s grasp; it was for him to do what he pleased with it. Some day,
doubtless, he would tell her what she had to do: meanwhile, she waited.

What else, indeed, can a woman do but wait? To sit still with folded
hands and bated breath, to possess her soul in patience as best she may,
to still the wild beatings of her all too eager spirit--that is what a
woman has to do, and does often enough. God help her, all too badly.

It is so easy when one is old, and the pulses are sluggish, and the hot
passions of youth are quelled, it is so easy then to learn that lesson
of waiting; but when we are young, and our best days slipping away, and
life's hopes all before us, and life's burdens well-nigh unbearable; then
it is that it is hard, that waiting in itself becomes terrible--more
terrible almost than the worst of our woes.

So wearily, feverishly, impatiently enough, Vera waited.

Winter died away into spring. The rough wind of March, worn out with its
own boisterous passions, sobbed itself to rest like a tired child, and
little green buds came cropping up sparsely and timidly out of the brown
bosom of the earth; and, presently, all the glory of the golden crocuses
unfolded itself in long golden lines in the vicarage garden; and there
were twittering of birds and flutterings of soft breezes among the
tree-tops, and a voice seemed to go forth over the face of the earth.
The winter is over, and summer is nigh at hand.

And then it came to her at last. An envelope by the side of her plate
at breakfast; a few scrawled words in a handwriting she had never seen
before, and yet identified with an unfailing instinct, ere even she broke
the seal. One minute of wild hope, to be followed by a sick, chill
numbness, and the story of her love and its longings shrank away into
the despair of impossibility.

How small a thing to make so great a misery! What a few words to make a
wilderness of a human life!

_"Her grandfather is dead, and she has claimed me. Good-bye; forget me
and forgive me."_

That was all; nothing more. No passionate regrets, no unavailing
self-pity; nothing to tell her what it cost him to resign her; no word to
comfort her for the hopelessness of his desertion; nothing but those two
lines.

There was a chattering going on at the table around her. Tommy was
clamouring for bread and butter; the vicar was reading out the telegrams
from the seat of war; Marion was complaining that the butter was not
good; the maid-servan