sm--that modern realization of the labor of Sisyphus--had
carried him round without giving him even time to remember that time was
flying. Day had slipped into week and week into month, without his
moving an inch from his groove in search of the girl whose unhappiness
was yet always at the back of his thoughts. Now he was shaken with
astonished self-reproach at his having allowed her to drift perhaps
irretrievably beyond his ken.

"She is quite alone in the world, poor thing!" he said after a pause.
"She must be earning her own living, somehow. By journalism, perhaps.
But she prefers to live her own life. I am afraid it will be a hard
one." His voice trembled again. The minister's breast, too, was laboring
with emotion that checked his speech, but after a moment utterance came
to him--a strange choked utterance, almost blasphemous from those
clerical lips.

"By God!" he gasped. "That little girl!"

He turned his back upon his friend and covered his face with his hands,
and Raphael saw his shoulders quivering. Then his own vision grew dim.
Conjecture, resentment, wonder, self-reproach, were lost in a new and
absorbing sense of the pathos of the poor girl's position.

Presently the minister turned round, showing a face that made no
pretence of calm.

"That was bravely done," he said brokenly. "To cut herself adrift! She
will not sink; strength will be given her even as she gives others
strength. If I could only see her and tell her! But she never liked me;
she always distrusted me. I was a hollow windbag in her eyes--a thing of
shams and cant--she shuddered to look at me. Was it not so? You are a
friend of hers, you know what she felt."

"I don't think it was you she disliked," said Raphael in wondering pity.
"Only your office."

"Then, by God, she was right!" cried the Russian hoarsely. "It was
this--this that made me the target of her scorn." He tore off his white
tie madly as he spoke, threw it on the ground, and trampled upon it.
"She and I were kindred in suffering; I read it in her eyes, averted as
they were at the sight of this accursed thing! You stare at me--you
think I have gone mad. Leon, you are not as other men. Can you not guess
that this damnable white tie has been choking the life and manhood out
of me? But it is over now. Take your pen, Leon, as you are my friend,
and write what I shall dictate."

Silenced by the stress of a great soul, half dazed by the strange,
unexpected revelation, Raphael s