One afternoon she felt so lonely, desolate and hopeless that she felt she must go out of herself. The future was taking on an aspect hard to face. Disposed to self-sacrifice, she was wretchedly conscious that there was nothing on which she could bestow a devotion which could sustain or inspire. There was no future to look forward to, no cause to be furthered, no goal to be reached by brave, patient effort. If she had lived at the time of the war she would have loved scarcely less than her mother, but her heart would have been almost equally divided between the cause and those who fought and suffered for it. If her lot had been cast in the North it would have been much the same. The same patriotic motives would have kindled her imagination and produced the most intense loyalty in thought and action. She was endowed with a spirit which, had she lived in the past, might easily have led her into an effort to restore some overthrown dynasty, and she would have so idealized even a very questionable conspiracy as to render it worthy, in her belief, of unstinted self-sacrifice. A girl of her character would have faced the wild beasts of the Roman amphitheatre for the sake of her faith, or she would have intrigued against the Spanish Inquisition although hourly conscious that she was exposing herself to its horrors. It was this very tendency to give herself up wholly to some object which she felt had a supreme claim upon her, that had enabled her to live so long upon the memories of the past. The lost cause, for which her father had died, had been as sacred to her as the old dream of freedom to a Pole, but Clancy's question in regard to the old phase of her life, "What good will it do?" combining with other circumstances, had awakened her to the futility of her course. Denied the hope of any future achievement, lacking a powerful motive to sacrifice herself and her love, her strong nature chafed and tended to despondency at the thought of a simple existence. It was not enough merely to earn a living and live. She craved an inspiring object, an antidote for her heartache, a consciousness that in giving up much she also accomplished much. Yet the future stretched away like an arid plain and she was depressed by the foreboding that every step carried her further from all that could give zest to life. She was, therefore, in a mood to accept anything which would relieve the dreary monotony. On the afternoon in question she decided to call upon an old lady who had lost nearly all her kindred and property. "Surely," thought the girl, "she has nothing to look forward to in this world but a few more straitened years, then death. I wish I were as old as she."