utomaton moved by some irresistible power; not
only was all doubt gone from her mind, but all responsibility seemed
also shed.

The street was almost deserted, but Julia saw Jim instantly, a full
block away, and walking resolutely, if slowly. She drifted silently
after him, not knowing why she followed, nor what she would say when
they met, but conscious that she must follow and that they would meet.

Jim walked to Eighteenth Street, turned north, and Julia, reaching the
corner, was in time to see him entering the shabby old church where they
had been married eight years ago. And instantly a blinding vertigo, a
suffocating rush of blood to her heart, made her feel weak and cold with
the sudden revelation that the hour of change had come.

She climbed the dreary, well-remembered stairs slowly, and slipped into
one of the last pews, in the shadow of a gallery pillar.

Jim was kneeling, far up toward the altar, his head in his hands. In all
the big church, which was bleak and bare in the cold afternoon light,
there was no one else. The red altar light flickered in its hanging
glass cup; a dozen lighted candles, in a great frame that held sockets
for five times as many, guttered and flared at the rail.

Minutes slipped by, and still the man knelt there motionless, and still
the woman sat watching him, her eyes brilliant and tender, her heart
flooded with a poignant happiness that carried before it all the
bitterness of the years. Julia felt born again. Like a person long deaf,
upon whose unsealed ears the roar of life bursts suddenly again, she
shrank away from the rush of emotion that shook her. It was
overpowering--dizzying--exhausting.

When Jim presently passed her she shrank into the shadow of her pillar,
but his face was sadder and more grave than Julia had ever seen it, and
he did not raise his eyes. She listened until his echoing footsteps died
away on the stairs; then the smile on her face faded, and she sank on
her knees and burst into tears.

But they were not tears of sorrow; instead, they seemed to Julia
infinitely soothing and refreshing. They seemed to carry her along with
the restful sweep of a river. She cried, hardly knowing that she cried,
and with no effort to stop the steady current of tears.

And when she presently sat back and dried her eyes, a delicious ease and
relaxation permeated her whole body. Like a convalescent, weak and
trembling, she drew great breaths of air, rejoicing that the deva