“Rest and then go to work; your picture is almost finished; it already shows the touch of a master-hand, and it is perfect so far as you have done. Marrion had other reasons for going away from us; believe me, he will make it all right.” She was ever gentle and tender toward him, and worked quietly, yet constantly. The task of reforming a man takes a great deal of time, more than a life has to give, frequently, but she had been strengthened by the promise from Marrion to aid her, though now she must bear it alone. She looked in the glass, and in the depths of it she found not the face that once smiled at her--ah! that other face, its wild-rose bloom had faded; the lips that used to tremble as if with joy alive are thinner now and they do not tremble; they are firm and somewhat sad. The hair that used to slip from its confinement, and in golden torrents fall about the wild-rose face, is somber-hued, and stays where it is pinned. Ah! she knows what youth means to a woman, and that is denied her. CHAPTER XXVII. THE CUP OF WRATH AND TREMBLING. With the first mail that Marrion Latham received after reaching New York was a letter which bore the postmark of the small railway station in Kentucky from which he had lately departed so hastily. He opened it first, for it was the most important to him. The letter ran: “MR. LATHAM: I have trusted you above all other men, yet you have proven to be my most hurtful enemy. I was surprised that you would sell my friendship, my future, and, above all, your own manhood to Willard Frost. From this time on I am done with you--we are strangers. Enclosed find check, as I prefer not being in your debt for services rendered. ROBERT MILBURN.” Marrion laid the letter down with a moan; but the cruel injustice of it aroused no resentment--he was only stunned by it. After awhile, he felt tired and sick, so he lay down across the foot of his bed and finally went to sleep. In his sleep nature had her way--was no longer held in check by his will, and so, when his weary brain, his sad, unresting heart cried out they could no longer endure, she came and gave them rest. Two hours afterward found him somewhat refreshed, but he was sorry to have awakened; he should have liked to sleep--that was all. That most vexing question kept repeating itself to him. “Why are the best motives of our lives turned into wolves, that come back, ravenous, to feed upon our helpless and tortured selves?” Willard Frost’s letter had made so slight an impression upon him that, until this reminder, he had quite forgotten it; had carelessly dropped it down, never thinking of it again until now. It looked hard, that he had come away to save that home, and then, to have the head of that home confront him with a pen picture of a scoundrel placarded “Marrion Latham.”