uniqueness is as fresh whenever it is spread before us as if we
had never seen it before."

It was but a part of what he meant. He was thinking how sorrow, the wide
sense of personal loss, was in some way like the pervasiveness, the
voiceless speech, of this shadowed radiance around them.

He drew a little nearer the relaxed and slender figure beside his own.
"It is of _her_ you are thinking, Lindsay," he said, gently, and
mentioning for the first time the young man's loss. "All that you see
seems saturated with her memory. I think it will always be so--scenes of
exceptional beauty, moments of high emotion, will always bring her
back."

The boy's response came with difficulty: "Perhaps so. I do not know. I
think the thought of her is always with me."

"If so, it should be for strength, for comfort," his friend pleaded.
"She herself brought only gladness wherever she came."

There was something unusual in his voice, something that for a moment
raised a vague questioning in Lindsay's mind; but absorbed as he was in
his own sadness, it eluded his feeble inquiry. To what Wayland had said
he could make no reply.

"Perhaps it is the apparent waste of a life so beautiful that seems to
you so intolerable--" He felt the strong man's impulse to arrest an
irrational grief, and groped for the assurance he desired. "Yet,
Lindsay, we know things are not wasted; not in the natural world, not in
the world of the spirit." But on the last words his voice lapsed
miserably, and he half rose to go.

Lindsay caught his arm and drew him back. "Don't go yet," he said,
brokenly. "I know you think it would help me if I would talk
about--Stella; if I should tell it all out to you. I thank you for being
willing to listen. Perhaps it will help me."

He paused, seeking for some words in which to express the sense of
poverty which scourged him. Of all who had loved his sister, he himself
was left poorest! Others had taken freely of her friendship, had
delighted themselves in her face, her words, her smile, had all these
things for memories. He had been separated from her, in part by the hard
conditions of their youth, and at the last, when they had been together,
by his own will. Oh, what had been her inner life during these last two
years, when it had gone on beside his own, while he was too busy to
attend?

But the self-reproach was too bitter for utterance to even the kindest
of friends. "I thought I could tell you," he said at last, "b