me the sole nurse of
a beautiful old invalid mother, a kind of lay sister in the nunnery of
home.

She came of a beautiful family. In all the big family of seven there was
not one without some kind of good looks. Two of her sisters were
acknowledged beauties, and there were those who considered Margaret the
most beautiful of all. It was all the harder, such sympathizers said,
that her youth should thus fade over an invalid's couch, the bloom of
her complexion be rubbed out by arduous vigils, and the lines
prematurely etched in her skin by the strain of a self-denial proper, no
doubt, to homely girls and professional nurses, but peculiarly wanton
and wasteful in the case of a girl so beautiful as Margaret.

There are, alas! a considerable number of women predestined by their
lack of personal attractiveness for the humbler tasks of life.
Instinctively we associate them with household work, nursing, and the
general drudgery of existence. One never dreams of their having a life
of their own. They have no accomplishments, nor any of the feminine
charms. Women to whom an offer of marriage would seem as terrifying as a
comet, they belong to the neutrals of the human hive, and are,
practically speaking, only a little higher than the paid domestic.
Indeed, perhaps their one distinction is that they receive no wages.

Now for so attractive a girl as Margaret to be merged in so dreary,
undistinguished a class was manifestly preposterous. It was a stupid
misapplication of human material. A plainer face and a more homespun
fibre would have served the purpose equally well.

Margaret was by no means so much a saint of self-sacrifice as not to
have realized her situation with natural human pangs. Youth only comes
once--especially to a woman; and

No hand can gather up the withered fallen
petals of the Rose of youth.

Petal by petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and
falling. More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for
existence. Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of
life. She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her,
more than most, the sunshine falling in muffled beams through the
lattices of her mother's sick-room came with a maddening summons
to--live. She was so supremely fitted to play a triumphant part in the
world outside there, so gay of heart, so victoriously vital.

At first, therefore, the renunciation, accepted on the surface with so