Sylvester to Paula as they came from the
dining-room. "Have the adventures of the day made such an impression
upon you that you will not be able to enjoy the evening's festivities?"

She lifted her face and the quick smile came.

"I do not like to see your brow so clouded," continued he, smoothing his
own to meet her searching eye. "Smiles should sit on the lips of youth,
or else why are they so rosy."

"Would you have me smile in face of my first glimpse of wickedness,"
asked she, but in a gentle tone that robbed her words of half their
reproach. "You must remember that I have had but little experience with
the world. I have lived all my life in a town of wholesome virtues, and
while here I have been kept from contact with anything low or base. I
have never known vice, and now all in a moment I feel as if I have been
bathed in it."

He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him. "Does your
whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula? What will you do in this
wicked world? What will you say to the sinner when you meet him--as you
must?"

"I don't know; it's a problem I have never been brought to consider. I
feel as if launched on a dismal sea for which I have neither chart nor
compass. Life was so joyous to me this morning--" a flush swept over her
cheek but he did not notice it--"I held, or seemed to hold, a cup of
white wine in my hand, but suddenly as I looked at it, it turned black
and--"

Ah, the outreach, the dismal breaking away of thought into the
unfathomable, that lies in the pause of an _and_!

"And do you refuse to drink a cup across which has fallen a shadow,"
murmured Mr. Sylvester, his eyes fixed on her face, "the inevitable
shadow of that great mass of human frailty and woe which has been
accumulating from the foundation of the world?"

"No, no, I cannot, and retain my humanity. If there is such evil in the
world, its pressure must drive it across the path of innocence."

"And you accept the cup?"

"I must; but oh, my vanished beliefs! This morning the wine of my life
was pure and white, now it is black and befouled. What will make it
clean again?"

With a sigh Mr. Sylvester dropped her hand and turned towards the
mantle-piece. It was April as I have said, and there was no fire in the
grate, but he posed his foot on the fender and looked sadly down at the
empty hearthstone.

"Paula," said he after a space of pregnant silence, "it had to come. The
veil of the temple must be rent in