ore than I can bear!"

But she remembered again those awful words, "No man, putting his hand to
the plough"-- _This_ was looking back. She took another sheet of paper
and patiently rewrote all that was on the sheets she had just burned. It
was nearly morning when she finally sealed the envelope and crept into
bed exhausted by the ordeal. There was no sense of "rising triumphant
over pain" to reward her for her sacrifice, but her stern little Puritan
conscience found a dreary sort of comfort in the thought that she had
followed duty, and that nothing else mattered.

"One doesn't _have_ to be happy," she told herself, over and over.

When she awoke next morning and remembered what she had done, the bottom
seemed to drop out of the whole universe, and she felt a hundred years
old as she moved languidly about the room at her dressing.

"But I can't go on this way," she exclaimed, catching a glimpse of her
wan-eyed reflection in the mirror. "Such a half-hearted sort of giving
won't do any good. I shall have to do as the nuns do when they shut
their convent gate on the world, shut it entirely and forever. I shall
have to put away everything that reminds me of Phil."

She glanced around the room. How many reminders there were, for she had
always treasured everything he had ever sent her; books, pictures,
little curios picked up on his travels. Even an odd stone he had found
on the desert and brought into the Wigwam one day, she used now as a
paperweight. An Indian basket he had bought from an old squaw at
Hole-in-the-rock held her sewing materials. Just under her hand on the
table lay the little book he had given her to read on the train when she
was starting home after Jack's accident, "The Jester's Sword." As she
fingered it caressingly, it seemed to open of its own accord to the
fly-leaf, where was printed the line from Stevenson: "To renounce when
that shall be necessary and not be embittered." And then on the opposite
page--"Because he was born in Mars' month the bloodstone became his
signet, sure token that undaunted courage would be the jewel of his
soul."

She had thought those lines were wonderfully helpful when she offered
them to Jack as an inspiration to renew _his_ courage, but what a hollow
mockery they seemed now that the time had come to apply them to her own
case. Still, the thought of the brave Jester persisted, and was with her
when she went down to breakfast, and later when she went to the station
to