stating
fever and the burning illusions were gone, and only the quiet weeks of
getting well lay before her.

She sat in the church a long time, staring dreamily before her. Odd
thoughts and memories drifted through her mind now: she was again a
little girl of eight, slipping into the delicatessen store in O'Farrell
Street for pickles and pork sausage; now she was a bride, with Jim in
New York, moving through the dappled spring sunlight of Fifth Avenue, on
the top of a rocking omnibus. She thought of the settlement house:
winter rain streaming down its windows, and she and Miss Toland dining
on chops and apple pie, each deep in a book as she ate; and she
remembered Mark, poor Mark, who had crossed her life only to bring
himself bitter unhappiness, and to leave her the sorrow of an
ineffaceable stain!

Only thirty, yet what a long, long road already lay behind her, how much
sorrow, how much joy! What mistakes and cross purposes had been tangled
into her life and Jim's, Mark's and Richie's, Barbara's and Sally's and
Ted's--into all their lives!

"Perhaps that _is_ life," mused Julia, kneeling down to say one more
little prayer before she went away. "Perhaps my ideal of a clean-swept,
austere little cottage, and a few books, and a few friends, and sunrises
and sunsets--isn't life! It's all a tangle and a struggle, ingratitude
and poverty and dispute all mixed in with love and joy and growth, and
every one of us has to take his share! I have one sort of trouble to
bear, and Mother another, and Jim, I suppose, a third; we can't choose
them for ourselves any more than we could choose the colour of our eyes!
But loving each other--loving each other, as I love Anna, makes
everything easy; it's the cure for it all--it makes everything easier to
bear!" And in a whisper, with a new appreciation of their meaning, she
repeated the familiar words, "Love fulfils the law!"

The next evening, just as the autumn twilight was giving way to dusk,
Julia opened the lower green gate of the Tolands' garden in Sausalito,
and went quietly up the steep path. Roses made dim spots of colour here
and there; under the trees it was almost dark, though a soft light still
lingered on the surface of the bay just below. From the drawing-room
windows pale lamplight fell in clear bars across the gravel, but the
hall was unlighted, the door wide open.

Julia stepped softly inside, her heart beating fast. She had got no
farther than this minute, in her h