t's it," she murmured, "that's just what I told her--'an enduring
work.' And what was it she said to me? Oh! I am going again--I am partly
there now! Don't you see it? Is that the Lower Orchard? Are those the
gray gables of the Farm?"

Her voice thrilled strangely and her eyes were staring, vague: it was as
if she hung between sleep and waking. I looked where she pointed, but it
was only an enormous ledge of gray rock, curiously slanted, and I said
so, softly.

"It is only a rock, broken at the gable angle, dear."

Then she faced me, herself perfectly.

"Oh, you think so?" she answered me with a smile.

The words were strange enough in themselves, but without them her
manner would have taught me that she was going to speak of stranger
things yet, and I was not disappointed.

"It was just such a day as this," she began, "and the smell of the
apples always takes me back, though never as strongly as now. We were in
the orchard ... ah, my dear, you will tell it wonderfully well when I
have told you, and many will learn as I have learned, but you can never
make them see the Dame as I saw her!"

Then she told me the tale of that adventure.

* * * * *

"What you need," said her friend, the great physician, "is change.
Change and rest. Where can you go and be sure of absolute quiet?"

"I cannot tell you," she said wearily, "there is always something that I
must do----"

"----or think that you must do," he interrupted her.

"It is all the same," she said.

He sighed, and looked at her quietly for a long time.

"It has taken me fifty years to learn that, my dear child," said he,
"and you toss it at me in a moment's talk. Since you have learned it,
why are you not well and happy?"

"Since I have learned it, I can never be," she told him, and again he
looked long at her.

"What is that that you are trying to do?" he asked her at last. "Think
carefully and tell me in one sentence."

"I have already thought carefully," she said, "and I can tell you. I am
trying to live my husband's life, which I ought not to give up, my
children's life, which I must not give up, and my own life, which I
cannot give up."

He looked even longer than before at her and the late sun slipped down
the polished fittings of his desk and down the gilded covers of the
book-filled shelves behind him. Longer than before he looked and the
lines deepened in his face and his eyes seemed to grow deeper in his
hea