e than maps or books,
being in themselves charts to the movements of her spirit. They
were regular; they were frank; they assured him how increasingly
she needed his friendship. When she returned, she declared she
would settle down to be near him for the rest of life. Few names
were mentioned in these letters: never Rowan's; never Mrs.
Osborn's--that lifelong friendship having been broken; and in truth
since last March young Mrs. Osborn's eyes had been sealed to the
reading of all letters. But beneath everything else, he could
always trace the presence of one unspoken certainty--that she was
passing through the deeps without herself knowing what height or
what heath her feet would reach at last, there to abide.

As he had walked homeward this afternoon through the dust,
something else had drawn his attention: he was passing the Conyers
homestead, and already lights were beginning to twinkle in the many
windows; there was to be a ball that night, and he thought of the
unconquerable woman ruling within, apparently gaining still in
vitality and youth. "Unjailed malefactors often attain great
ages," he said to himself, as he turned away and thought of the
lives she had helped to blight and shorten.

As the night advanced, he fell under the influence of his book, was
drawn out of his poor house, away from his obscure town, his
unknown college, quitted his country and his age, passing backward
until there fell around him the glorious dawn of the race before
the sunrise of written history: the immortal still trod the earth;
the human soldier could look away from his earthly battle-field and
see, standing on a mountain crest, the figure and the authority of
his Divine Commander. Once more it was the flower-dyed plain,
blood-dyed as well; the ships drawn up by the gray, the wrinkled
sea; over on the other side, well-built Troy; and the crisis of the
long struggle was coming. Hector, of the glancing plume, had come
back to the city for the last time, mindful of his end.

He read once more through the old scene that is never old, and then
put his book aside and sat thoughtful. "_I know not if the gods
will not overthrow me. . . . I have very sore shame if, like a
coward, I shrink away from battle; moreover mine own soul
forbiddeth me. . . . Destiny . . . no man hast escaped, be he
coward or be he valiant, when once he hath been born_."

His eyes had never rested on any spot in human history, however
separated in