So she refuses. She throws away thereby her last chance. And yet--can we believe it?--she still hopes. Alvan has done his best and has failed. His friends have tried to help him. Circumstance has given away before them. And she has thrown away their help--yet she still hopes. Alvan sends a challenge to her father. Prince Marko accepts it, and now her shuddering trust is in Providence. Marko will be killed. Now Alvan shall have her hand. But "Providence" does not save her. Alvan is killed, and Prince Marko returns Clotilde cannot understand it. She is stunned, but recovers sufficiently to marry Prince Marko. "Not she, it was the situation they had created which was guilty," she had thought. "The craven with desires expecting to be blest is a zealot of the faith which ascribes the direction of events to the outer world." Of Alvan's death, Meredith says some very characteristic words. Let me quote once again: "He perished of his weakness, but it was a strong man that fell." "He was 'a tragic comedian,' one of the lividly ludicious, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish where their character strikes the note of discord with life; for otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life will seem a thing demoniacally inclined by fits to antic and dive into gulfs." This, then, is George Meredith's message. We have eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the power to choose between the two has entered into our souls. We are under the rule of a great overhanging law. Destiny's wheels we cannot stop, but through our capacity for moral choice, our hands lie on the button that moves the whole machine in its relation to our own individual lives. This is a great lesson. How strong in its likeness to the teachings of our great masters of the past! How needful in its new scientific form to-day! How suggestive as to the universe! Does it not follow that as our lives are planned so is this universe planned in which we live! Does it not follow that the spiritual is the central life upon which all else depends? It is the teaching of the childhood of the race, broadened through knowledge of life's passion, humbled and heightened through sight of God's hand, strengthened and widened through the opening of our eyes in modern science to a fuller and clearer knowledge, not only of the machinery of the universe, but also of its motive power. _Emily G. Hooker_. THE TRAGEDY OF OPHELIA. RENUNCIATION.