you to see me, I took a stolen
glance at the theatre myself----"

"I have left it, my lord."

"Left it?"

And then she told him what she had done. His old eyes glistened and his
head sank into his breast.

"It wasn't that I came to talk about, my lord, but another and more
painful matter."

"Can I relieve you of the burden of your message, my child? It has
reached me already. It is in all the morning newspapers."

"I didn't think of that. Still the doctor told me to----"

"What does the doctor say about him?"

"He says----"

"Yes?"

"He says we are going to lose him."

"I have sent for a great surgeon--But no doubt it is past help. Poor boy!
It seems only yesterday he came up to London so full of hope and
expectation. I can see him now with his great eyes, sitting in that chair
you occupy, talking of his plans and purposes. Poor John! To think he
should come to this! But these tumultuous souls whose hearts are
battlefields, when the battle is over what can be left but a waste?"

Glory's eyes had dried of themselves and she was looking at the old man
with an expression of pain, but he went on without observing her:

"It is one of the dark riddles of the inscrutable Power which rules over
life that the good man can go under like that, while the evil one lives
and prospers."

He rose and walked to and fro before the fireplace. "Ah, well! The years
bring me an ever-deepening sadness, an ever-increasing sense of our
impotence to diminish, the infinite sorrow of the world."

Then he looked down at Glory and said: "But I can hardly forgive him that
he has thrown away so much for so little. And when I think of you, my
child, and of all that might have been, and then of the bad end he has
come to----"

"But I don't call it coming to a bad end, sir," said Glory in a quivering
voice.

"No? To be torn and buffeted and trampled down in the streets?"

"What of it? He might have died of old age in his bed and yet come to a
worse end than that."

"True, but still----"

"If that is coming to a bad end I shall have to believe that my father,
who was a missionary, came to a bad end too when he was killed by the
fevers of Africa. Every martyr comes to a bad end if that is a bad
ending. And so does everybody who is brave and true and does good to
humanity and is willing to die for it. But it isn't bad. It's glorious! I
would rather be the daughter of a man who died like that than be the
daughter of an earl, and