t exists but it was once the vision of a dreamer. Our
dreams to-day become the realities of to-morrow."

"Do you believe Tom is not dead--that he will one day come back?"
asked her mother abruptly.

It was twilight and the fire flickered, lighting up the library. But
in the flash of it Mrs. Westmore saw Alice's cheek whiten in a
hopeless, helpless, stricken way.

Then she walked to the window and looked out on the darkness fast
closing in on the lawn, clustering denser around the evergreens and
creeping ghostlike toward the dim sky line which shone clear in the
open.

The very helplessness of her step, her silence, her numbed, yearning
look across the lawn told Mrs. Westmore of the death of all hope
there.

She followed her daughter and put her arms impulsively around her.

"I should not have hurt you so, Alice. I only wanted to show you how
worse than useless it is ... but to change the subject, I do wish to
speak to you of--our condition."

Alice was used to her mother's ways--her brilliancy--her pointed
manner of going at things--her quick change of thought--of mood, and
even of temperament. An outsider would have judged Mrs. Westmore to
be fickle with a strong vein of selfishness and even of egotism.
Alice only knew that she was her mother; who had suffered much; who
had been reduced by poverty to a condition straitened even to
hardships. To help her the daughter knew that she was willing to make
any sacrifice. Unselfish, devoted, clear as noonday in her own ideas
of right and wrong, Alice's one weakness was her blind devotion to
those she loved. A weakness beautiful and even magnificent, since it
might mean a sacrifice of her heart for another. The woman who gives
her time, her money, her life, even, to another gives but a small
part of her real self. But there is something truly heroic when she
throws in her heart also. For when a woman has given that she has
given all; and because she has thrown it in cold and dead--a lifeless
thing--matters not; in the poignancy of the giving it is gone from
her forever and she may not recall it even with the opportunity of
bringing it back to life.

She who gives her all, but keeps her heart, is as a priest reading
mechanically the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible. But she who
gives her heart never to take it back again gives as the Christ dying
on the Cross.

"Now, here is the legal paper about"--

Her voice failed and she did not finish the sentence.

Alice