ent. Will you fail me at the last? For
we shall never meet again, Michael!_"

Fay closed the note, directed it, pinned it into the lace of her inmost
vest--the wife of an Italian distrusts pockets and postal
arrangements--and then wept her heart out, her vain, selfish little
heart, which for the first time in her life was not wholly vain, nor
wholly selfish. Perhaps it was not her fault if she was cruel. It takes
many steadfast years, many prayers, many acts of humble service before
we may hope to reach the place where we are content to bear alone the
brunt of that pang, and to guard the one we love even from ourselves.

CHAPTER III

There will no man do for your sake, I think,
What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread.

--A. C. SWINBURNE.

A witty bishop was once heard to remark that one of the difficulties of
his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly
alike, and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which
archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged. It
would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the
episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where
we lay helpers should fear to tread. But it may be stated, without
laying ourselves open to a suspicion of wishing to undermine the Church,
that when the woman of forty in her turn acidly announces, as she not
infrequently does, that all young men seem to her exactly alike, she is
in a parlous condition.

Yet many women had said that Michael was exactly like every other young
man. And to all except the very few who knew him well he certainly did
appear to be--not an individual at all--but only an indistinguished unit
of a vast army.

His obvious good looks were like the good looks of others. He looked
well bred, but to look that is as common in a certain class as it is
rare in another. He had the spare, wiry figure, tall and lightly built,
square in the shoulders, and thin in the flank; he had the clear
weather-beaten complexion, the clean, nervous, capable hand, and the
self-effacing manner, which we associate with myriads of well-born,
machine-trained, perfectly groomed, expensively educated, uneducated
Englishmen. Our public schools turn them out by the thousand. The "lost
legion" is made up of them. The unburied bones of the pionee