ood to her, beyond all dreams and all deserving. For her had been
reserved all the prizes, all the guerdons; for her who had done nothing
to merit them.

Her husband she knew was no less happy. In those first three years
after their marriage, life was one unending pageant; and their
happiness became for them some marvellous, bewildering thing, dazzling,
resplendent, a strange, glittering, jewelled Wonder-worker that
suddenly had been put into their hands.

As one of the first results of this awakening, Laura reproached herself
with having done but little for Page. She told herself that she had not
been a good sister, that often she had been unjust, quick tempered, and
had made the little girl to suffer because of her caprices. She had not
sympathised sufficiently with her small troubles--so she made herself
believe--and had found too many occasions to ridicule Page's
intenseness and queer little solemnities. True she had given her a good
home, good clothes, and a good education, but she should have given
more--more than mere duty-gifts. She should have been more of a
companion to the little girl, more of a help; in fine, more of a
mother. Laura felt all at once the responsibilities of the elder sister
in a family bereft of parents. Page was growing fast, and growing
astonishingly beautiful; in a little while she would be a young woman,
and over the near horizon, very soon now, must inevitably loom the
grave question of her marriage.

But it was only this realisation of certain responsibilities that
during the first years of her married life at any time drew away
Laura's consideration of her husband. She began to get acquainted with
the real man-within-the-man that she knew now revealed himself only
after marriage. Jadwin her husband was so different from, so infinitely
better than, Jadwin her lover, that Laura sometimes found herself
looking back with a kind of retrospective apprehension on the old days
and the time when she was simply Miss Dearborn. How little she had
known him after all! And how, in the face of this ignorance, this
innocence, this absence of any insight into his real character, had she
dared to take the irretrievable step that bound her to him for life?
The Curtis Jadwin of those early days was so much another man. He might
have been a rascal; she could not have known it. As it was, her husband
had promptly come to be, for her, the best, the finest man she had ever
known. But it might easily have b