d none because she had not died in time. Ah! had not
he heard somewhere that the soul is immortal and never dies? Where
then was Ida's? She had disappeared utterly out of the universe. She
had been transformed, destroyed, swallowed up in this woman, a living
sepulchre, more cruel than the grave, for it devoured the soul as well
as the body. Pah! this prating about immortality was absurd, convicted
of meaninglessness before a tragedy like this; for what was an
immortality worth that was given to her last decrepit phase of life,
after all its beauty and strength and loveliness had passed soulless
away? To be aught but a mockery immortality must be as manifold as
the manifold phases of life. Since life devours so many souls, why
suppose death will spare the last one?

But he would contend with destiny. Painters should multiply the face
in his locket. He would immortalize her in a poem. He would constantly
keep the lamp trimmed and burning before her shrine in his heart. She
should live in spite of the woman.

But he could now never make amends to her for the suffering his cruel,
neglectful youth had caused her. He had scarcely realized before how
much the longing to make good that wrong had influenced his quest of
her. Tears of remorse for an unatonable crime gathered in his eyes. He
might indeed enrich this woman, or educate her children, or pension
her husband; but that would be no atonement to Ida.

And then as if to intensify that remorse by showing still more clearly
the impossibility of atonement, it flashed on him that he who loved
Ida was not the one to atone for an offence of which he would be
incapable, which had been committed by one who despised her love.
Justice was a meaningless word, and amends were never possible, nor
can men ever make atonement; for, ere the debt is paid, the atonement
made, one who is not the sufferer stands to receive it, while, on the
other hand, the one who atones is not the offender, but one who comes
after him, loathing his offence and himself incapable of it. The dead
must bury their dead. And thus pondering from personal to general
thoughts, the turmoil of his feelings gradually calmed, and a restful
melancholy, vague and tender, filled the aching void in his heart.

KIRBY'S COALS OF FIRE.

BY LOUISE STOCKTON.

_Atlantic Monthly, December, 1875._

Considering it simply as an excursion, George Scott thought, leaning
over the side of the canal-boat and looking at the