like a dreadful nightmare, feeling one's way through this darkness--and
when you are so silent, I feel as if you were a ghost like all the rest,
instead of a real live man."

"I wish I were!" returned the stranger bitterly. Then recovering
himself with an effort, "I beg your pardon," he said. "I am afraid I
have been very remiss. To tell the truth, I was lost in my own thoughts
when you came to me a few minutes ago, and I am afraid I had gone back
to them, and forgotten that I had a companion!"

Forgotten! Forgotten her very existence! A young man rescues a
beauteous maid--really and truly she had looked unusually well in all
her smart Christmas farings--from a position of deadly peril, and
straightway forgets her very existence! This part of the story, at
least, must be omitted from the home recital. Betty pursed her lips in
offended dignity, but in the end curiosity got the better of her
annoyance, and she said tentatively--

"They must have been very nice thoughts!"

"Nice!"

The foolish girl's word was repeated in a tone of bitterest satire.

"Interesting, then?"

"In so far as the last of anything is interesting, be the beginning what
it may!"

"The last!" It was Betty's turn to play the part of echo, as she stared
in amazement at the shadowy form by her side. "How could they be your
last thoughts? You seem quite well and strong. It isn't possible to go
on living and not to think."

"No, it is not, and therefore when thoughts become unbearable--"

He stopped short, and Betty felt a thrill of foreboding. The strange
silence, followed by the hopeless bitterness in the stranger's voice,
seemed to bespeak some trouble of overwhelming magnitude, and, viewed in
that light, his last words admitted of only one conclusion. Life had
become unbearable, and therefore he had decided to end it. Hitherto
Betty had carelessly classed all suicides as mad; but this man was not
mad; he was, on the contrary, remarkably sane and quiet in manner! He
was only so hopelessly, helplessly miserable that it did not seem
possible to endure another day's existence. Betty thrilled with a
strange new feeling of awe and responsibility. The hidden strength of
her nature, which had come to her as the result of being brought up to
womanhood in a household dedicated to God and His Christ, broke through
the veneer of youthful folly, and came triumphantly to the surface.

Her nervous fear dropped from her like a mantle, a