devotion had ever joined her to it and she gave herself over wholly to the love of her brother, whom she is older than by a few years, to make of herself a mother for him, tending him as far as tending could reach, and doting on him wherever she found a way,

and that this knot of the soul, whose grip had tightened without respite or truce, might be tamed.

But the fates, or chance, or life itself laughs mockingly a second time at her values

For here is the father she had so long admired, whose fine qualities she had sung —

here he deals her a blow in her good opinion of him, and takes another woman to wife, whom she strives with all her might to regard as a mother

to please the father she still loves and please the conscience she carries and please the pride that holds petty things at a distance yet scarcely does she succeed... or find rest

and behold, she withdraws still further into herself as though this soul had never known happiness for a day, nor exulted in the charms of life

And the generous heart, amid all this, throbs with a violent throbbing and the soul enamored of ideals

takes blow upon blow, with a calm that fills her eyes with tears and her lips with a counterfeit smile.

And the beloved brother, of whose character she had tried to make a living model for the pure-hearted young — and did not succeed, reaping from him nothing but obstinacy and vanity beyond all bounds —

behold, she despairs of him for the last time, and it is as though in this despair she had cut whatever firm

ties there were between herself and life.

And it seemed to her that she no longer needed any creature

in whom to prove her existence and it seemed to her likewise that there was no creature who needed her any more...

Well then, what is there to join her to life?!

And why should she live?!! But the hidden powers of youth,

which labor always to embroider events in splendid colors holding much of the beauty of courage, or of the beauty of self-denial, were casting over her life a bright hue from the legend of heroism.

Until she feels herself as if playing a part in some fanciful tale that bears no relation to her real life.

She is therefore intoxicated, exul-tant to the point of tears with this part, proud of it, answering to it and so she returns to life as one athirst and yearning returns

but with the step of one who takes one pace forward and another back.. For the doubt crouching upon the small breast

was not easily lifted and cast, all at once, beyond her own inner bounds. Could it be! Was all this prepared with wisdom to cast her, without thought or design, into loving him — him alone, apart from all mankind —

with a chaste, overwhelming devo-tion holding the monk's worship and his austere world, and the sup-pliant's pleading and his contented realm —

him — that one who kept pace, step by step, with the dreams of her growing years

so that she never ceased soaring with him high, and very high

until she came to see nothing of the past of her innocent childhood but him.

And that past came to gather itself, all of it, into a single interval of her girlhood, and into a single place

there where she saw him for the first time — and it is as if she sees him through a thick fog — with his slender frame and his lively smile beneath that chinaberry tree tenting

with its gathered boughs over her western window looking out upon the garden of the house where she used to stand for long hours

despite her nine boisterous years, to delight in the sight of the people of the house whom she loved

as they came and went about the deep well

and the neighing of her father's mare reaching her ears

with the trot of the dark colt's hooves like dancing melodies

and the horizon as the evening twilight began to tinge it.

All of that would appear to her as though it bore a translucent stamp of bliss

when he made his way to her, weary from the long journey, to say to her in his low voice,

brushing a fair lock from his brow: Is it you... cousin?!