Mona sighed. "It seems five to me sometimes." "I suppose it has been very full of events?" Mr Reynolds had not forgotten the man whose presence at Borrowness made "all the difference" in Mona's life there. "Yes. There was first my life with my cousin; and then the examination; and then Switzerland with the Munros; and then hospital. Four different Mona Macleans,--each living as hard as ever she could." "And enjoying life?" "I don't know. I have been so restless, so unsettled." "I fancied I could read that in your face, but it is passing over now." "I hope so. I don't know. Don't let us talk of it." "You enjoy your hospital work?" Mona was sitting opposite him on the corner of the tiled fender. She looked into the fire now, with an amount of expression in her face that was almost painful. "Hospital," she said, "is--_salvation_! All one's work apart from that tends to make one self-centred. It is a duty to think much of _my_ knowledge, _my_ marks, _my_ success, _my_ failure. Hospital work gives one a chance to 'die to live.'" She laughed softly. "It must seem incredible to you, but I actually thought once that I had died to live,--I, with my books and my pictures, and my pretty gowns, and my countless toys! I thought I held them with so light a hand, that I valued them only for the eternal that was in them." She paused and went on without much logical sequence. "It is so easy to die to live, when the life one dies to is something vague and shadowy and unknown; but let one brilliant ray of promised happiness cross one's path, and then it becomes a very different thing to die to that--to nothing abstract, nothing vague, but just to _that_! One realises what one's professions are worth. "All the time I was at Borrowness I hardly once said a cross word to my cousin, and I suppose I took great credit to myself for that; but I see now that there was no true selflessness in it at all. It was simply because she was so unlike me that she never came into my real life. I conquered my hardships in a sense, by escaping them. I thought I had attained, and I have only learned now that I have attained nothing. The whole lesson of self-renunciation has still got to be learned." "You are thinking much of the duty of self-renunciation; what of the duty of self-realisation?" "Is there such a duty?" "You have acted instinctively up till now on the theory that there is. Have you any reason to distrust your instincts?" "I don't know. I seem to have got into a muddle about everything. How can they both be duties when they are so absolutely incompatible?"