with faded crimson cushions. “Oh, it is useless! It is too late, now!” she cried, hopelessly, as she paced the floor, and the weight of her past life hung heavy upon her. The roots of it lay too deep, she told herself, to be torn out. She was already too tainted with the dust of that outer world, too febrile, too passionately avid of movement and change. The contrast was too great. They would make it too hard for her, too rigidly exacting. For what did _they_ know of the dark and complicated and compelling currents of the real world, lapped in their gentle backwaters of old-world clerical life, secluded and sheltered and untried! She would still have been one of them, if her paths had been theirs, if she had only breathed the quiet air they breathed! “It is too hard!” she moaned, in her misery. The test of life itself was so crucial—that was the thought that kept recurring to her—the ordeal by fire was foredoomed to be so exacting! All their old lessons and creeds, which she had once chimed so innocently and so cordially, now seemed to fall empty and enigmatic on her older and wiser heart. They seemed to solve none of her imminent problems. Their mysticism only bewildered her. And she sat amid the roar of London, idle and sick at heart, unhearing and unseeing. “I will do it!” she at last said aloud. “It will be my punishment!” She could no longer demand so much of life. She looked on existence, now, with older and disillusioned eyes. For what she had taken she must stand ready to pay. It would be her penance and penalty for past transgressions. And it would have to be borne; it was obligatory. It was not happiness or well-being that was at stake, she argued, in that new mood of amendment; it was something vast and undying and eternal within her, something that came before happiness itself, something she had seen her defiant and broken and dying father ignore and surrender and suffer for. While this new expiatory passion was still warm in her blood, she packed her boxes, soberly, and then as soberly wrote to Durkin. It was not a long letter, but she spent much time and thought in its composition. In it, too, she seemed to cast off her last vestige of hesitation. For she felt that the very note of impersonality in its unnatural stiffness of phrasing was a new means of support. It was a support as clumsy and retarding as a child’s walking-chair, but she was willing enough to catch at it, whimsically, in those first tottering steps of renunciation.