d even half-terrified him.

"Tell me," she said, with a sort of anger, "tell me, you that are a
clergyman--Do you think God has made us only to torment us? You have got
a daughter, Eustace; pray God, night and morning, that she may have a
hard heart, and that she may never have one gleam of womanly tenderness
within her; for only so are women happy!"

He did not answer her wild words. Instinctively he felt that common-place
speeches of rebuke or of consolation would be trivial and out of place
before the great anguish of her heart. The man's soul was above the
narrow limits of his training; he felt, dimly, that here was something
with which it were best not to intermeddle, some trouble for which he
could offer no consolation.

She rose and stood before him, holding his hands and gazing earnestly at
his anxious face.

"It has come to this with me," she said, below her voice, "that there are
times when there is but one good thing in all the world that I know any
longer how to desire. God has so ordered my life that there is no road
open for me that does not lead to sin or to misery. Surely, if He were
merciful, He would take back the valueless gift."

"Vera! what do you mean?"

"I mean," she exclaimed, wearily, "that if I could die, I should be at
peace."

She had walked slowly on; her voice, that had trembled at first with a
passionate wildness, had sunk into the spiritless apathy of despair; her
head was bent, her hands clasped before her; her dress trailed with a
soft rustle across the grass, sweeping over a whole wilderness of white
daisies, that bent their heads beneath its folds as she walked. A gleam
of sunshine fell upon her hair, and a bird sang loud and shrill in the
lime trees overhead.

Often and often, in the after days, Eustace Daintree thought of her thus,
and remembered with a pang the sole sad gift that she had craved at
Heaven's hands. Often and often the scene came back to him; the sunny
garden, the scarlet geraniums flaring in the borders, the smooth green
lawn, speckled with shadows from the trees, the wide open windows of his
pleasant vicarage beyond, and the beautiful figure of the girl at his
side, with her bent head, and her low broken voice--the girl who, at
twenty-three, sighed to be rid of the life that had become too hard for
her; that precious gift of life which, too often, at three-score years
and ten, is but hardly resigned!

"If I could die, I should be at peace," she had said.