e thought like this was passing through the mind of Miss Minola Grey,
who sat on the steps of the tomb and looked up into the faces
illustrative of man's struggle and final success. Life had long been
wearing a hard and difficult appearance to her, and she would perhaps
have been glad enough sometimes if she could have got into the haven of
quiet waters which, in the minds of so many people and in so many
symbolic representations, is made to stand for Eternity. She was a
handsome, graceful girl, rather tall, fair-haired, with deep bluish gray
eyes which seemed to darken as they looked earnestly at any one--eyes
which might be described in Matthew Arnold's words as "too expressive to
be blue, too lovely to be gray"--with a broad forehead, from which the
hair was thrown back in disregard of passing fashions. Perhaps it was
her attitude, as she leaned her chin upon her hand and looked up at the
mausoleum--perhaps it was the presence of that gloomy building
itself--that made her face seem like an illustration of melancholy.
Certainly her face was pale and a little wanting in fulness, and the
lips were of the kind that one can always think of as tremulous with
emotion of some kind. This was a beautiful summer evening, and all the
park around was green, sunny, and glad. The dry bare spot on which the
tomb was built seemed like a gray and withering leaf on a bright branch;
and the figure of the girl was more in keeping with the melancholy
shadow of the mausoleum than the joyousness of the sun and the trees and
the whole scene all around.

Indeed, there was a good deal of melancholy in the girl's mind at that
moment. She was taking leave of the place: had come to say it a
farewell. That park had been her playground, her studio, her stage, her
world of fancy and romance and poetry since her infancy. She had driven
her brother as a horse there, and had played with him at hunting lions.
She had studied landscape drawing there from the days when a half
staggery stroke with some blotches out of it was supposed to represent a
tree, and a thing shaped like the trade-mark on Mr. Bass's beer bottles
stood for a mountain. As she grew up she came there to read and to idle
and to think. There she revelled in all the boundless fancies and
extravagant ambitions of a clever, half-poetic child. There she was in
turn the heroine of every book that delighted her, and the heroine of
stories which had never been put into print. Heroes of surpassing