Ernestine was alone in the laboratory one bright morning in December. Mr. Beason had just gone away after assuring her anew that she had a very great deal to learn. Perhaps it was funny, but one was not always in the mood for humorous things. Sometimes one felt more like putting one's head down on the table and having a good cry. Her hands were not quite steady, as she went about the work Beason had patronisingly left for her to do, and out of the mists which blinded her there came a picture of her own quiet studio at home, where she had worked with her own things, things with which she was supreme. She saw herself at her easel, working in that quick, sure way of hers, no one to tell her some one else could do it a great deal better, and that it was extremely doubtful whether she could ever do anything at all. A longing to be back there doing the things she knew she could do, a longing to have again that sure sense of her work as good, swept over her then. She was accustomed to a sense of mastery; it was that made some of these things so hard. It was not easy to make over one's soul, even when it was love called one on. As she went steadily ahead with her task, working out painstakingly the correction Beason had made, she wondered whether there were as many tears back of other smiles as there had often been back of hers. But she had been able to smile!--that was something for which to give thanks. Not even Karl himself would ever know what she had gone through, but what she had gone through was of small consequence could she but push her way on to what she was confident awaited her. There was sustaining power in that thought: her hands did not tremble now, her eyes were clear; she worked on steadily and firmly. One thing which had unnerved her was that Karl had seemed to hate to have her go away that morning. He had followed her out into the hall. "Working so hard, liebchen?" he said--and was it not wistfully? Perhaps he had not felt like work himself and had wanted her to stay at home with him. It hurt cruelly to think Karl might not understand her willingness to be away from him so much. His presence was always with her in the laboratory. The days brought a very clear picture of Karl at work there, a new understanding of his adjustment to his work, firmer comprehension of his love for it. Often a sense of the terribleness and wrongness of his disaster would rush over her, crowding her heart with the old rebellion and bitterness. Again and again she lived through the hour Karl had spent there alone, facing the truth, and then a horror of those things with which she worked, those awful things which had destroyed Karl's eyes, would take hold of her as a physical fear, a repulsion, almost impossible to fight.