What of the years of loyal friendship he had given her? How could she forget his tenderness and sympathy at the bitterest moment of her life? How ignore either, the many kindnesses difficult for a man wholly cynical, impossible for one wholly selfish, which he had shown to the down-trodden, the beaten, the unsuccessful in life’s struggle? Once again, for the thousandth time she recognized the complexity of every human being. The baffling contradictions; good interwoven with evil, nobility with meanness, honour with disloyalty. It was the great intricate puzzle of human nature she was once more considering; a tangle which nothing but the cloak of infinite charity can cover. The only cloak which glorifies and reveals what is good and strong, while in pity, in despairing tenderness it hides under its ample folds, the shame, the weakness, the ugly scars of the form it both shelters, and defines. Anne sighed as she reached the top of the Spanish steps, and leant on the wall to take a last look at the city she loved. Overhead, that “great inverted bowl we call the sky,” here, deeply blue, surpassingly beautiful. Beneath it, the dancing sunshine playing alike on dome and pinnacle, roof and tree, and on the thousands of men and women in the busy streets. Men and women hiding within their breasts incalculable heights and depths of virtue and vice, actual or potential. Men and women soon to be covered by the earth on which they walked, to make place for another, yet essentially the same swarm of human beings between the same earth and sky, still asking the same questions under the same sunshine, which laughed, and never replied. It was the eternal puzzle, the old riddle to which through the ages no solution has been found. Anne sighed once more, and then smiled at the futility of considering it again just now, when there was packing to be done. _He maketh His sun to shine upon the just and upon the unjust._ The words slipped into her mind before she turned away, with a momentary sensation of reassurance. At least the sunshine fell upon every one alike. Perhaps it symbolized a cloak of charity wider and larger than any woven by human minds. * * * * * “Will Madame come upstairs?” The maid re-entered the room in which Anne had been waiting, and then preceded her up the staircase to a door which she threw open. A little figure huddled over the fire, rose hastily as she entered, and with incoherent words that sounded like a cry, threw herself into her arms. “Oh! You are good! You are good!” Madge repeated, hiding her eyes like a child against the elder woman’s arm. “I should have _died_ if you hadn’t come.” When at last she drew herself away, and looked at her visitor, Anne had to suppress a start of dismay. She scarcely recognized Madge Dakin.