oor and then stood
trembling before the threshold.

CHAPTER IV

SHOWS THAT TRUE LOVE IS TRUE SERVICE

On the evening of the day upon which Laura was to have been married,
Adams went, as usual, into his study and lit the green lamp upon his
desk; but his mind was so filled with the mystery of her absence that
even the pretence of distraction became unendurable. Since the news of
her broken engagement and her flight had reached him, he had spent three
days in a fruitless, though still hopeful, search for her; and the
nights when he was forced to relax his efforts were filled with agonised
imaginings of her loneliness at so great a distance and yet in reality
so near. From the moment that he had heard through Gerty of her
disappearance, there had ceased to exist all uncertainty as to the
position in which he now stood to her; and he reproached himself, as he
remembered her visit to his office, because he had failed then to take
into his hands a decision which from an external view appeared so little
to affect him.

But the external view, he realised, was nothing to him to-night. On that
last day he had penetrated beneath the shallow surface of the
conventions, and he had read in her tormented heart the whole story of
the bitter disillusionment which she did not dare to put in words. Her
imagination, he saw, had created an ideal lover in Kemper's shape, and
in the moment of her awakening she had turned away not from the
falsehood, but from the truth. "Though he is not what I loved yet I will
still love him!" her heart had cried, in a subjection to the old false
feminine belief that faithfulness to a mistaken ideal is not weakness
but virtue. Yet in the end she had fled from that ultimate choice
between the higher and the lower nature. How could she have lived on a
lie when her spirit had forged so clear a path of truth before her?

Rising from his chair he walked for a few minutes rapidly up and down
the room. How far or how near was she to-night? Had she remembered him
in her misery? Would God reveal Himself to her in the most terrible
hour? His trust in her final deliverance was so great that even as he
put the questions, he knew in his heart that she was one of those who,
in the end, "win their own souls through perseverance." His eyes fell on
her picture above his desk, and then turning away rested on Connie's
which stood where he had placed it in the first years of his marriage.
Connie and her life with h