Of all cruel gifts, is not that which lingered in Pandora’s box the one through which men suffer most fiercely? O Hope! if thou hadst escaped along with the rest of the heathen god’s blessings, how many tortured souls would now be at rest in a fixed and accepted grief which struggles not, neither rebels at the decrees of destiny! Unquenchable art thou, robbing sad mortals of all repose; even in death shall they not find rest; thou troublest the dying with thy visions of a future! With resolute hands sorrowing women seize upon thee, and would stifle thee in their breasts; but though thou dost sometimes simulate death, when the watchful hands loosen their hold thou springest up stronger and more cruel than before, and tormentest the sufferer with thy struggles! "If it would only die--if it would only die!" moaned Millicent, as she paced her room, her hands crossed heavily upon her breast, as if to stifle some tangible spark with their weight. A thousand times she submitted to the rest of a despair which was all too quickly routed by the fever of a hope which could not die. CHAPTER XVI. "If we should part and pass to separate ways With stifled sigh, averted head, Within a land where centuries are as days Our love shall live though flesh and wrong lie dead." And her lover, where was he? In the heart of the city, working in a garret on his great picture, for the sake of which he had forsaken the woman he loved. Intolerant of opposition was Graham; and when once an idea had been accepted by him, it was next to an impossibility for him to give it up. He had become convinced that his love for Millicent would make him faithless to his work; that the love of woman was not compatible with the highest devotion to art. Her fond dependence on him would drain his strength. Without his work he could neither be satisfied nor satisfy her. The closer she clung to him the more did he recoil from her. In the strength of his genius, he laughed at the idea that a loving companionship was necessary to him; and yet hours came, at the end of a long day’s work, in the quiet watches of the night when the city slept about him, in which all his theories were overset, in a terrible longing for the girl whose sad eyes haunted him. To see her and to touch her; to hear her low, deep voice; to forget all the grievous striving of his life, in the restful warmth of hers! He thought of her always as he had first seen her, lying before the fire, her slender figure robed in white, her head supported in the hands which he had so often caressed. Waiting for him, she seemed to have been then. Waiting for him, he loved to fancy her always. These tender thoughts drifted through his mind in the soft twilight, or before the dawn. In the fervid daylight he only remembered her as she had been on that last evening, rebellious and close-clinging, desperate, beautiful, and full of unrest.