help any more than the rich,"
she added, "but the poor are the only ones that I can reach."

He nodded, smiling, while he watched the animated gestures of her hands.
Her poetry, her groping for love, her longing at last to give help to
the oppressed, each phase of thought or feeling through which she had
passed, showed to him only as the effort of the soul within her to find
expression. In this passionate search after the eternal upon earth was
she not, in reality, only seeking in outward forms the thing which was
herself?

"I will help you, of course," he answered, with a gravity which he found
it difficult afterward to maintain, for from that moment she had thrown
her heart into the work of uplifting until her whole existence appeared
to round presently about this new point of interest. While he could
follow her here, he waited almost impatiently for the reaction of her
temperament which would bring her back to him, he felt, as inevitably as
the changes of the seasons would bring the spring again to the earth.

On Christmas Eve she had arranged for some celebration among the poor on
the East Side, and when they came away together, she asked him to take
her to Gerty's house instead of to Gramercy Park. Then as they walked
along the cross-town blocks from the elevated road, she alluded for the
first time to the evening a year ago when he had found her in her
deepest misery.

"I thought then that my life was over," she said, "but to-day I have put
my foot upon my old grief and it has helped me to spring upward. The
world is so full for me now that I can hardly distinguish among so many
vivid interests--and yet nothing in it is changed except myself. Do you
know what it is to feel suddenly that you have found the key?"

"I know," he replied, "for I have found it, too, and it is love."

"Love for the world--for all mankind," she corrected. "No, don't look at
me like that," she added, "I am perfectly happy to-day, but it is the
happiness of freedom."

For a moment he did not answer; then he turned his eyes upon the bright
pallor of her cheek showing above the dark furs she wore, and there was
a smile in his eyes though his voice, when he spoke, was grave.

"Do you know what I have sometimes thought about that, Laura," he said,
"it is that I all along, from first to last, have known your heart
better than you knew it for all your desperate certainty."

"I never knew it," she responded; "I do not know it now."

"A