t avoid weeping, though he answered:

"No, my dear Roland. The doctor says that the worst is over."

Roland smiled with pleasure at the fatherly dropping of the formal
"Mr.," but he reiterated the assertion with a more decided manner. "I
am going to die. Will you see that my wife goes back to England to her
father and mother?"

"I will. Is there anything else?"

"No. She knows all that is to be done. Comfort her a little when I am
dead."

"My dear Roland, we are going to Florida as soon as you are able."

"I am going to a country much farther off. I will tell you how I know.
All my life long a figure formless, veiled, and like a shadow has come
to me at any crisis. When I was striving for honours at my college it
whispered, 'you will not succeed.' When I went to my first business
desk it brought me the same message. The night before I sailed for
America it stood at my bedside, and I heard the one word, 'failure.'
This afternoon it told me, 'you have come to the end of your life.'
Then my soul said, 'Oh, my enemy, who art thou?' And there grew out of
the dimness the likeness of a face."

For a few moments there was a silence painful and profound. Roland
closed his eyes, and from under their lids stole two large tears--the
last he would ever shed. And Mr. Lanhearne was so awed and troubled he
could scarcely say:

"A face! Whose face, then, Roland?"

"My own! My own!" and he spoke with that patience of accepted doom
which, while it carries the warrant of death, has also death's
resignation and dignity.

After this revelation there was a decided relapse, and after a few
more days of suffering, of hope, and despair had passed, the end came
peacefully from utter exhaustion. Mr. Lanhearne was present, but it
was into Denasia's eyes that Roland gazed until this sad earth was
lost to vision, and the dark, tearless orbs, once so full of light and
love, were fixed and dull for evermore.

"It is all past! It is all over!" cried Denasia, "all over, all over!
Oh, Roland! Roland! My dear, dear love!" and Mr. Lanhearne led her
fainting with sorrow from the place of death.

And in another room, in a little sanctuary of holy dreams and loving
purposes, Ada knelt in a transport of divine supplication, praying for
the dying, praying for the living, consecrating her own wounded heart
to the service of all women wearing for any reason the crown of
sorrow, or drinking of the cup of Gethsemane, or treading alone the
painful roa