Dinah's sweet serenity was vaguely disturbed, and the quiet tears gathered in her eyes. Silence was good for both of them, she thought. When one has lived through a great pain, and by God's grace has conquered, it is better to bury the dead past. Elizabeth's passionate incredulity, the difficulty she felt in understanding her sister's motives, her exaggerated praise, made Dinah wince in positive pain. How could human love misjudge her so! Did not even her nearest and dearest--her own sister-friend--know how often she had striven and failed and fainted under that hard cross that had been laid upon her? And in truth few women had suffered as Dinah had in the sweet blossom of her early womanhood, and more than once she had been very near the gates of the dark valley whose shadow is the shadow of death. How she had gloried in her lover--her "Douglas--Douglas, tender and true," as she had called him to herself--in his great intellect and his strong man's heart, in the plan and purpose of his life, with its scientific research and its passionate love of truth! And then that awful struggle between her affection and her sense of right, the doubts and terrors, the wakeful nights and joyless days, the vast blank of life that stretched before her poor eyes, half-blind with their woman's weeping. "O Galilaean, Thou hast conquered," were the words that came to her when the crucial test had been passed, and she had parted with her beloved. Those were sad days at the Wood House, and there were sadder days still at Rome; but she lived through them, and Elizabeth helped her; and so by and bye the light of a new dawn--a little gray and misty perhaps, but still dawn--opened before Dinah's tired eyes. "I loved much and I prayed much, and God answered my prayers," she said long afterwards. But the wound was wide and deep and healed slowly, and it was not until Douglas Fraser had married a noble-hearted and beautiful woman, whom he called his Lady of Consolation, that Dinah recovered a measure of her former cheerfulness. But the day she heard that he was no longer an agnostic was always kept by her as a festival. Then indeed the cup of her pure joy seemed full to the very brim. He had come right, and now all was well with him and with her too. Pain and loss had been his teachers, and great indeed was her reward. "It was your renunciation and sacrifice that first opened my eyes," he wrote. "I know now how rightly you acted. If I had married you then--if my entreaties had prevailed--I should never have made you happy. My dear Agnes has taught me this." And this cherished letter was Dinah's treasure. She and Dr. Fraser seldom met--not more than once a year--but from time to time he wrote to her, and his wife and children were very dear to her. "I cannot understand it," Elizabeth had more than once said. But Dinah could furnish no explanation: she only knew that it was so--that her life was a happy one, and that she asked for nothing more.