Oliver!--No hope for him?--at thirty-six! His career broken--his ambition defeated. Nothing before him but the decline of power and joy; nights of barren endurance, separating days empty and tortured; all natural pleasures deadened and destroyed; the dying down of all the hopes and energies that make a man. She threw herself down beside the open window, burying her face on her knees. Would they never let her go to him?--never let her say to him: "Oliver, take me!--you did love me once--what matters what came between us? That was in another world. Take my life--crush out of it any drop of comfort or of ease it can give you! Cruel, cruel--to refuse! It is mine to give and yours to spend!" Juliet Sparling's daughter. There was the great consecrating, liberating fact! What claim had she to the ordinary human joys? What could the ordinary standards and expectations of life demand from her? Nothing!--nothing that could stem this rush of the heart to the beloved--the forsaken and suffering and overshadowed beloved. Her future?--she held it dross--apart from Oliver. Dear Sir James!--but he must learn to bear it--to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for herself. What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but just this: to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver--to bring him the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love? And if it were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena, where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and throw herself blindly into the fight. Perhaps some heavenly voice might still speak through it; perhaps, beyond its jar, some ineffable reunion might dawn-- "First a peace out of pain--then a light--then thy breast!..." She trembled through and through. Restraining herself, she rose, and went to her locked desk, taking from it the closely written journal of her father's life, which had now been for months the companion of her thoughts, and of the many lonely moments in her days and nights. She opened on a passage tragically familiar to her: "It is an April day. Everything is very still and balmy. clouds are low, yet suffused with sun. They seem to be tangled among the olives, and all the spring green and flowering fruit trees are like embroidery on a dim yet shining background of haze, silvery and glistening in the sun, blue and purple in the shadows. The beach-trees in the olive garden throw up their pink spray among the shimmering gray leaf and beside the gray stone walls. Warm breaths steal to me over the grass and through the trees; the last brought with it a strong scent of narcissus. A goat tethered to a young tree in the orchard has reared its front feet against the stem, and is nibbling at the branches. His white back shines amid the light spring shade.