will come to me?"

"No," she said quickly as if not daring to pause, "It will always be the
same; there never will be quiet times for us. I can't leave my father.
It isn't as if he had other children I am the only one, and must stay."

"Is this then to be the end of it all?" cried Brian. "My darling, you
can not be so cruel to me. It can not be the end there is no end to love
and we know that we love each other. Erica, give me some future to look
to some hope."

The terrible pain expressed in every line of his face wrung her heart.

"Oh, wait," she exclaimed. "Give me one moment to think."

She buried her face in her hands, shutting out the sunny Italian
landscape, the very beauty of which seemed to weaken her powers of
endurance. Truly she had been living lately in a golden dream, and the
waking was anguish. Oh, if she had but realized before the meaning of
it all, then she would have hidden her love so that he never would have
guessed it. She would have been to him the Erica of a year ago, just a
friend and nothing more. But now she must give him the worst of pain,
perhaps ruin his whole life. If she might but give him some promise.
What was the right? How were love and duty to be reconciled?

As she sat crouched up in her misery, fighting the hardest battle of her
life, the bell in the campanile of the village church began to ring.
It was twelve o'clock. All through the land, in remembrance of the hour
when the true meaning of love and sacrifice was revealed to the human
race, there swept now the music of church bells, bidding the people to
pause in their work and pray. Many a peasant raised his thoughts for a
moment from sordid cares or hard labor, and realized that there was an
unseen world. And here in the Roman amphitheatre, where a conflict more
painful than those physical conflicts of old time was going on, a soul
prayed in agony for the wisdom to see the right and the strength to do
it.

When at length Erica lifted her face she found that Brian was no longer
beside her, he was pacing to and fro in the arena; waiting had grown
unbearable to him. She went down to him, moving neither quickly nor
hurriedly, but at the steady "right onward" pace which suited her whole
aspect.

"Brian," she said in a low voice, "do you remember telling me that day
that I must try to show them what the Father is? You must help me now,
not hinder. You will help me just because you do indeed love me?"

"You will give me no p