ght with
that other Power to win or lose itself, once for all. I do not know: it
seems but just that one should be so left, untrammelled, to choose
between heaven and hell: but who can shake off trammels,--make
themselves naked of their birth and education? I know on that day when
the face of my fate changed, I myself was conscious of no inward
master-struggle: the great Life above and Life below pressed no closer
on me, seemed to wait on no word of mine. It was a busy, vulgar day
enough: each passing moment occupied me thoroughly. I did not look
through them for either God or Death; and as for the deed I did, I had
been drifting to that all my life: it began when I was a pampered,
thin-blooded baby, learning the alphabet from blocks on my mother's lap;
then years followed, succulent to satiety for my hungry brain and
stimulated tastes; a taint of hereditary selfishness played its part,
and so the end came. Yet I know that on that day I entered the gate
through which there is no returning: for, believe me, there are such
ways and gates in life; every day, I see more clearly how far and how
immovably the paths into those other worlds abut into this, and I know
that I, for one, have gone in, and the door is closed behind me. There
is no going back for me into that long-ago time. Only He who led me here
knows how humbly and through what pain I dared to believe this, and dare
to believe that He did lead me,--that it was by no giddy, blear-sighted
free-will of my own that I arrived where I stand to-day.

It was about eighteen months after my marriage that we came to Newport.
But let me go back a few weeks to one evening when my husband first told
me of the failure of the house in which his property was invested; for
it was then, I think, that the terror and the temptation which had beset
my married life first took a definite shape and hold on me.

It was a cool September evening, I remember: a saffronish umber stain
behind the low Hudson hills all that was left of the day's fresh and
harvest-scented heat; the trails of black smoke from the boats against
the sky, the close-shut cottages on the other shore, the very red cows
coming slowly up from the meadow-pool, looking lonesome and cold in the
sharp, blue air. In the library, however, there was a glow of warmth and
light, as usual where Doctor Manning sat. He had been opening the
evening's mail, and laid the last letter on the table, taking off his
glasses in his slow, deli