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experienced the agony which comes when we battle in dream with the intangible and the dread, when we know it is dream and yet feel it is death.

“It is all my fault,” she cried. She found but that. At the moment she was in that condition which precedes the great commotion of tears, when the strangulation of agony is subsiding and contracted nerves distend. But the tears did not come. The pain was infinite. There was a weight which she felt not without but within, a weight so heavy that she thought she could not bear it. It racked her. Only her mind was active. “It is my fault,” she repeated. Then she added, “And my cross.”

From a crisis such as this, in a nature such as hers, the soul issues as from an orgy. It has supped on sorrow. It is fed. It ceases to look back. It looks forward, marveling indeed that it should look at all, yet looking. Life’s burdens are more bearable than the despairful think. Until the eyes are closed and the heart no longer beats, in some way, somehow, they can be carried.

Sylvia took up her cross. It was leaden. But in the effort she was aided. Pride helped her. The assistance of pride may be poor, yet is it not better than none? To Sylvia it was useful. It enabled her to answer Fanny’s letter.

“You have my congratulations, Fanny dear,” she wrote, “all of them, my best and warmest, and so has Arthur too. Please say so to him and tell him that, in marrying by dearest friend, he and I must be dear friends also.”

Then the tears did come, swiftly, like the ripple of the rain. On the table where she sat she put her head down and sobbed, paroxysmally, as sobs a child.