retched before her poor eyes, half-blind with
their woman's weeping.

"O Galilaean, Thou hast conquered," were the words that came to her
when the crucial test had been passed, and she had parted with her
beloved.

Those were sad days at the Wood House, and there were sadder days still
at Rome; but she lived through them, and Elizabeth helped her; and so
by and bye the light of a new dawn--a little gray and misty perhaps,
but still dawn--opened before Dinah's tired eyes.

"I loved much and I prayed much, and God answered my prayers," she said
long afterwards.

But the wound was wide and deep and healed slowly, and it was not until
Douglas Fraser had married a noble-hearted and beautiful woman, whom he
called his Lady of Consolation, that Dinah recovered a measure of her
former cheerfulness. But the day she heard that he was no longer an
agnostic was always kept by her as a festival. Then indeed the cup of
her pure joy seemed full to the very brim.

He had come right, and now all was well with him and with her too. Pain
and loss had been his teachers, and great indeed was her reward.

"It was your renunciation and sacrifice that first opened my eyes," he
wrote. "I know now how rightly you acted. If I had married you then--if
my entreaties had prevailed--I should never have made you happy. My
dear Agnes has taught me this." And this cherished letter was Dinah's
treasure.

She and Dr. Fraser seldom met--not more than once a year--but from time
to time he wrote to her, and his wife and children were very dear to
her.

"I cannot understand it," Elizabeth had more than once said. But Dinah
could furnish no explanation: she only knew that it was so--that her
life was a happy one, and that she asked for nothing more.

Douglas and his wife were her dearest friends, and Lettice, her sweet
god-daughter, ranked next to Cedric in her heart.

With so many to love, how could life fail to satisfy her! "And it so
short--so short," she would say to herself. "One sees so little of
one's friends here; but one will have plenty of time to enjoy them in
Paradise."

Continuity of life--continuity of love, this was Dinah's simple creed,
but it kept her young and happy.

"Dinah has the secret of perpetual youth," Elizabeth would say to her
friend Mrs. Godfrey; but she generally ended with a sigh, "If only I
were like her!"

CHAPTER XXII

"TWO MAIDEN LADIES OF UNCERTAIN AGE"

How poor a thing is man! Alas, 'tis true