ungering for
spiritual peace, a thirsting for rare devotion which you seemed to be
offering with laden hands?'

"'Your longings must have been slight!' I scoffed, ungenerously.

"'Listen,' she cried, still standing rigid, though the thrilling tone of
her voice confessed her emotion. 'The verdict of acquittal was merely a
doom to perpetual remorse. "A life for a life," was cried to me from
even the day-break cheeping of the birds. I thought to make atonement by
fasting and prayer: I hoped for it in attending the stricken--walking
hand-in-hand with disease. On stormy nights I fancied I might save some
drowning soul from wreck; earn an innocent life at the cost of my own; I
was ready--craving of God the hour and the opportunity, but it never
came. I have knelt and starved, I have nursed the sick to health, I have
rescued a child from the depths, and yet I live!'

"I clutched her gown, kissed it, abjured her to leave her theories of
atonement with Heaven, and trust her future and its serenity to me. But
she put me aside.

"'Oh, Aubrey, be merciful--spare me all you can, for I am like a pilgrim
who faints in sight of the Great Road. I know now that it is not the
pulse of life, but the colour and the scent of it that make one's
sacrifice. I believe that every guilty soul must have his moment of high
opportunity--of expiation, and this is mine. You are brave, you are
great, you are generous. Shall you tempt me--and stay; or will you save
me--and go?'"

Poor Yeldham's voice broke to a hoarse whisper, and I laid a sympathetic
hand upon his knee.

"And you, Aubrey, you went?"

"I am here," he answered, with a groan that was more pitiful than tears.

For Love or Science?

"This morn a throstle piped to me,
''Tis time that mates were wooed and won--
The daffodils are on the lea.'"

There is always a store of benevolence and magnanimity in the heart that
beats at an altitude of nearly four feet from the ground. Wit, wisdom,
and energy may go pit-a-pat "at the double" on lower levels, but great
souledness and probity only come to their perfection in a steadier
region.

Beyond these last-quoted virtues Ralph Danby had few. He was rather
lethargic and decidedly clumsy. His six-feet-three of flesh and blood
was knotty with muscle, but, in the garments of the polite, the
muscularity showed like adipose tissue and spoilt him. In feature he was
pronounced perfect.

"Perfect as regenerate man can well be," r