f Leonidas at
Thermopylae and even of Roosevelt at San Juan. It quite stirred you.

It stirred Sylvia. The paper fell from her. But the past returned. At
once it seemed to her that it might be mended and the old days
renewed. The hero of whom the paper told she knew now that she had
wholly loved, and she knew, too, that wholly she still loved him.

Time had done its work ridiculously, inopportunely, yet effectively at
last. But the gates of life are double. On one stands written "Too
Soon." On the other "Too Late." It is unfortunate to get wedged
between them. Of that fact Sylvia became rapidly aware. On the morrow
she began a letter to Annandale. Before it was finished there came one
from Fanny, announcing that she was to be Annandale's wife.

In certain crises of the emotions there is a certain sense of
unreality. Even as Sylvia read what Fanny said she could not grasp it.
When presently she did, she could not believe it. But there it was.
Then immediately she experienced the agony which comes when we battle
in dream with the intangible and the dread, when we know it is dream
and yet feel it is death.

"It is all my fault," she cried. She found but that. At the moment she
was in that condition which precedes the great commotion of tears,
when the strangulation of agony is subsiding and contracted nerves
distend. But the tears did not come. The pain was infinite. There was
a weight which she felt not without but within, a weight so heavy that
she thought she could not bear it. It racked her. Only her mind was
active. "It is my fault," she repeated. Then she added, "And my
cross."

From a crisis such as this, in a nature such as hers, the soul issues
as from an orgy. It has supped on sorrow. It is fed. It ceases to look
back. It looks forward, marveling indeed that it should look at all,
yet looking. Life's burdens are more bearable than the despairful
think. Until the eyes are closed and the heart no longer beats, in
some way, somehow, they can be carried.

Sylvia took up her cross. It was leaden. But in the effort she was
aided. Pride helped her. The assistance of pride may be poor, yet is
it not better than none? To Sylvia it was useful. It enabled her to
answer Fanny's letter.

"You have my congratulations, Fanny dear," she wrote, "all of them, my
best and warmest, and so has Arthur too. Please say so to him and tell
him that, in marrying by dearest friend, he and I must be dear friends
also."

Then the t