face, the restless
melancholy eyes. 'Catherine, my darling, you are the strong one. They
will look to you. Support them.' And she could see in imagination her
own young face pressed against the pillows. 'Yes, father,
always--always!'--'Catherine, life is harder, the narrow way narrower
than ever. I die'--and memory caught still the piteous, long-drawn
breath by which the voice was broken--'in much--much perplexity about
many things. You have a clear soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others.
Bring them safe to the day of account.'--'Yes, father, with God's help.
Oh, with God's help!'

That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as though it were
spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she kept her pledge? She looks
back humbly on her life of incessant devotion, on the tie of long
dependence which has bound to her her weak and widowed mother, on her
relations to her sisters, the efforts she has made to train them in the
spirit of her father's life and beliefs.

Have those efforts reached their term? Can it be said in any sense that
her work is done, her promise kept?

Oh, no--no! she cries to herself with vehemence. Her mother depends on
her every day and hour for protection, comfort, enjoyment. The girls are
at the opening of life,--Agnes twenty, Rose eighteen, with all
experience to come. And Rose---- Ah! at the thought of Rose, Catherine's
heart sinks deeper and deeper--she feels a culprit before her father's
memory. What is it has gone so desperately wrong with her training of
the child? Surely she has given love enough, anxious thought enough, and
here is Rose only fighting to be free from the yoke of her father's
wishes, from the galling pressure of the family tradition!

No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, its most critical,
moment. How can she leave it? Impossible.

What claim can she put against these supreme claims--of her promise, her
mother's and sisters' need?

_His_ claim? Oh, no--no! She admits with soreness and humiliation
unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he loves her she has opened
the way thereto; she confesses in her scrupulous honesty that when the
inevitable withdrawal comes she will have given him cause to think of
her hardly, slightingly. She flinches painfully under the thought. But
it does not alter the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest
school of Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights
of passion. Half modern litera