with all the tenderness a mother can have; and he would yield to the calls of this tenderness, of which he had been deprived as a child, and which he refused as a grown man.

And he in his turn would care for her, as completely as a man can, thrusting his personal inclinations behind him, pressing on, as far as he was able, in the settled life she loved.

And on the evenings when the moon did not appear to light his hard road, she would stand on the balcony of his modest house, waiting for him the long hours, as he came back late from his work and hurried up to her, eagerness for the sight of her spurring him on; and when he was almost arrived, he would whistle her a tune she loved from him, and how quickly she would answer him with sung syllables she had taken from him for diversion, and meet him at the door, happiness leaping from her beautiful eyes.

And through the evening, and over the meal, he would ply her with his jokes and recount to her the novel pranks that had come his way in the daytime. And the little house would ring with her laughter, joyous and unruly.

And when she laid her head on the pillow to sleep, he would insist on telling her one of his delightful tales, after putting out the light and taking to his bed. For he knew that his pampered sister had been accustomed, from childhood, never to fall asleep at night except upon a new story, whose monotonous murmur would lull her until she drowsed off into virgin dreams of dancing hopes.

xxxx

Can she, then, wipe all this from the record of her past, casting

away that huge, crowded record — the wide expanse upon whose radiant smiles she opened her eyes for the first time?

From here there began to form, in the folds of her subconscious mind, a new complex, nearer to pessimism than to the generous outlook and the sound nature.

And from here this pessimism began to peer out whenever

it found a way to prove its existence, only to draw back and hide again behind her overwhelm-ing humanity, which also seeks to prove its existence in every moment of creation and of giving — strong, responsive, genuine.

But scarcely does she do so before she falls back, as though she had been flung from a great height, to writhe in her death-throes between dust and blood.