“Yes, she is so afraid that he will worry himself ill; but, of course, she too believes in him. I think she suspects the other man in the shop, Darnell—but I don’t see how he can have anything to do with it, I must own.” There was a silence. Cecil looked sadly at the passers-by, lovers strolling along happily in the cool of the evening, workers just set free from the long day’s toil, children reveling in the fresh sweet air. How very brief was the happiness and rest as compared to the hard, wearing drudgery of most of those lives! Love perhaps brightened a few minutes of each day, but in the outside world there was no love, no justice, nothing but a hard, grinding competition, while Sorrow and Sin, Sickness and Death hovered round, ever ready to pounce upon their victims. It was unlike her to look so entirely on the dark side of things, but Frithiof’s persistent ill-luck had depressed her, and she was disappointed by Roy’s words. Perhaps it was unreasonable of her to expect him to share her view of the affair, but somehow she had expected it, and now there stole into her heart a dreary sense that everything was against the man she loved. In her sheltered happy home, where a bitter word was never heard, where the family love glowed so brightly that all the outside world was seen through its cheering rays, sad thoughts of the strength of evil seldom came, there was ever present so strong a witness for the infinitely greater power of love. But driving now along these rather melancholy roads, weighed down by Frithiof’s trouble; a sort of hopelessness seized her, the thought of the miles and miles of houses all round, each one representing several troubled, struggling lives, made her miserable. Personal trouble helps us afterward to face the sorrows of humanity, and shows us how we may all in our infinitesimal way help to brighten other lives—take something from the world’s great load of pain and evil. But at first there must be times of deadly depression, and in these it is perhaps impossible not to yield a little for the moment to the despairing thought that evil is rampant and all-powerful. Poverty, and sin, and temptation are so easily visible everywhere, and to be ever conscious of the great unseen world encompassing us, and of Him who makes both seen and unseen to work together for good, is not easy. Cecil Boniface, like every one else in this world, had, in spite of her ideal home, in spite of all the comforts that love and money could give her, to “dree her weird.” CHAPTER XXVIII.