de the window. It seemed
to her that if she could not have a little while to think by herself
that she should go mad. The utterly inconceivable to her had
happened, and the utterly inconceivable fairly dazzles the brain when
it comes to pass. Maria felt as if she were outside all hitherto
known tracks of life, almost as if she were in the fourth dimension.
The possibility that her own sister might fall in love with the man
whom she had married had never entered her mind before. She had
checked Evelyn's wonder concerning him, but she had thought no more
of it than of the usual foolish exuberance of a young girl. Now she
believed that her sister really loved Wollaston. She recalled the
fears which she had had with regard to her strenuous nature. She did
not believe it to be a passing fancy of an ordinary young girl. She
recalled word for word what Evelyn had said, and she believed. Maria
sat awhile gazing out of the window at the starlit sky in a sort of
blank of realization, of adjustment. She could not at first formulate
any plan of action. She could only, as it were, state the problem.
She gazed up at the northern constellations, at the mysterious polar
star, and it seemed to steady her mind and give it power to deal with
her petty problem of life by its far-away and everlasting guiding
light. The window was partly open, and the same pungent odor of death
and life in one which had endured all day came in her nostrils. She
seemed to sense heaven and earth and herself as an atom, but an atom
racked with infinite pain between the two.

"There is the great polar star," she said to herself, "there are all
the suns and stars, here is the earth, and here am I, Maria Edgham,
who am on the earth, but must some day give up my mortal life and
become a part of it, and part of the material universe and perhaps
also of the spiritual. I am as nothing, and yet this pain in my
heart, this love in my heart, makes me shine with my own fire as much
as the star. I could not be unless the earth existed, but it is of
such as myself that the earth is made up, and without such as myself
it could not shine in its place in the heavens."

Maria began to attach a certain importance to her individual
existence even while she realized the pettiness of it, comparatively
speaking. She was an infinitesimal part, but the whole could not be
without that part. Suddenly the religious instruction which she had
drank in with her mother's milk took possessi