--You are a sufferer who can say to no one: “I suffer.” You are a sinner and there is no name for your sin. You are too lone to confess: too lone even to be despised.... _But the word hope must still be there, since you recall it?_ God stands so far away: the truth, that God is All and that no life can die, is not a neighbor. Truth sweeps away the nearness of good things. For the things good unto the life of man are they on the bright surface where man crawls: it is the brightness of his need that makes them shine. Blesséd, blesséd man! Fool, when you seek the truth that lies in darkness. Sage when you stone your sages, when you crucify your Christs. God is too far, and too vast. But the word hope is there! Hope ... Mildred ... there? * * * * * So came the thought of Mildred, and grew, thriving on hope, hope on her, until the two were one and at last were all. The world were well lost indeed, if Mildred still could be my world. If, knowing what I was, what I had done, how tragically I had been moved to equal her own ruthless, wordless wisdom--if she accepted me, I could accept the truth and master it, and bring it down to our own livable world. What sin was mine, if Mildred still was mine? What loss if all my loss had purchased her? I was no sickly repentant to bewail that my will had forged from the Whirlwind weapons to make its way. I was not weeping because Philip LaMotte lay dead, and my idle parents. No: I wept because my act had slain my world and left me all alone: I wept because of the falsity, the ugliness, the sterility of what my will had done. But if it had won Mildred, if it brought to my life the beauty of Mildred, then indeed my will was mastered by a greater and was good. Mildred and hope throve on each other so, and grew in my mind: and my body healed. I thought toward the day when she would come at my call and we would consummate a marriage whose like earth had not known. --What waits on that day? I said at last. Is there not a telephone in your room? And though I have used it little these three weeks, have I not a voice?... Her voice answered mine. And said that she would come. “_This afternoon._” _d_ I walked to the door, I opened for her. In the day’s low light, I looked at her. Mildred! the lovely body of my hope. A sharp pang cut across my eyes: I would not question it. I looked at her, moved all my power to know upon her standing there within my room, so free and so near. The weeks had worn her. Her golden hair strained back from the transparent, faintly throbbing temples. The brow was higher, more pale, with this new way she caught her hair back, almost brusquely, from it. Her body seemed lighter: it was a sheath ever more frail and quick to the fluid of her soul. She stood at ease, and yet a subtle drooping of the shoulders, the clasp of the tapered fingers on her breast, marked a fine tracing of the time upon her. She was intact, but a rain of circumstance had worn her.