She perused the sweet, pale face with earnest scrutiny, for she thought she saw the mark of doom on the forehead where the lines were deeper than they should have been on the sunny side of thirty. She remembered the short-lived mother, the consumptive father. * * * * * Vera sat in a corner of the reserved compartment and read Browning's "Christmas Eve" all though the swift journey from the red cliffs of North Devon and the wide, blue sky to the grey dullness of a London twilight. It was a poem which she read again and again, which she knew by heart. It lifted her out of herself. She felt as if she were out in the winter darkness on the wind-swept common, as if her hands were clutching the edge of the Divine raiment. Was not that sublime vision something more than a dream in a stuffy Methodist chapel? Were there not moments in life when earth touched heaven, when Divine compassion was something more real than the words in a book; when Christ the Redeemer came within reach of the sinner, and when Faith became certainty? Nothing less than this, nothing but the assurance of a Living God, could lift the despairing soul out of the abyss. The house to which she was returning was a house of fear, and in spite of all she had said to her aunt, she knew that there was no necessity for her return. The rich man's widow had nothing to do that a telegram to her housekeeper would not have done for her. But the house drew her somehow. She had a morbid longing to be there, alone in the silence and emptiness of unused rooms, without Claude, whose presence jarred in rooms where another figure was still master. She found all things in perfect order, no speck of dust in the rooms on the ground floor, her morning-room brilliant with Japanese chrysanthemums. She went to the library after her solitary dinner. The evening was cold, and fires were burning in all the rooms. She drew a low chair to the hearth, and sat brooding over the smouldering cedar logs, perhaps one of the loneliest women in London; and yet not quite alone, since nothing that had happened in her futile life of the last years had shaken her belief in Mr. Symeon's creed, and she felt that the dead were near her. Giulia, who had loved her, Giulia, the happy soul who had known neither sin nor sorrow, the yearning of unsatisfied love, or the seething fires of guilty passion. Giulia's gentle spirit had been with her of late, the spirit of her only girl friend, and she had lived over again the tranquil hours at San Marco, the talk of books that had opened a new world to her, Giulia having read so much and she so little. Father and daughter had opened the gates of that new world for her. It was from them that the poet's daughter had learnt to understand and love all that is highest in the poetry of the world.