Miss Selwyn laid the volume down again, and, still smiling, answered quietly but a shade frostily: "It would take something written with a mixture of raw brandy, blood and vermilion paint to arrest your attention, I believe! Your authors write with--with--an ax in place of a pen. But I can't harrow up my own imagination with their horrors, much less read them aloud!" "An exclusive regime of problem novels, plays and moralizings on pessimistic lines is bad for the mental digestion," admitted Bryant in judicial tones. "Poor girl! I must teach you to live in and love this beautiful, violent, sweet and good old world of ours--the world of real nature, real men and women, and real literature!" "I thank you for your indulgent, patronizing intentions," she flashed back at him. "You would feed butterflies on brawn, teach the bluebird to scream like a macaw, make the trembling, silver-leaved white birches all over into oaks." "My dear Margaret--" stammered Bryant, starting up, but he could not lay the spirit he had raised. "There are questions in life that cannot be settled by the stroke of a sword or ax," she went on. "Your favorite writer has smirched the fair figure of childhood in his brutal pictures of boys' life. He has made an unwholesome, disgusting thing out of what should be and is healthful and fine. How can you, who read him with patience, carp at my taste for what seems to me well thought and well expressed?" "The effect of your favorites upon you to-day has not been particularly reassuring," said Bryant, more stirred by Margaret's tone and manner than by her words. Seeing that he had angered her, and trying to stem the tide of her indignation, he still blundered most flagrantly, and within a half hour the quarrel had culminated in an avowed separation for the rest of their lives, Bryant leaving the house in a state of indignant misery such as fond and over-confident lovers alone may know. Not a word had been said, this time, about the "blue-mouldy" girl. The atmosphere had been too electric, the mood too tense for a laughing word. Then followed silence between these two. Stubborn pride on the part of the woman, proud stubbornness on the part of the man. They were earnestly and faithfully in love, but each waited to hear the first word of forgiveness. Bryant did write, but in his preoccupation left his letter upon the desk unposted, and in a day it was snowed under by his unopened or carelessly glanced at mail. Of course he misunderstood Miss Selwyn's silence and she resented his. One Sunday morning Margaret, with an innate grasping and running back to the faith in which she had been bred, sought help at the source which best suited her--the relief which comes from religion. It so chances that there is a shrine upon the bank of the Ganges. It so chances that there is what we call a Mecca. It so chances that we all occasionally seek our shrines.