COMPREHENSIBLE

truth of her feelings to trust. All these things she had, and for these things I

clung to her.

For these things I would have crawled on with her for twenty years, if for

twenty years longer her life of endurance had been protracted. But another

decree was written. It seemed I must be stimulated into action. I must be

goaded, driven, stung, forced to energy. My little morsel of human affec-

tion, which I prized as if it were a solid pearl, must melt in my fingers and

slip thence like a dissolving hailstone. My small adopted duty must be

snatched from my easily contented conscience. I had wanted to compromise

with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life

of privation and small pains. Fate would not so be pacified; nor would Prov-

idence sanction this shrinking sloth and cowardly indolence.

One February night— I remember it well— there came a voice near Miss