when he asked himself if he were strong
enough for the thing which he had before him--strong enough, not for the
swift, exalted moment of the sacrifice, but for the daily fret and
torment of a perfectly unpoetic self-denial. Would the light go out
again and the exaltation fail him before many days? Then he remembered
the pathos of her struggling smile, the timid groping of her hands, the
deprecating gratitude he found in her look; and it seemed to him when
all other resources were exhausted--when his energy, his duty, his
religion flagged--that his compassion would still remain in his heart to
render possible all that was impossible to his will alone. Compassion!
this, he came to find in the end, was the true and the necessary key to
any serious understanding of life.

He was still putting these questions to himself, when, coming in one
afternoon from his office, he found Connie, wearing a loose fitting
wrapper of some pale coloured muslin, awaiting him in an easy chair
beside her window. It was the first time that she had left her bed; and
when he offered a few cheerful congratulations upon her recovered
strength, she looked up at him with a face which still showed signs of
the hideous ravages of the last few months. In her hollowed cheeks, in
her quivering unsteady lips, and in the dull grayness of her hair, from
which the golden dye had faded, he could find now no faint traces of
that delicate beauty he had loved. At less than thirty years she looked
the embodiment of uncontrolled and reckless middle-age.

"It isn't that I'm really better--not really," she said, in answer to
his look almost more than to his words, "but the doctor told me that I
must get up and dress to-day. He wants me to go to the hospital this
afternoon."

Her voice was so composed--so unlike the usual nervous quiver of her
speech--that at first he could only repeat her words in the vague
blankness of his surprise.

"To the hospital? Then you are ill?"

"I asked him not to tell you," she replied, with a tremor of the lips
which had almost the effect of a smile, "he didn't understand--he
couldn't, so I wanted you to hear it first from me. I'll never be any
better--I'll never get really well again--without such an operation--and
he thinks, he says, that it must be at once--without delay."

As she spoke she stretched out her hand for a glass of water that stood
at her side, and in the movement her wedding ring slipped from her thin
finger and