of hope", she had
finally moored a strained, dismasted barque in the "Anchorage", whence
with swelling canvas and flying pennons no ships ever went forth.

A rush of grateful tears filled her tired eyes, and soothed by the
consciousness of an inviolable security, her trembling lips moved in a
prayer of thankfulness to God, upon whom she had stayed her tortured
soul, grappling it to the blessed promise: "Lo, I am with you always. I
will never leave you nor forsake you."

CHAPTER XXX.

"Why deny it, Leo? Let us at least be frankly realistic, and 'call a
spade a spade' when we set ourselves to dig ditches, draining the
stagnant pools of life. Each human being has a special goal toward
which he or she strains, with nineteen chances out of twenty against
reaching it in time; and if it be won, is it worth the race? With some
of us it is love, ambition, mundane prosperity; with others,
intellectual supremacy, moral perfection, exalted spirituality,
sublimated altruism; but after all, in the final analysis, it is only
hedonism! Each struggles with teeth and claws for that which gives the
largest promise of pleasure to body, mind, or soul, as the individual
happens to incline. To Sybarites the race is too short to be fatiguing,
and the goal is only an ambuscade for satiety and ennui; to ascetics,
the race course stretches to the borders of futurity, but even for them
one form of pleasure, spiritual pleasure, lights up eternity. The thing
we want, we want; not because of its orthodoxy, or its excellency or
beauty PER SE; we want it because it gratifies some idiosyncratic
craving of our threefold natures. The good things of this world are
very adroitly and ingeniously labelled, but we rummage in the
bonbonniere for a certain marron glace, and if it be not there, all the
caramels in Venice, all the 'gluko' in Greece, all the rahatlicum in
Turkey will not appease us."

Wit