im any more." At the time it appeared to her very easy, and she
felt that it made no difference to her however things might happen on
the morrow. "It will be as it will be, and I cannot alter it, for in any
event I shall be miserable whether I marry him or give him up." Then she
remembered that though she had pardoned Kemper greater sins than this,
by the courage of his attitude he had always succeeded in placing her
hopelessly in the wrong. "Even after his meeting with Madame Alta it was
he who forgave me," she thought with the strange mental clearness, which
destroyed her happiness without lessening her emotion, "and through his
whole life, however deeply he may wrong me, I know that I shall always
be the one to justify myself and seek forgiveness. Is it, after all,
only necessary to have the courage of one's acts that one may do
anything and not be punished?"

The light of the candle flickering on the mirror gave back her own face
to her as if reflected in the dim surface of a pool. She watched the
shadows from a vase, of autumn leaves come and go across it, until it
seemed to her that the rippling reflection resembled a drowned face that
was still her own; and shrinking back in horror, she sat holding the
candle in her hand, so that the light would shine on the walls and
floor.

"Yes, that is settled--I shall tell him to-morrow," she said, as if
surrendering her future into the power of chance or God or whatever
stood outside herself, "it will happen as it must, I cannot change it."
For a moment there was some comfort in the fatalism of this thought, and
after blowing out the candle, she turned her face to the wall and fell
at last into a troubled sleep. But her sleep even was filled with
perplexing questions, which she continued to ask herself with the same
piercing mental clearness that tormented her when she was awake; and she
passed presently into a vivid dream, in which she rescued the letter
with burned hands, from the fire, and carried it to Kemper, who laughed
and kissed her burns and threw the letter back into the flames. "It has
never really happened--you have imagined it all," he said, "you've
dreamed Jennie Alta and now you're dreaming me and yourself also. Look
up, for you are just beginning to awake." And when she looked up at his
words, his face changed suddenly and she saw that it was Roger Adams who
held her hands.

From this dream she awoke with a more distinct memory of Adams than she
had had f