t last adjusted to her satisfaction; and with a last
brilliant glance, which swept her entire figure, she turned from the
mirror and paused to draw on her gloves while she bent over and kissed
Laura upon the cheek.

"Goodbye, dear, if Billy turns out to be any real comfort, I'll share
him with you."

"Oh, I have a Billy of my own!" retorted Laura; and though her words
were mirthful there was a seriousness in her look which lasted long
after the door had closed upon her friend. She was thinking of Adams,
wondering if she should write to him, and how she should word her note;
and whether any expression of sympathy would not sound both trivial and
absurd? Then it seemed to her that there was nothing that she could say
because she realised that she stood now at an impassable distance from
him. The connection of thought even which had existed between them was
snapped at the instant; and she felt that she was no longer interested
in the things which had once absorbed them. The friendship was still
there, she supposed, but the spirit of each, the thoughts, the very
language, had become strangely different, and she told herself that she
could no longer speak to him since she had lost the power to speak in
any words he might understand.

"How can I pretend to value what no longer even interests me?" she
thought, "and if I attempt to explain--if I tell him that my whole
nature has changed because I have chosen one thing from out the
many--what possible good, after all, could come of putting this into
words? Suppose I say to him quite frankly: 'I am content to let
everything else go since I have found happiness?' And yet is it true
that I have found it? and how do I know that this is really happiness,
after all?"

It seemed to her, as she asked the question, that her whole life
dissolved itself into the answer; and she became conscious again of the
two natures which dwelt within her--of the nature which lived and of the
nature which kept apart and questioned. She remembered the night after
her first meeting with Kemper and the conviction she had felt then that
her destiny lay mapped out for her in the hand of God. Her soul on that
night had seemed, in the words of the quaint old metaphor, a vase which
she held up for God to fill. The light had run over then, but now, she
realised with a pang, it had ceased to shine through her body, and her
vase was empty. Even love had not filled it for her as her dream had
done.

Again sh