What had she to live for? The brief romance of her girlhood was all she had ever known of the love which for most women means a life history. For her it had been only the beginning of a chapter--ending in self-sacrifice, as blind and piteously faithful to duty as Abraham's obedience to the Divine command. And after all those years of fond fidelity to a memory, she had seen her lover again--once for a few minutes--by stealth, through an open window, undreamt of by him. What had she to live for? A son whose restless spirit would not allow him to be her companion and friend--in whose feverish life she was of so little value that he could leave her for a pilgrimage to Central Africa, with a brief good-bye; as if it were a small thing for mother and son to live with half the world between them. It seemed to her sometimes, brooding upon the past year, that Allan Carew had cared for her more, was more in sympathy with her, than that very son--as if some hereditary sentiment, some mystic link with the father who had loved her, brought the son nearer to her heart. And now they were both so distant that she thought of them almost as mournfully as if they were dead. Dark clouds of trouble hung over their forms, as she tried to see them in that far-off world, ever impending dangers which haunted her in her dreams, until the words of St. Paul burnt themselves into her brain, and she would awake from some dream of horror, hearing her own voice, with that awful sound of the dreamer's voice, repeating-- "In journeyings ... in perils of waters, in perils of robbers ... in perils by the heathen ... in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea ... in weariness and painfulness ... in hunger and thirst." * * * * * Suzette had been absent for nearly a year, and Suzette's absence had increased the sense of loss and deepened the gloom of the rambling old house, and those picturesque gardens, where the girl's bright face and graceful figure flitting in and out from arch to arch, between the walls of ilex or yew, had been a living gladness that seemed only a natural accompaniment to spring flowers, sulphur butterflies, and the deepening purple of the beeches, in the joyous awakening of the year. But Suzette had returned from her travels nearly a year since, and had taken up the thread of life again, and with it her old friendship for Mrs. Wornock, feeling herself secure from the risk of all violent emotions in her friend's house, now that Geoffrey was a good many thousand miles away.