afterward. No one spoke further of her
presence among them; no one thanked her for her services; all was
assumed and she blessed them for it.

The doctor passed the evening with his new patient, and when she
mounted the stairs for her last night she found her simple luggage in
the room next hers: there was no question of helping her to bed, and
she undressed thoughtfully alone. The house was very still.

Her window was a deep dormer, and as she leaned out of it, for a breath
of the stars, she saw Dr. Stanchon stretched in her chair on the
balcony, his face white and tired in the moonlight. In the chair near
her, so near that she could touch it, lay the frail creature in the
grey dress, black now at night.

"It is his old patient!" she thought contentedly, remembering with
vexation that she had absolutely forgotten to ask the house-mother
about her and why she had not appeared; and she began to speak, when
the other raised her hand warningly, and she saw that Dr. Stanchon
slept.

Why she began to whisper she did not know, but she remembered afterward
that their conversation, below breath as it was, was the longest they
had yet had, though she could recall only the veriest scraps of it.
For instance:

"But Mary and Martha?" she had urged, "surely there is a deep meaning
in that, too? It was Martha who was reproved...."

"One would imagine that every woman to-day judged herself a Mary--and
that is a dangerous judgment to form, one's self," the other whispered.

"But to deliberately assume these tasks--simple because they clear my
life and keep me balanced--when I have no need to do them, seems to me
an affectation, absurd!"

"How can a thing be absurd if it brings you ease?"

"But I don't need to do them, really, for myself."

"For some one else, then?"

It was then that another veil dropped from before her.

"Then is that why, do you think, people devote themselves to those low,
common things--great saints and those that give up their own lives?"

"I think so, yes."

"It is a real relief to them?"

"Why not? ..."

She fell asleep on the broad window-seat, her head on her arms, and
when she woke and groped for her bed in the dark, the balcony was empty.

There was no bustle of departure: a grave hand-shaking from the
daughters, a kiss on the mother's withered, rosy cheek.

"Come back again, do," said the old woman and the doctor commented upon
this as they sat in the train.

"That is a great c