exceptional and her attitude toward it must remain equally exceptional. And now it must go; its talismanic and sacramental power must rest unappreciated in the hands of another. Yet in selling the bag was she not giving final and practical expression to the impulse of the donor? He had told her, when she had protested against his generosity, that before he was lost in the war his money would be better spent in giving some one something that was desired than in gambling it all away. Equally now would he not say to her that the money were better spent in helping a Queenie than in serving as a symbol rather than as an instrument of love? Or was the intrusion of Queenie into this intimacy of personal communion a kind of sacrilege? The soldier had never intended the bag to acquire any redemptive signification; he had merely chosen Sylvia by chance as the vehicle of one of those acts of sacred egotism which illuminate the divine purpose. It was not to be supposed that the woman with the cruse of ointment was actuated by anything except self-expression, which was precisely what gave her impulse value as an act of worship. The commonplace and utilitarian point of view on that occasion was perfectly expressed by Judas. "And my own point of view about Queenie is not in the least altruistic. I want to give her something of which I have more than my fair share. I am burdened with an overflowing sense of existence. I have attached Queenie to myself and assumed a responsibility for her in exactly the same way as if I had brought a child into the world. There is no false redemptionism about the mother's relation to her child: there is merely a passion to bequeath to the child the sum of her own experience. My feeling about Queenie partakes of the passionate guardianship with which a loose woman so often shields her child. Certainly I must sell the bag. Who knows what chain of good may not weave itself from that soldier's action? To me he gave an imperishable store of love at the very moment when without the assurance of love my faith must have withered. I, in turn, give all that I can give to balance Queenie's life in the way I think it should be balanced. The next purchaser of the bag may, I should like to think without superstition, inherit with it a sacramental of love that will carry on the influence. And the one who first gave it to me? That almond-eyed soldier swept like a grain of chaff before the winnowing-fan of war? At this very moment perhaps the bullet has struck him. He has fallen. His company presses forward or is pressed back. He will lie rotting for days between earth and sky, and when at last they come to bury him they will laugh at the poor scarecrow that was a man. They will speculate neither whence he came nor who may weep for him; but his reward will be in his handiwork, for he will have shown love to a woman and he will have died for his country; such men, like stars, may light a very little of the world's darkness, but they