was a world worth,
that had never known Mr. Dunbar?

Over burning ploughshares she had walked to meet one destined to stir
to its depths the slumbering sea of her tenderest love; and to forego
the pain, would she relinquish the recompense?

During the months that elapsed after Leo's visit to the "Anchorage",
Beryl had surrendered her heart to the great happiness of dwelling,
unrebuked by conscience, upon the precious assurance that the love of
the man whom she had so persistently defied and shunned, was
irrevocably hers. The sharpest pain that can horrow womanhood, springs
from the contemplation of the superior right of another to the object
of her affection; and though honor coerces submission to the just
claims of a rival, renunciation of the beloved entails pangs that no
anaesthetic has power to quiet.

After the long struggle to aid Miss Gordon's accepted lover in keeping
his vows of loyalty, the discovery of his freedom, and the belief that
Bishop Douglass had supplanted him in the affection of her generous
benefactress, had brought to Beryl an exquisite release; sweet as the
spicy breath of the tropics wafted suddenly to some stranded, frozen
Arctic voyager. Heroic and patient, keeping her numb face steadfastly
turned to the pole star of duty, where the compass of conscience
pointed--was the floe ice on which she had been wrecked, drifting
slowly, imperceptibly, yet surely down to the purple warmth of the Gulf
Stream, dotted with swelling sails of rescue? Like oceanic streams
meeting, running side by side, freighted with cold for the equatorial
caldrons, with heat for the poles, are not the divinely appointed
currents of mercy and of affliction, God's agents of compensation, to
equalize the destinies of humanity?

We rail at Fate as triple monsters; but sometimes it happens, that the
veil of inscrutability floats aside, for an instant, and we catch a
glimpse of the radiant smile of an infinite love.

Hope had set in Beryl's sky, but a tender afterglow held off the coming
night, when she thought of the face that had bent so yearningly above
her, of the passionate voice and the thrilling touch that were now her
most precious memories. The pearl which Miss Gordon had cast away as
worthless, the discarded convict might surely, without sin, claim as
her own for ever. To-day an intense longing to see him once more, to
hear from his lips praise of her "Antigone", disturbed the tranquillity
that was spreading its r