He relaxed his hold on her, and sank back in his chair with a sigh. "I'm tiring you," said Sibylla. "I'll go now, and leave you alone with Mumples. I'll call her back here. No, I can't stay to tea--you've made me think of too much. But I'll come to-morrow and bring my little boy." "If what you say is true, you must pray for yourself sometimes? Pray for me too, madame." "Yes, I'll pray for you the prayer I love best: 'Those things which for our unworthiness we dare not and for our blindness we cannot ask----' I will pray for those, for you and for me. And because you're an old man and have suffered, you shall give me your blessing before I go." She knelt to receive his trembling benediction, then rose with a glad smile on her face. She saw Mumples standing now on the threshold of the room, and kissed her hand to her. "The old is done, and the new is begun," she said to the old man as she pressed his hand in farewell. She walked slowly up the hill in the peaceful dusk. Lights burned in the church: the village choir was laboriously practising an ambitious effort for the next day. There were lights in the windows over the post-office; one was open to the mild evening air, and Jeremy's voice in a love-ballad competed enviously with the choir's more pious strains, till it was drowned in a merry protest of youthful shouts. When she reached home, there was a light in the nursery, and the nurse was singing softly to the little boy. Her agitation was passed, her emotion was gentle now, and her face peacefully radiant. Her grievances seemed small beside the old man's suffering, her woes nothing beside his punishment, her return to life and light so much easier than his. He had but a remnant of life left--the rest had been demanded of him in ransom for his deed, and the ransom had been exacted to the uttermost farthing. He was poor, though not destitute; but she was rich. Her life lay still before her with all its meaning and its possibilities--its work and its struggles, its successes and its failures, the winning of more victories, the effort and the resolve not to lose what had been so hardly won. Soberly she looked forward to it, assessing and measuring her strength and weakness and the strength and weakness of those with whom her life was cast. She had no more of the blind and reckless confidence of her first essay; her eyes were open. Her knowledge did not forbid her soul reaching out to the joy that was to come, but it whispered that the joy was not all, and that the joy must be fairly won. Yet she welcomed the joy with the innate ardour of her mind, exultant that now she might take it, that now it could prove no delusion because she had learnt wherein lay the truth of it. The clue was in her fingers. The path might be rough sometimes, uphill sometimes, not all in pleasant valleys and soft beguiling scenes; there would be arid tracts, perhaps, and bleak uplands. Such was the Way of Life: she recognised it now.