tiny
tendrils of dark hair had escaped; her skin was of the whiteness of rose
petals except where the blood flushed, her eyes had the look of wet
violets in spring. My lips murmured incoherent thanks and welcome. I
could not force my mind away from the waiting figure in the next room.

"You wished to see me," she said, in a soft voice that had an under-note
of sadness. "If I can help you, please be quite free with me. It's to be
my life's work to help those who are in trouble."

"Your life's work?" I repeated.

"Yes," she said, "I'm to go into a convent."

"My trouble will seem very small to you, but to me it seems great, and
it has to do with so worldly a thing as love."

Her face flushed and paled again before she answered--

"True love can never be small--it is always beautiful."

"That is my thought of it, too," I said; "but however much one wants to
do the right thing, it is sometimes terribly hard to decide."

"I know," she said, "I know."

"Now suppose," I said, "that I loved a girl with all my heart--as I do,"
I added, thinking of Lucy, "but had never told her so; and suppose that
her friends, for some foolish reason, did not like me, and wished her to
devote her life to a calling which she herself had some leaning to----"

"Yes," she said, breathlessly, and I could see she was applying the case
to herself.

"And suppose," I went on, "I had been blind in the past, and perhaps
unknowingly allowed the time to go by when I should have spoken: would I
be justified in coming into her life again, drawing her away from the
peace that this calling might already have given her, and asking her to
come back with me into the world where love is?"

For an instant she turned her head aside, and I saw the tears heavy
under her eyelids.

"It would be for her to decide," she said; "you should tell her."

"That's just what my friend Lord St. Alleyne thinks," I said.

"You know him?" she cried. The look in her eyes at that moment was
certainly not for me.

"He is my very dear friend," I said, "and I have often heard him speak
of you. I know him for one of the best men alive."

She slipped down on her knees by the bed, and if I had not already known
all about the matter her eyes would have told me.

"I believe he is, I believe he is," she said. "Tell me about him. Is he
well? When did you see him last?"

"No longer ago than this morning," I said.

[Illustration: "SHE SPRANG TO HER FEET, AND RAN TO HIM WITH