ime since my company could be called cheering, I'm afraid.
Thorold is `down and out' himself, and he ought to have happy people
about him." He turned his dark eyes upon me with sudden interest.
"Like _you_!" he said emphatically, "like _you_! Excuse a personal
remark, Miss Harding, but you seem to have an eternal flow of vitality.
Thorold and I were talking about you last night, comparing you with
other women of your--er--your generation. We agreed that you left an
extraordinary impression of youth!" He looked at me with wistful eyes.
He was a lonely man, and I was a woman, conveniently at hand, and
possessed of a "feeling heart". An impulse towards confidence struggled
to birth. In his eyes I could see it grow.

"I suppose," he began tentatively, "you have had an easy life?"

"In a material sense--yes! But I have had my trials." A wave of
self-pity engulfed me and quivered in my voice. "I have been separated,
by death or distance, from all my relatives. My best friend is abroad."

"Death--or distance!" he repeated the words in his deep, slow tones, as
though they had struck a note in his own heart. "But distance _is_
death, Miss Harding! The worst kind of death. Desolation without
peace! Thorold thinks himself brokenhearted, but there are men who
would envy him his clean, sweet grief. His sorrow is for himself alone.
She is at peace!"

"Ah," I said quickly, "I know what you mean. When we are quite young,
death seems the crowning loss, but there are worse things--I've
discovered that! I realised it in those terrible days when we feared
for Billie's brain. When you love people very much, it would be a daily
death to know that they were suffering."

He gazed gloomily into the fire.

"It is extraordinary--the capacity for suffering of the human heart!
Physically we are so easily destroyed. An invisible germ will do it,
the prick of a finger, a draught of cold air; but a man can live on,
suffering mental torture, month after month, year after year, and his
weight will hardly decrease by a pound. You read of broken hearts, but
there are no such things! Hearts are invulnerable, torture-proof,
guaranteed to endure all shocks!"

It occurred to me that it was time that Miss Harding exerted her
vitality and stopped this flow of repining. The poor man had evidently
had some tragedy in his life which had warped his outlook. He needed
cheering--we all needed cheering; proverbially the surest way of
che