ation seized her, as the vision of the convent vanished like some
lovely vale which one leaves forever. Very simply he banished the
desolation.

"I have been computing," he said, as they sat on the veranda after
breakfast, "what you might have been worth to the Church as a nun ...
hear me, hear me ... wait for the end of the story ... it is charming.
You are now about twenty-seven, I won't venture any nearer your age. I
don't know my mother's age."

"And no man will ever know it," said Anne. "Men have no discretion about
ages."

"Let me suppose," Arthur continued, "that fifty years of service would
be the limit of your active life. You would then be seventy-seven, and
there is no woman alive as old as that. The oldest is under sixty."

"Unless the newspapers want to say that she's a hundred," said Anne
slyly.

"For the sake of notoriety she is willing to have the truth told about
her age."

"As a school-teacher, a music-teacher, or a nurse, let me say that your
services might be valued at one thousand a year for the fifty years,
Honora. Do you think that a fair average?"

"Very fair," said she indifferently.

"Well, I am going to give that sum to the convent for having deprived
them of your pleasant company," said he. "Hear me, hear me, ... I'm not
done yet. I must be generous, and I know your conscience will be tender
a long time, if something is not done to toughen it. I want to be
married in the new cathedral, which another year will see dedicated. But
a good round sum would advance the date. We owe much to Monsignor. In
your name and mine I am going to give him enough to put the great church
in the way to be dedicated by November."

He knew the suffering which burned her heart that morning, himself past
master in the art of sorrow. That she had come down from the heights to
the common level would be her grief forever; thus to console her would
be his everlasting joy.

"What do you think of it? Isn't it a fair release?"

"Only I am not worth it," she said. "But so much the better, if every
one gains more than I lose by my ... infatuation."

"Are you as much in love as that?" said Anne with malice.

They were married with becoming splendor in January. A quiet ceremony
suggested by Honora had been promptly overruled by Anne Dillon, who saw
in this wedding a social opportunity beyond any of her previous
triumphs. Mrs. Dillon was not your mere aristocrat, who keeps exclusive
her ceremonious march through