There was real gentleness and pity in her smile, and as she rose to stand looking into his face with a winning smile of apology he forgot all his bitterness. "The trouble is with me," he said. "I do not understand the world, and I should keep out of it." "Oh, not at all," she retorted briskly. "You should learn how to live in it." A spark of mischief kindled in her glance as she spoke, and she extended to him the back of her hand. Her smile challenged him, and he had been won and moved by the sympathy of her voice. The hand, too, was so beautiful, so slender, so feminine; he had so keen a longing to be comforted, to be soothed by womanly softness, and to assuage his loneliness by woman's sympathy, that it seemed impossible to resist the invitation of those delicate fingers. He took her hand, and raised it half way to his lips. Then he dropped it abruptly, letting his own arm swing lifelessly to his side. "No," he said bitterly. "I am a priest!" X A SYMPATHY OF WOE Titus Andronicus, iii. 1. The first sensation which returning consciousness brought to Berenice Morison, after the shock of the collision and the feeling that the whole train had been hurled confusedly into space, was that of coming into fresher air as if she were emerging from the depths of the sea. Opening her eyes without comprehending where she was or what had happened, she found herself on the side of an overturned car. Around her were dreadful noises, yells, groans, cries, shouts; her nostrils were filled with the reek of burning stuffs; the light of lanterns and of torches blinded her eyes; a sense of horror oppressed her; appalling calamity which she could not understand seemed to have overtaken her; and she shuddered with terror unspeakable. Her first impulse was to shriek and to attempt to flee from the fearful things which surrounded her; but instantly the self-control of returning reason made itself felt. Berenice found herself supported by a couple of men, and it became clear to her in an instant that she had just been lifted from that pit below where she could see the glint of flame and the blinding smother of smoke, and from which came such heartrending cries that she instinctively tried to cover her ears. In the movement she realized that beside the hold which her rescuers had of her, she was grasped by other arms; that she was in the embrace of a man apparently dead. In the dim light her dazed sense did not recognize him, and she struggled to release herself from the hold of this corpse. "Take him away from me!" she shrieked hysterically in mingled terror and repulsion. "Gently, gently," said one of the men who held her. "He's got killed tryin' to save yer." "If this cut in his arm was in your back," remarked the other, who was unlocking the hands so strongly clasped behind her, "it'd 'a' been a finisher."