o her eyes.

* * * * *

Justine Brent, in her earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those
emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She
had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly
returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an
incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that mild
malady, leaves traces out of all proportion to its actual virulence. The
blow fell on Justine with tragic suddenness, and she reeled under it,
thinking darkly of death, and renouncing all hopes of future happiness.
Her ready pen often beguiled her into recording her impressions, and she
now found an escape from despair in writing the history of a damsel
similarly wronged. In her tale, the heroine killed herself; but the
author, saved by this vicarious sacrifice, lived, and in time even
smiled over her manuscript.

It was many years since Justine Amherst had recalled this youthful
incident; but the memory of it recurred to her as she turned from Mr.
Langhope's door. For a moment death seemed the easiest escape from what
confronted her; but though she could no longer medicine her despair by
turning it into fiction, she knew at once that she must somehow
transpose it into terms of action, that she must always escape from
life into more life, and not into its negation.

She had been carried into Mr. Langhope's presence by that expiatory
passion which still burns so high, and draws its sustenance from so deep
down, in the unsleeping hearts of women. Though she had never wavered in
her conviction that her act had been justified her ideas staggered under
the sudden comprehension of its consequences. Not till that morning had
she seen those consequences in their terrible, unsuspected extent, had
she understood how one stone rashly loosened from the laboriously
erected structure of human society may produce remote fissures in that
clumsy fabric. She saw that, having hazarded the loosening of the stone,
she should have held herself apart from ordinary human ties, like some
priestess set apart for the service of the temple. And instead, she had
seized happiness with both hands, taken it as the gift of the very fate
she had herself precipitated! She remembered some old Greek saying to
the effect that the gods never forgive the mortal who presumes to love
and suffer like a god. She had dared to do both, and the gods were
bringing r