Of course, she does not realize this at first. The truth only comes home to her after she has left her native land and lived, not too happily, in London. Because "he" had spoken enigmatically, always with a sense that there was something dangerous in their companionship, she had thought it best to leave him, he, too, assenting that that was the best course to adopt. Then, after some weary months of exile, the impulse comes upon her, too strong to be resisted, to write to her lover, not the ordinary letter, but one containing a strong, insistent question. "Do you think that I may come back?" she asked him. A long answer arrives: "If you had remained here, I do not know what might have happened; if you come back, I know what will happen. But the question is, may it come thus? You are not a girl of the ordinary type; you belong to the race of Asra, the people who die when they love. And, because I have known that from the first, I have done for you what I have never done for another woman yet--namely, got hold of the head of the beast within, turned it round sharply, and laughed at it." That, then, is the end of it. A very different end from what the girl had imagined, but which she now recognizes as inevitable, and not otherwise than consolatory. For which is more glorious for a girl--that a man should make her his wife, or make her his most beautiful dream and his lasting desire? As for him, he will doubtless lead the man's life, never at peace with himself, tasting every pleasure and getting to know every disgust. "But above all pleasure and above all disgust there will be the one longing of his soul, which had denied itself the drink because of the dregs it knew to be at the goblet's bottom." This renunciation becomes Anna's ideal, and she smiles to herself that strange, wonderful smile "which only a woman knows who is willing to take upon herself the heaviest burden for the sweet sake of love." Such is the life story of Anna, the heroine of "Rue and Roses." Very simple, very sentimental, but with a rare charm for those who have the wit to understand and the heart to feel, and written in a style of much tenderness and felicity. Do not put it down because the earlier portion may seem uninteresting. Read on to the finish, and you will be rewarded; for this is the story of one who realized her mission, a mission which falls to the lot of many women--a mission of loneliness with occasional moments of inspiration. It is the history, not of the eternal womanly, but of the eternal virginal. Anna is, like the daughter of Jephthah, a predestined virgin, who does not, like her Hebrew prototype, bewail her maidenhood among the mountains, but accepts it with grave resignation as her lot in life. W. L. COURTNEY. _March 27, 1913._ RUE AND ROSES Chapter I