wing, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the
wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the
flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that
hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting
and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark
passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the
chill of reaction that set in with her mother's death.

She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high
disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed
as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after
this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating
matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper
because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it.
Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took
up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part
in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world's misery, but longing
with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a
single hand to clasp.

Ah, it was cruel to be alive, to be young, to bubble with springs of
mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with
decay and pain--to look persistently into the grey face of death without
having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt
her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually
enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like
hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on
their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole
wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than a frightful
emptiness to be shut out with tight walls of habit....

* * * * *

A tap on the door announced Mrs. Dressel, garbed for conquest, and
bestowing on her brilliant person the last anxious touches of the artist
reluctant to part from a masterpiece.

"My dear, how well you look! I _knew_ that dress would be becoming!" she
exclaimed, generously transferring her self-approval to Justine; and
adding, as the latter moved toward her: "I wish Westy Gaines could see
you now!"

"Well, he will presently," Miss Brent rejoined, ignoring the slight
stress on the name.

Mrs. Dressel continued to brood on her ma