ve married. Love is not any guide to happiness. Remember
that, Magdalen. We were both weak. He was weak and domineering. I was
weak and yielding. I don't know which is the worst."

As the shadows deepened all the tacit unforgiveness of a weak,
down-trodden nature which has been vanquished by life whispered from the
brink of the grave.

"I have never been loved. I have given everything, and I have had
nothing back. Nothing. Nothing. Don't marry, Magdalen. Men are all like
that. Lots of women say the same. They take everything and they give
nothing. It is our own fault. We rear them to it from their cradles.
From their schooldays we teach them that everything is to give way to
them, beginning with the sisters. With men it is Take, Take, Take, until
we have nothing left to give. I went bankrupt years ago. There is
nothing left in me. I _have_ nothing and I _am_ nothing. I'm not dying
now. I have been dead for years."

* * * * *

"You say I am going to be at peace, Magdalen, but how do you know? I
daresay I'm not. I daresay I am going to hell, but if I do I don't care.
I don't care where I go so long as it is somewhere where there aren't
any more husbands, and housekeeping, and home, weary, weary home, and
complaints about food. I don't want ever to see anything again that I
have known here. I am so tired of everything. I am tired to death."

* * * * *

Poor mother and poor daughter.

Who shall say what Magdalen's thoughts were as she supported her
mother's feeble steps down to the grave. Perhaps she learned at
seventeen what most of us only learn late, so late, when life is half
over.

Bitterness, humiliation, the passionate despair of the heart which has
given all and has received nothing,--these belong not to the armed band
of Love's pilgrims, though they dog his caravan across the desert.

These are only the vultures and jackal prowlers in Love's wake, ready to
pounce on the faint hearted pilgrim who through weakness falls into the
rear, where fang and talon lie in wait to swoop down and rend him.

If we adventure to be one of Love's pilgrims we must needs be long
suffering and meek, if we are to win safe with him across the desert,
and see at last his holy city.

* * * * *

Tears welled up into Magdalen's eyes as one piteous scene after another
came back to her, enacted in this very room.

Poor little mother, wh