certainly it never seems equal, in any marriage. The one always loves more, or less, than the other. And then, in circumscribed lives, such as Anne's and Tom's were, both men and women choose the one whom they prefer from among the few whom they chance to know; they cannot choose from a large number which might possibly have induced a different selection. But the width of the world would not have altered Anne's choice. And a love like hers changes no more with time than it is influenced by environment; it is too little of the flesh, and too much of the spirit to age, or to wither, or to grow cold. Even her husband's neglect had made no difference through all the unhappy years of her married life; even his disregard of religion did not lessen or alter her love, although it put her and her husband farther apart than they might otherwise have been, and came nearer than all else to breaking her heart. She could bear the loss of happiness in her daily life; she could bear to be deprived of her husband's society day after day and night after night, by interests and associations in which she had no part,--living was but waiting, anyway, to Anne. But she could not bear the thought of the Long Time without the beloved. To Anne, as much as to any mediaeval saint in any rock-ribbed cell, the longest, happiest earthly life measured nothing against a glorious eternity. Her husband was handsome, spirited, high-hearted, masterful, compelling, and kind, too, in his careless way; another woman might have been happy and proud to be his wife; but Anne's heart had ached from first to last for the one thing of which she never spoke, and for which she was always praying. Then came the accident, striking down the strong man at the height of his powers, as the lightning blasts the mighty oak in full leaf. Stunned at first, Anne, rallying, felt the blow as a manifestation of offended Power. A mind like hers works in strangely tortuous ways. But after a while she began to see in this awful affliction a means of grace thus given when all else had failed; and it was then that the wan ghost of happiness began to visit Anne's desolate breast. The world had been violently wrenched away from her husband's grasp, which otherwise would, most likely, never have loosed; it might perhaps now come to pass--through mercy cloaked in cruelty--that his thoughts would turn heavenward. So poor Anne thought, and thus it was that when, to all outward seeming, the husband's hopeless convalescence was the last settling down of darkest despair, in reality a shining rainbow of hope first began to span the wife's long-clouded content.