In the dead, unhappy night, when the rain is on the roof, with what vivid distinctness does memory recall scenes and hopes that are past. Poor Grace hears the winds and the rain as they hold their midnight revels outside, and shudders as the thronging ghosts of memory flit by. Her brief and exquisite wedded happiness, her love for the dark-eyed husband who has wronged her so cruelly--she shudders and tries to put these thoughts away. But she cannot. She has tried before. So long as her child was left, with "baby fingers" to "press him from the mother's breast," she had tried to put her husband away from her heart; tried to be content with his darling little prototype; tried with all the strength of her resolute young soul to crush her love for him. But there are some things that the strongest and bravest of us cannot do. Love is "beyond us all;" the battle is not always to the strong; success does not always crown the bravest efforts. It is something to know that they who fail are sometimes braver than they who succeed. Now, when the little child that was such a darling comfort to her sad, lonely life is so rudely wrested from that yearning heart, her thoughts irresistibly center about the father of her child. She had loved her baby best--the maternal love was more deeply developed in her than the conjugal--but even then her husband had been blessed with a fervent, tender worship that is the overflow of only such deep, strong natures as hers--natures prodigal of sweetness. Latterly, when the terrible news that he had six months before joined the army of France had come to her with all its terrible possibilities, she had only begun to fathom the depths of her unsounded love for him. It amazed herself--she put it from her with angry pain, and rushed into the whirl of social life to keep herself from thinking; wore the mask of smiles above her pain, and sunned herself in the light of admiring eyes, but though fashion and pride and station bowed low to the Senator's deserted wife, acknowledging her calm supremacy still, though sympathy and curiosity--(softly be it spoken) met her with open arms, though the wine-cup circled in the gay and brilliant coterie, it held no Lethean draught for her, and weary and heart-sick she turned from it all, and sought oblivion in the seclusion of home, and the ever welcome company of cheerful Lulu Clendenon. But her heart would not be satisfied thus. Failing in its earthly love and hope, true to itself through all her mistakes and follies, the heaven-born soul yearned for more than all this to fill up its aching vacancy, for more than all this to bind round the tortured heart and keep it from breaking.