r breast.

Yet she was helpless. What could she do? Even if he were free from
Alicia, even if he wished to recall her, how could he--maimed and
broken--take the steps that could alone bring her to his side? If their
engagement had subsisted, horror, catastrophe, the approach of death
itself, could have done nothing to part them. Now, how was a man in such
a plight to ask from a woman what yet the woman would pay a universe to
give? And in the face of the man's silence, how could the woman speak?

No!--she began to see her life as the Vicar saw it: pledged to large
causes, given to drudgeries--necessary, perhaps noble, for which the
happy are not meant. This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers
much longer. If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could
live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden,
surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the
world rang in her ears--wild voices!--speaking universal, terrible,
representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close,
close to her heart. No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in
her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not
stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she
best could. Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her
own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own
youth, grief for her parents. She must turn to the poor in that mood she
had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself--the
mood of one seeking an opiate, an anaesthetic. The scrubbing of hospital
floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest
obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of
them deaden thought--these were what she turned to as the only means by
which life could be lived.

Oliver!--No hope for him?--at thirty-six! His career broken--his
ambition defeated. Nothing before him but the decline of power and joy;
nights of barren endurance, separating days empty and tortured; all
natural pleasures deadened and destroyed; the dying down of all the
hopes and energies that make a man.

She threw herself down beside the open window, burying her face on her
knees. Would they never let her go to him?--never let her say to him:
"Oliver, take me!--you did love me once--what matters what came between
us? That was in another world. Take my life--crush out of it any drop of