of a
human eye, a smile from human lips. Even gross, material things like
food and drink lose half their flavor when taken in solitude. Pepeeta
needed friends and found them.

We never know how small a part of ourselves that fraction may be which
we have taken for the whole! We come to know ourselves by struggle and
endeavor, more than by thought and meditation. We have only to do our
work each day in hope and trust. We can only find rest in effort. It is
not in repose, but in activity--not in joy, but in sorrow, that the soul
comes to its second birth. Pepeeta needed labor and suffering, and they
were sent her.

She accepted all that followed her supreme decision without a question
and without a murmur for many months, and then--a reaction came! The
draughts upon her physical and emotional nature had been too great.

CHAPTER XXIII.

WHERE I MIGHT FIND HIM

"Attempt the end, and never stand to doubt,
Nothing's so hard but search will find it out."

--Herrick.

During several months of loneliness and sorrow a great change had been
taking place in the mind of the patient sufferer, of which she was only
vaguely conscious.

Purposes are often formed in the depths of our souls, of which we know
nothing until they suddenly emerge into full view. Such a purpose had
been slowly evolving in the heart of Pepeeta.

The strain which she had been undergoing began at last to exhaust her
physically.

Her vital force became depleted, her step grew feeble, the light died
out of her eyes, she drooped and crept feebly about her room. The
determination which she had so resolutely maintained to live apart from
her guilty lover slowly ebbed away. She was, after all, a woman, not a
disembodied spirit, and her woman's heart yearned unquenchably for the
touch of her lover's hand, for the kisses of his lips, for the comfort
of his presence.

This longing increased with every passing hour. Fatigue, weariness,
loneliness, steadily undermined her still struggling resistance to those
hungerings which never left her, till at last, when the failing
resources of her nature were at their lowest point, all her remaining
strength was concentrated into a single passionate desire to look once
more upon the face which glowed forever before her inner eye, or at
least to discover what had befallen the wanderer in his sin and
wretchedness.

Slowly the diffused longing crystallized into a fixed purpose, to resist
which wa