You who look at the simple events which I have been relating (from the outside and at a distance) may have other criticisms to make of Ernest. You may think it impossible that a youth so well placed, as he was at Harvard, should have turned his back upon its paths of pleasantness for the narrower way that meant so much hard work. Yet Ernest had not allowed himself to be led or governed by an illusion. In the whole world the serious student, the man who has his own way to make, can find no better opportunity than at Harvard. No one could realize this better than Ernest himself, in that time of storm and stress when he had felt that the chart of his life must be mapped out by his own hand. But his, he saw, was a special case, and the surest way to free himself from all entanglements and to place himself at the command of duty, was, he thought, to start out on an entirely new course. It was his Puritan inheritance, this devotion to duty when once duty had shown clearly her kindly but resolute visage. Yet my story has been ill told if it has seemed to be more the story of Ernest than of Miss Theodora. For very few of us does life hold any marked surprises, any startling events. A whole life is often merely the summary of many very commonplace happenings. Its real events are more likely to be those moral crises when the soul must put itself in harmony with all those external happenings which it has no power to control. Nor is it one of the least of life's lessons that it would be indeed a fatal gift, if it were ours--this longed for power to turn the tide of events. Take, for example, the case of Miss Theodora; what a feeble figure she had been in her efforts to turn the current of affairs that made up her life. How helpless her will to accomplish her desires! If John had not married Dorothy--if Ernest had been willing to take his grandfather's profession--if he had never met Eugenie--if he and Kate had never cared for each other,--with all these "ifs" turned into verities, how different, Miss Theodora thought, had been her outlook on life. But we, who regard these things from the point of view of the impartial onlooker, know that the fulfilling of her desires would not have made her happiness, nor for the happiness of her nephew. If in trying to show you this I have seemed to dwell too long on the ordinary happenings in a simple life, remember that these, after all, were not the things which I count of chief importance.