a sensation of disgust for the old
lady's stony eyes and carefully painted out wrinkles.

Without replying to the moral pointed by Uncle Percival and the white
rabbit, she left the room and hastily dressed herself for her morning
walk. The house had grown close and oppressive to her and she wanted the
January cold in her face and limbs. At the moment she was impatient of
anything that recalled a restraint of mind or body.

When she came in two hours later, after a brisk walk in the park, she
found Mr. Wilberforce awaiting her in the drawing-room downstairs. He
looked older she thought at the first glance in the last few days, but
there was a cheerfulness, a serenity, in his face which seemed to lend
itself like a softening light to his beautiful pallid features. He was a
man who having fought bitterly against resignation for many years comes
to it peacefully at last only to find that he has reaped from it a
portion of the "enchantment of the disenchanted." Her intuition told her
instantly that he had given up hope of love, but she recognized also,
through some strange communion of sympathy, that he had attained the
peace of soul which follows inevitably upon any sincere renouncement of
self.

"I am so glad, dear friend," she said, holding his hand for a moment as
she sat beside him.

He looked at her silently with his brilliant eyes which burned in the
midst of his blanched and withered face like two watch-fires that are
kept alive in a scorched desert.

"For a while I thought it might be," he replied after a long pause. "I
asked you to give me what I have never had--my youth. You could not do
it," he added with a smile, "and at first it seemed to me that there
remained only emptiness and disappointment for the future, but presently
I learned wisdom in the night." He hesitated an instant and then added
gravely, "I saw that if you couldn't give me youth, you could at least
make my old age very pleasant."

"I can--I will," she answered in a broken voice, and it seemed to her
that all the bitterness had turned to sweetness in his look. Was the
divine wisdom, after all, she wondered, not so much the courage which
turned the events that came to happiness as the greater power which
created light where there was nothing. Only age had learned to do this,
she knew, and she was conscious of a quick resentment against fate that
only age could put into passion the immortal spirit which youth craved
in vain.

"I asked a gr