im was like a half-forgotten dream to him now,
yet, looking back upon it, he could not tell himself that there had been
for him no gain of strength, for Connie no growth of understanding, in
the pitiless failure of their marriage. All was softened in his memory
by that last afternoon when he had seen the shame of experience wiped
from her face as they combed her hair straight back from her forehead in
the old childish fashion; and he had realised from that instant that a
soul had come to birth in the hour before her death. A single ray of the
divine light had dispelled the thick darkness, and her blind eyes were
opened for one minute before she closed them to the body forever. Was
that one minute not worth every heart throb he had suffered and every
difficult hope for which he had battled in his thoughts? Having looked
though for a fleeting glimpse only upon the unity of life, was not her
spirit's growth measured in the instant of that flashing vision? For God
had worked here--had worked in the pity of his heart, as well as in the
awakening gratitude in Connie's; and because of the deeper insight he
had attained, he could look back over the whole sordid tragedy and
discern one of those steep and arduous roads by which the spirit mounts
to enlightenment through the flesh. And if this were so here--if in
ugliness such as this he could find beauty, was it not one and the same
over the broad field of human effort? Had not his own life proved to him
that let a man's eyes be opened, and even in the depths of abasement he
may look in his soul and discover God?

And Laura? His heart was flooded with tenderness, and he felt again a
confident, an almost mystic assurance that her destiny was one with his.
In this growing conviction his anxiety appeared to him suddenly as a
pitiable and cowardly denial of his faith--and he was possessed by the
certainty that he had only to send out his will in order to smooth the
way of her return to peace.

The room had become warm, and opening the window he stood looking beyond
the housetops to the stars which shone dimly over the city. The noise in
the streets grew fainter in his ears, and as he stood there with his
eyes on the stars, he could tell himself in the joy of his
reconciliation, that the law by which they moved gloriously toward
their end was the law which controlled his own and Laura's life. The
sense which is less a belief than an intimate knowledge of immortality
belonged to him n