Today she has a rendezvous; that is why she seems to take no notice of what is around her.

She looks at her room, and she feels like an intruder in it.. for nothing in this room belongs to her any longer: not the bed that has held her body for so many years, not the chair on which she so often sat facing the window, watching the road, not the wardrobe whose lock would yield to no one but her — even her beloved bookcase no longer stirs in her that old delight, and she will not trouble today to set it in order, since after today it will no longer be hers; and tomorrow, when it becomes another's, what will it matter to her?

Tomorrow?.. Where will she be tomorrow, she wonders?

Is what they tell of eternal life true? Is it a fact that there is a paradise and a fire, and that those who are tormented in this earthly life live in the hereafter in lasting bliss?

If that were true, how happy she would be — then tomorrow she would be in bliss.

She pictures the morrow with a shiver in her heart, fear mingled with joy: fear of the unknown, and joy at what is promised.

Had her yesterday been happy, she would not have gone seeking her happiness in the unknown; but it was a black yesterday, and she hates to picture it, for its memory spoils for her even the pleasure of thinking of tomorrow.

But her mind refuses to obey her in what she wishes, and carries her back to yesterday.. and the events file past before

her imagination.

And she remembers..

She remembers, first of all, losing her mother when she was five. Though at the time she was not of an age to grasp the enormity of the calamity, or to weep for the departed with burning grief, she felt even then a void in her life.. a void left by a heart that had so long filled her loneliness with love. After her mother's death her life ran on at a single pace, exactly as it had before her passing.. lacking nothing but a radiant smile that used to light the sky of that life.

Then the days followed one upon another.. and the true anguish that pained her came when she looked for the first time, with full awareness, into her mirror and understood her reality; the bitterness of that reality appalled her, and from that day her struggle with time began.

She began to see, through the harsh glances, what reminded her always of her sickly body and her plain, ugly face.

God of heaven! How she suffered from those glances in the first years of her youth. But with the passing of time she came to ignore them and to try to forget them; indeed, with habit they no longer pained her as much as at first, for she had surrendered to a kind of despair in which she found rest for her sorrowful soul. She hung upon her lips a half-smile, with which she hid the gloom of her spirit and made those around her believe that she was happy with her life — for her pride would never allow her to accept pity from any human being — any human being whatsoever.

But though she could make people believe in her happiness, she could not deceive herself, or quiet her soul, when there came upon her crimson nights in which she knew no meaning of sleep.. when she would look around her and see her friends delighting in their beauty and youth, while she was the prisoner of that sickly body and that ugly face; and then