One had to see her apart, and note the quick, urgent step, the independent, lofty poise of her head, and the steadfastness of the tired eyes, and firm, strong mouth, to feel that life had given her a heavy burden, which only a noble soul could have supported with heroism. As she left the portals of the General Post Office she hesitated a few seconds as to her direction. “Should she go straight back to the little flat in Holloway, or should she go west, and get the drawing-paper Basil was wanting?” Doris could easily get the drawing-paper the next day, if she chose; and at the flat Dudley Pritchard would have arrived for the evening. She surmised hastily that it was extremely probable Doris had made some other engagement for herself that she would be unwilling to delay, and that Dudley would in no wise regret her own tardy return. The last thought caused her eyes to grow a little strained, as she walked quickly westwards—strained with the determination to face the fact unflinchingly, and try to overcome the deep, insistent ache it caused. But the love of a lifetime is not dismissed at will, and looking a little pitifully backward, though she was but twenty-eight, Ethel felt she could not remember the time when she did not love Dudley Pritchard, though it had perhaps only crystallised into the great feature of her life at the time when, in silent, heroic endeavour, he had given of all he had to win his friend back to life and health. It was Dudley’s careful savings that he had paid for the great specialist and the big operation; Dudley’s courage and devotion that had nerved the stricken man to take up the awful burden of perpetual invalidism; Dudley’s never-failing encouragement and friendship that helped him still to bear the dreary months of utter weariness, in the little home kept together by his sister’s salary. High up in the dreary-looking block of flats in Holloway, attended through the day by the erratic ministrations of Doris, and at night by the yearning tenderness of Ethel, Basil Hayward dragged out a weary martyrdom, that prayed only for release. In vain Ethel murmured over him, that to work for him was a glory compared to what it would be to live without him; in the silent, tedious hours of her absence, his soul broke itself in hopeless, passionate protest against the decree that compelled him to accept his daily bread at the hands of the sister he would gladly have striven for day and night. It as a martyrdom across which one can but draw a curtain, and stand “eyes frontt”. Look this way, look that, what answer is there, what reason, what explanation, of the hidden martyrdoms of the work-a-day world, which the blank wall of heaven seems to regard with utter unconcern? Mankind today is less disposed than ever of yore to calmly fold the hands and say, “It is the will of God.” They can no longer do so honestly without either blaming or criticising the Divine Will that not merely permits, but is said to send, such martyrdoms.