niverse, as the ship-wrecked mariner on
a narrow strip of rock in a boundless sea. Life may touch, but eternity
enfolds us; we are single before God and as such must stand or fall.

Upon their return to the house, Mr. Sylvester withdrew with a few
intimate friends to his room, and Paula, lonely beyond expression, went
to her own empty apartment to finish packing her trunks and answer such
notes as had arrived during her absence. For attention from outsiders
was only too obtrusive. Many whom she had never met save in the most
formal intercourse, flooded her now with expressions of condolence,
which if they had not been all upon one pattern and that the most
conventional, might have afforded her some relief. Two or three of the
notes were precious to her and these she stowed safely away, one
contained a deliberate offer of marriage from a wealthy old
stock-broker; this she as deliberately burned after she had written a
proper refusal. "He thinks I have no home," she murmured.

And had she? As she paced through the silent halls and elaborately
furnished rooms on her way to her solitary dinner, she asked herself if
any place would ever seem like home after this. Not that she was
infatuated by its elegance. The lofty walls might dwindle, the gorgeous
furniture grow dim, the works of beauty disappear, the whole towering
structure contract to the dimensions of a simple cottage or what was
worse, a seedy down-town house, if only the something would remain, the
something that made return to Grotewell seem like the bending back of a
towering stalk to the ground from which it had taken its root. "If?" she
cried--and stopped there, her heart swelling she knew not why. Then
again, "I thought I had found a father!" Then after a longer pause, a
wild uncontrollable; "Bless! bless! bless!" which seemed to re-echo in
the room long after her lingering step had left it.

* * * * *

"Will he let me go without a word?"

It was early morning and the time had come for Paula's departure. She
was standing on the threshold of her room, her hands clasped, her eyes
roving up and down the empty halls. "Will he let me go without a word?"

"O Miss Paula, what do you think?" cried Sarah, creeping slowly towards
her from the spectral recesses of a dim corner. "Jane says Mr. Sylvester
was up all last night too. She heard him go down stairs about midnight
and he went through all the rooms like a gliding spectre and into