acrificing love," she replied--"It
could not be put to better use! It was a fancy of mine;--I love it and
its gardens--and I should have tried to live there had I not found out
the secret of a large and longer life!" She paused--then
added--"To-morrow morning you will come?"

He bent his head.

"To-morrow!"

With a salute of mingled reverence and affection she left him. He
watched her go,--and hearing the bell begin to chime in the chapel for
vespers, he lifted his eyes for a moment in silent prayer. A light
flashed downward, playing on his hands like a golden ripple,--and he
stood quietly expectant and listening. A Voice floated along the
Ray--"You are doing well and rightly!" it said--"You will release her
now from the strain of seeming to be what she is not. She is of the New
Race, and her spirit is advanced too far to endure the grossness and
materialism of the Old generation. She deserves all she has studied and
worked for,--lasting life, lasting beauty, lasting love! Nothing must
hinder her now!"

"Nothing shall!" he answered.

The Ray lessened in brilliancy and gradually diminished till it
entirely vanished,--and Don Aloysius, with the rapt expression of a
saint and visionary, entered the chapel where his brethren were already
assembled, and chanted with them--

"Magna opera Domini; exquisita in omnes voluntates ejus!"

The next morning, all radiant with sunshine, saw the strangest of
nuptial ceremonies,--one that surely had seldom, if ever, been
witnessed before in all the strange happenings of human chance. Manella
Soriso, pale as a white arum lily, her rich dark hair adorned with a
single spray of orange-blossom gathered from the garden, stood
trembling beside the bed where lay stretched out the immobile form of
the once active, world-defiant Roger Seaton. His eyes, wide open and
staring into vacancy, were, like dull pebbles, fixed in his head,--his
face was set and rigid as a mask of clay--only his regular breathing
gave evidence of life. Manella's pitiful gazing on this ruin of the man
to whom she had devoted her heart and soul, her tender sorrow, her
yearning beauty, might have almost moved a stone image to a thrill of
response,--but not a flicker of expression appeared on the frozen
features of that terrible fallen pillar of human self-sufficiency.
Standing beside the bed with Manella was Marco Ardini, intensely
watchful and eager to note even a quiver of the flesh or the tremor of
a muscle,