of this girl, she should have striven so eagerly to throw this light over the future.  Commoner natures have done more and hoped less.  It was a poor gift, you think, this of the labor of a life for so plain a duty; hardly heroic.  She knew it.  Yet, if there lay in this coming labor any pain, any wearing effort, she clung to it desperately, as if this should banish, it might be, worse loss.  She tried desperately, I say, to clutch the far, uncertain hope at the end, to make happiness out of it, to give it to her silent hungry heart to feed on.  She thrust out of sight all possible life that might have called her true self into being, and clung to this present shallow duty and shallow reward.  Pitiful and vain so to cling!  It is the way of women.  As if any human soul could bury that which might have been in that which is!

The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes, heeded the transient flush of enthusiasm but little.  Even the pleasant cheery talk that pleased her father so was but surface-deep, he knew.  The woman he must conquer for his great end lay beneath, dark and cold.  It was only for that end he cared for her.  Through what cold depths of solitude her soul breathed faintly mattered little.  Yet an idle fancy touched him, what a triumph the man had gained, whoever he might be, who had held the master-key to a nature so rare as this, who had the kingly power in his hand to break its silence into electric shivers of laughter and tears,—­terrible subtle pain, or joy as terrible.  Did he hold the power still, he wondered?  Meanwhile she sat there quiet, unread.

The evening came on, slow and cold.  Life itself, the Doctor thought, impatiently, was cool and tardy here among the hills.  Even he fell into the tranquil tone, and chafed under it.  Nowhere else did the evening gray and sombre into the mysterious night impalpably as here.  The quiet, wide and deep, folded him in, forced his trivial heat into silence and thought.  The world seemed to think there.  Quiet in the dead seas of fog, that filled the valleys like restless vapor curdled into silence; quiet in the listening air, stretching gray up to the stars,—­in the solemn mountains, that stood motionless, like hoary-headed prophets, waiting with uplifted hands, day and night, to hear the Voice, silent now for centuries; the very air, heavy with the breath of the sleeping pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like some human voice weary with preaching to unbelieving hearts of a peace on earth.  This man’s heart was unbelieving; he chafed in the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling mockery to a sick and hungry world,—­a dead torpor of indifference.  Years of hot and turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret of the night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with the needs and suffering of the countless lives that hemmed him in, to accept the great prophetic calm.  He was blind to the prophecy written on the earth since the day God first bade it tell thwarted man of the great To-Morrow.