f old his voiceless call to one afar off, in some land
where her whiteness, her budding soul, had found their rightful place;
but even as he did so, his thought of her seemed to be growing clearer.
From that far, reverenced, but unimagined sphere she was coming back to
the range of his apprehension, to comradeship in the life which they
once had shared together.

He trembled with the hope of a fuller attainment, lifting his bowed head
and taking another package of the letters from their place. Her letters!
He had begged them of her friends in his desperate sense of ignorance,
his longing to make good something of all that he had lost in those last
two years of her life. What an innocent life it was that was spread
before him; and how young,--oh, how young! And it was a happy life. He
was astonished, after all his self-reproach, to realize how happy; to
find himself smiling with her in some girlish drollery such as used to
come so readily to her lips. He could detect, too, how the note of
gladness, how her whole life, indeed, had grown richer in the larger
existence of Vaucluse. At last he could be comforted that, however it
had ended, it was he who had made it hers.

He had been feeding eagerly, too eagerly, and under the pressure of
emotion was constrained to rise and walk the floor, sinking at last into
his armchair and gazing with unseeing eyes upon the ruddy coals in the
grate. That lovely life, which he had thought could never in its
completeness be his, was rebuilt before his vision from the materials
which she herself had left. What he had believed to be loss, bitter,
unspeakable even to himself, had in these few hours of the night become
wealth.

His quickened thought moved on from plane to plane. He scanned the
present conditions of his life, and saw with clarified vision how good
they were. What it was given him to do for his students, at least what
he was trying to do for them; the preciousness of their regard; the long
friendship with his colleagues; the associations with the little
community in which his lot was cast, limited in some directions as they
might be; the fair demesne of Greek literature in which his feet were so
much at home; his own literary gift, even if a slender one; his dear,
dear child.

And Gertrude? Under the invigoration of his mood a situation which had
long seemed unamenable to change resolved itself into new and simpler
proportions. The worthier aspects of his home life, the fine