rise. Her lips
quivered, and the fingers of her hands interlaced till the muscles
showed white beneath skin. She asked no more questions, and Grizel
stood by her side, watching in silence for the first sight of that which
was to be her reward. She waited many minutes, but it came at last,
shining forth more and more strongly as the shock and the pain lost
their keenness,--a look of relief!

Cassandra's shoulders heaved, she drew a long, fluttering breath, and
her eyes grew moist with tears.

"Oh, thank God. _Over_! I have been dreading, how I have been
dreading... Grizel, Grizel, if you only knew--"

"I _did_ know! Every minute of the day you would have been with them,--
following them, seeing, imagining, _hearing_, torturing yourself,
squandering your strength! My dear, I am a woman too! I did know. So
I lied, and the day passed by in peace, here with the dear nuns, and you
knew nothing--nothing!"

"Thank God!" cried Cassandra again. "It was a blessed lie. I shall be
thankful to you all my life for what it spared me, Grizel. It's a
weight rolled off."

She stood silent, with drawn brows, nerving herself to the new facts.
Dane married. Dane a husband. Dane happy with his girl wife. For he
_would_ be happy. Cassandra realised that fact, and the acknowledgment
brought with it, not joy, but at least a chastened relief. He would
never altogether forget the woman who had been his ideal mate, but as a
sane, honest man he would thrust the thought of her farther and farther
into the background, while the tendrils of affection would twine more
closely round wife and child. Teresa had been brave and patient; now
she would have her reward. The husband of the future would be more her
lover than the bridegroom of to-day.

Cassandra leant her arms on the low walls, and gazed over the country
beneath. All was flat, and bare, and uninteresting, one square meadow
succeeding another, divided by the same dwarfed line of hedgeway; a
monotonous outlook, beautified only where the sun lent the glory of
colour.

"And so," said Cassandra slowly, "it all ends! ... I waited for a big
thing to fill my heart, and it came, and was more wonderful, more
beautiful, than I had ever imagined... And it passed, and I am left to
go on. All my life is before me, but the big thing has passed. Grizel!
it doesn't seem possible that it should all be over..."

"You are thirty-two, Cassandra. The big things of life are not all o