knew; her books were gone, and all the
costly decorative fittings he had chosen with so much joyous anxiety.
But the panelled doors which he had worked at with his own hands were
there, and the window, with its delicately tinted lattice-frames,
through which the sun had shone in daintily upon her at her desk. He
went slowly up the long staircase, pausing now and then lost in thought;
and standing, at last before the door, which he had never opened without
asking permission to enter in, he hesitated for many minutes before he
went in.

An empty room, swept clean of everything which made it a living
habitation. The sunshine fell in pencils of colored light upon the bare
walls and uncarpeted floor. It bore no trace of any occupant; yet to him
it seemed but yesterday that he had been in here, listening to the low
tones of Felicita's sweet voice, and gazing with silent pride on her
beautiful face. There had been unmeasured passion and ambition in his
love for her, which had fatally changed his whole life. But he knew now
that he had failed in winning her love and in making her happy; and the
secret dissatisfaction she had felt in her ill-considered marriage had
been fatal both to her and to him. The restless eagerness it had
developed in him to gain a position that could content her, had been a
seed of worldliness, which had borne deadly fruit. He opened the
casement, and looked out on the familiar landscape, on which her eyes
had so often rested--eyes that were closed forever. The past, so keenly
present to him this moment, was in reality altogether dead and buried.
She had ceased to be his wife years ago, when she had accepted the
sacrifice he proposed to her of his very existence. That old life was
blotted out; and he had no right to mourn openly for the dead, who was
being laid in the grave of her fathers at this hour. His children were
counting themselves orphans, and it was not in his power to comfort
them. He knelt down at the open window, and rested his bowed head on
the window-sill. The empty room behind him was but a symbol of his own
empty lot, swept clean of all its affections and aspirations. Two thirds
of his term of years were already spent; and he found himself bereft and
dispossessed of all that makes life worth having--all except the power
of service. Even at this late hour a voice within him called to him, "Go
work to-day in my vineyard." It was not too late to serve God who had
forgiven him and mankind w