If Claude had had a dying daughter whom he loved, could he have watched her sink into her grave, and kept the secret of his sorrow, and smiled at her while his heart was breaking? She knew he could not. He was a creature of light and variable moods, of sunshine and fine weather. She had loved him for his lightness. He had brought her relief from ennui whenever he crossed her threshold; he had brought her gladness and gay thoughts, as a man brings a bunch of June roses to his sweetheart. And now that the past was done with, and that she was his for ever, they were to be always glad and gay. There was to be no gloom in their atmosphere, no long, dull pause in life to give time for dark thoughts. "Everybody has something to be sorry for," Vera told Susan Amphlett; "that's why people's existence is a perpetual rush. Niagara can have no time to think--but imagine, if nature were alive, what long aching thoughts there might be under the bosom of a great, smooth lake." "You know, my darling Vera, I generally think everything you do is perfect," Susan answered, more sensibly than her wont, "but, I sometimes fear that you and Claude are burning the candle at both ends. You are too much alive. You seem to be running a race with time. Neither your health nor your beauty can last at the pace you are going." "I'll take my chance of that. There is one thing that I dread more than being ill and growing ugly." "What is that?" "Living to be old." "What, you've caught my fear?" "I dread the long, slow years--the long, slow days and sleepless nights--old people sleep very little--in which there is nothing but thought, an endless-web of miserable thoughts, going slowly round and round, never stopping, never changing. That's what I am afraid of, Susie." "Strange for you to be afraid of anything," her friend said thoughtfully. "I think you are the most courageous woman I ever heard of--as brave as Joan of Arc, or Charlotte Corday." "Why?" "Because you are not afraid to live in this house." "Why not? What does the house matter?" "It must make you think sometimes," faltered Susan. "I won't think! But if I were to think of the past, the house would make no difference. My thoughts would be the same in Mexico--or at the North Pole. I have heard of people who go to the end of the earth to forget things, but I should never do that. I should know that memory would go with me." * * * * *