e moonlight creep along the floor, and heard the cocks crow
at midnight and in the morning; the birds woke with the new day while
she tried to understand the day that had gone, wondering what she must
do and say when she faced the world again only a few hours later.

Sometimes she felt herself carried along upon a rushing tide, and was
amazed that a hundred gifts and conditions to which she had scarcely
given a thought seemed dear and necessary. Once she fancied herself in
a quiet home; living there, perhaps, in that very house, and being
pleased with her ordering and care-taking. And her great profession
was all like a fading dream; it seemed now no matter whether she had
ever loved the studies of it, or been glad to think that she had it in
her power to make suffering less, or prevent it altogether. Her old
ambitions were torn away from her one by one, and in their place came
the hardly-desired satisfactions of love and marriage, and home-making
and housekeeping, the dear, womanly, sheltered fashions of life,
toward which she had been thankful to see her friends go hand in hand,
making themselves a complete happiness which nothing else could match.
But as the night waned, the certainty of her duty grew clearer and
clearer. She had long ago made up her mind that she must not marry.
She might be happy, it was true, and make other people so, but her
duty was not this, and a certainty that satisfaction and the blessing
of God would not follow her into these reverenced and honored limits
came to her distinctly. One by one the reasons for keeping on her
chosen course grew more unanswerable than ever. She had not thought
she should be called to resist this temptation, but since it had come
she was glad she was strong enough to meet it. It would be no real
love for another person, and no justice to herself, to give up her
work, even though holding it fast would bring weariness and pain and
reproach, and the loss of many things that other women held dearest
and best.

In the morning Nan smiled when her aunt noticed her tired look, and
said that the play had been a pursuit of pleasure under difficulties.
And though Miss Prince looked up in dismay, and was full of objections
and almost querulous reproaches because Nan said she must end her
visit within a day or two, she hoped that George Gerry would be, after
all, a reason for the girl's staying. Until Nan, who had been standing
by the window, looking wistfully at the garden, s