gotten transport. Nor fire, nor flood, nor fraud can prevail
against thee! Thy treasures moth and rust doth not corrupt nor thieves
break through and steal!

As a burning building lends its heat to all beside it, so was my own
soul kindled, half with rapture and half with anger, by the story of
Margaret's passion. Father's and daughter's hearts were never pressed
closer to each other than were mine and my only child's.

It was the succeeding Sunday night that Margaret, in her father's arms,
breathed out the tender tale; I was enjoying my evening smoke (a
post-sermonic anodyne), but long before Margaret had finished, my cigar
was in ashes and my heart in flame.

"Father," she began, her face hidden on my shoulder, "I am either very
happy or very wretched, and I cannot decide which till I know which you
will be."

"The old problem, daughter, is it not?" I answered. "Still longing to
enter a hospital? And you want to wheedle your old father into giving
you up?" for Margaret, like every other modern girl, had been craving
entrance to that noble calling. The high-born and the love-lorn, those
weary of life, or of love, or both, find a refuge there.

"No, father, I was not thinking of that at all. I don't want to be a
nurse any more."

"What is it then? You have never had any secrets from your father and
you will not have any now, will you, dear one?"

"Oh, father, I will tell you all I can--but I cannot tell you all."

I started in my chair, for the child note was absent from her words, and
the passion of womanhood was in its stead. Awesome to a father's heart
is that moment wherein a daughter's voice unconsciously asserts the
suffrage of her soul.

"Go on, my daughter--tell me what you may," I said, for I knew now that
the realm was one wherein parental authority was of no avail.

Only silence followed; her lips spoke no word, but the heaving bosom had
a rhetoric all its own and told me that a new life, begotten not of
mine, was throbbing there. An alien life it seemed to me, a soul's
expansion beyond the province of my own, an infinitude which denied the
sway of even a father's love. At length she spoke:

"Oh, father, I will tell you all--that is, all I can. But I am so
lonely. You cannot follow me, father. I have gone away in--with
another--in where you cannot go."

"What mean you, Margaret? In where? Where can I not come?" I asked,
perplexed.

"Father, let me tell you. I am speaking in a figure, I know--b