ing at the maniac will of the waves. Through the rush of wind and water struck the steady pulses of the pumps and the clear, assuring human cry of "Brave my boys!"

At the first glimpse of the Cunarder a great shout of joy broke into the cry of despair which a moment be fore rose from the decks of L'Imperatrice. It was the signal that made the awful struggle for life begin. With the shout: "Boats out!" and the counter cry from numberless distracted voices: "We are sinking!" a panic began whose extremity of human terror, selfishness, and despair, no words of any human language are in the least degree adequate to portray. In vain the boats of both ships were lowered. In vain the worn-out voice of the brave captain of L'Impératrice essayed to restrain the mortal tunult. Every man forsook wheel and pumps, and each one struck out for his own life. Men clung to belaying pins: men lashed themselves under the shelter of shivering bulwarks; men seized life-preservers and leaped into the sea; men bore down into the already overcrowded boats, trampling women and children beneath their feet. The shrieks and prayers of women, the wailing of infants, mingled with the shouts of command, the groans and oaths of men. In vain the commander of the Cunarder in trumpet shout declared that with men at the pumps and wheel, without selfishness or self-destruction, every one might be saved. It is as easy to quench flame with oil as to restrain with speech the frenzy of human panic confronting death.

Agnes gazed from the very edge of the deck, her heart panting, her senses strained to anguish of sight and of hearing, her faculties tortured with the neces sity of comprehending all, her soul agonizing to save, while her feeble hands hung helpless.

"When they reach us, when they are safe on board, I can do something, something, for them, those poor women and children. If I could but reach them there! If I could stay this holocaust!" And with these words a low, piercing cry seemed to be crushed out of her own heart. A woman that instant was thrust back upon deck by a crowd of trampling men, and the last boat, with its frenzied crew pushed off. Agnes' eyes had rested for moments upon the slender figure of this woman, as she had seen it driven on by the crushing crowd. Was there one hope left for her now? Would the toppling L'Impératrice stay above water long enough for the boats to unload and push back! She had on no life-preserver. There must be one near at hand. Agnes, leaning far over the deck's railing, between her lifted hands tried to call to the woman to put one on, but her soft voice was caught up and borne back by the wind.

Nevertheless, standing apart from the crowd who now rushed to the other end of the ship to watch the advance of the struggling boats, something in her attitude and gestures caught the attention of the despairing woman left behind. She stretched forth her hands in mute entreaty, she turned her face in last appeal, - the face of Circe Sutherland. Her hands were outstretched for help. The hands of the woman opposite were outreached to save. In that instant, in that long last look of commingled pity and despair, each knew the other. In another a cry of terror broke from both. The deck of L'Impératrice heaved upward. She rolled, she threw her bows, she shuddered, then with one slow, awful plunge, sucking the last boat with all its living freight into her swirl, making a whirlpool

that seemed to drag the stanch Cunarder after her in her wake, she went down.

Agnes saw the woman opposite throw her white arms upward, her head heavenward, saw her fair, fair upturned face sink down, down into the gray waste, the sobbing waves close over it and shut it out of sight; and as she saw it she fell forward, lost to all mortal consciousness.

Perhaps ten days after the last event occurred, Vida, reading the morning journal to her father in the breakfast room at Lotusmere, gave with girlish voice and with no knowledge of its personal significance this an

nouncement:

NEW YORK, June 26.

The agent of the Transatlantic Steamship Company has received the following despatch from the manager of the line in Paris: L'Impératrice was disabled by hurricane and sunk June 15, one thousand miles from Havre. First officer and twenty passengers lost. Eighty passengers saved by an English ship. All speak in praise of the lamented Captain Rousseau, who was cool and brave, notwithstanding the fearful sea."

:

Agnes rested at Lucerne. Already the shores of the idyllic Vierwaldstädter See had taken on for her the tender aspect of familiar reminiscence. She sought it as a chosen refuge. The shocks through which she had passed left her in no condition to meet the demands of ordinary travel. She was haunted by a face a face that had so stamped itself upon her soul that it could never fade out. Till her latest breath she was to see it in all the startling distinctness with which it now gazed in upon the very eyes of her soul in the agony of utter, final appeal. Agnes was destined never to be left to hate even those who had wronged her most. She was created for love, suffering, help, and forgiveness. To her Linda's death wiped out Linda's life. She shrank from Circe Sutherland. Her soul abhorred her, her heart hated her in moments while she lived. That dying gaze annulled the capability of resentment in the emotions of Agnes. "Where is her soul?" she said, and her own seemed to follow out after it, and to brood over it with sorrowful prayer and ineffable pity.

She had just passed a crisis in her life. She knew it. She was sure of it. She seemed to have no strength nor knowledge nor desire to begin life anew. If there was more work for her to do, the strength to do it, the wisdom to know it, the desire for it, would be granted her. She must wait. She must hold all her being receptive to the undreamed of good, if so be, unknown and unaware, it awaited her. In this spirit she wandered through the Forest Cantons which border the fairest of all Swiss lakes. She met pleasant people. She made dear friends. But when she turned from their smiles and kindly accents, she knew that with them all she was no less alone. Her heart cried dumbly for her child, yearned over the hapless image of the man who was once her husband, went back in tender gratitude to her friend. The three lived, yet was she alone. If they were but dead to her, then she could bury them and go on. She could put the garments that clothed them in her thought aside, hide them out of sight, and be gin to live anew. Because they were not dead, but living, she could not put them from her. Every fibre of her being seemed to cling to them, and as she tried to turn and go on without them, she found that it could not be, she carried them with her still and ever. They were with her, yet they were not hers. They filled all her

She could not go She could but wait and

thoughts, and yet she was alone.
back. She could not go on.
look and listen.

Even these she was unwilling to do at first. In her utter desolation when she turned from her child, it seemed to her that even nature could be nothing to her more. What would be all its elemental beauty, void of the human affection and companionship which is its soul? Then she was lashed by ocean. Its terrific energy, its glut of human sacrifice before her very eyes, still made memory shudder. That face, that fair, fair face! should she not forever see it sinking, sinking into the engulfing waves? Slowly through all this pain, yet day by day, she seemed to feel on her wounds a touch of healing.

The mother Nature distils the needed elixir for each hurt child. Through her quiet waters peace stole to Agues. Through the uplifting of her mountains Agnes grew silently once more toward strength. Not even the conscious heart could shut out from the ex

quisitely attuned sense the myriad rivulets of delicately melodious sound that rippled inward from ear to soul. Not even this selfishly asserting pain could close her eyes upon the marvels and mysteries of unimagined hues creeping tenderly up to her across the shifting grass, throbbing before her sight in blending clouds of emblazoned mist, or tingeing inaccessible snow-peaks with the dawning blush of unfolding rose.

The mighty mother! Everywhere was she not one? The massed cloud moving northward from the Bernese Alps, it was the very same that she had seen before panoply the lowlier mountains beside the blue lake of another hemisphere. The vagrant vapors roving in and out amid the bewildering rocks, how often far away she had seen them cleft and carried upward before the wind to the highest country of cloud. The opalescent veil of film trembling above the Righi Kulm, did it not shimmer before the green Pinnacle across the seas? The stony rampart of that Western mountain, was it not the same stuff as this which had defied ages of storm in the scarred head of domed Pilatus? Here and there might be change in heights and outline, in more awful effects, in a new atmosphere, yet through all there was no hint of strangeness. mother ministered to her child here as there.

The one

It was as if the same lichens purpled the rocks, the same insects hummed in the air, the same crickets chirped in the moss, the same grasshoppers vaulted through the pennoned grass, the same flaming butterflies flickered past. The racing streams scampering to the vales below were but the far-off trout brooks that she loved. The hills held in their hollows tiny, tremulous lakes of liquid blue, tender as the lakelets of her far-off North. The translucent waters of Lucerne and Zug were not more profoundly azure, more intensely emerald, than the gleaming reservoir of the Canadian Tarn. Even the tinkling bells on the necks of the Alpine kine and goats made her shut her eyes till she saw again the grazing cattle, the grassy pasture, the glinting spring before Evelyn's log-house. In nature all was kinship, companionship. Even the associations of this historic spot were all of personal heroism, of the grand democracy of a valorous race. Benumbed as she was, it was not possible for even her to sail up and down this lake hallowed by the legends of liberty, to visit the Mecca of Switzerland, to stand at the shrine of its hero, and not feel the old passion for hum in freedom, for human growth, quicken again above the ashes of her

heart, and her silenced faculties through the dull sense of pain awake to somewhat of their primal power.

Thus without conscious volition she began and finished tasks that never seemed to be tasks. Imperceptibly she sought the ministry of labor. And one superlative evening she heard herself exclaim: "Thank God for work! It gives me to others, and makes me forget the weakness that is myself." Even these words she said with a hand upon her heart. She had received no letter from Vida written since the wreck of L'Impératrice was known in America. She, in her letters to her daughter, had made no reference to it. They did not know at Lotusmere the name of the ship in which she sailed. She had written to Vida just as she would have done had her eyes never beheld that awful catastrophe. She sent words only of love and cheer and help to her child. She sent no personal message to that child's father; but every line that she wrote tended to make her child more thoughtful, helpful, and loving toward him. Two letters from Vida, full of passionate love and longing for her mother, full of tender, pitiful regrets for her father, had reached Lucerne. But they were written before she could have received Agnes' letter announcing her own arrival there. Since then no word had cheered the dreadful silence. As it lengthened by days and weeks it seemed to Agnes that nothing but the new power to work, and the necessity of doing it, kept her alive. It was not Cyril! A life, an awful death, separated him from her forever. She expected no word from him. But their child, Vida, her bright, bright Vida, her ever-loving Vida, - why did not she speak to her exiled mother?

With this cry in her heart she sat at her window in the Pension Wallis. Her eyes followed the winding waters of the Reuss, past the Capellbrücke, past the Reussbrücke, past the Mühlenbrücke, past the blue Lucerne, till they rested on the truncated peaks of the Righi sheathed in glowing red; while above, thin clouds, rose-flushed, streamed upward like the smoke of incense from a mighty altar of worship set alone in the universe. It was natural as her breath, this far, high outlook. It seemed to translate and uplift her far above the human sorrow tugging at her heart. At such height, where no discord of earth could reach, there must be peace. The sense of far-off-ness, of uplifting, of divine repose, which it gave, was evanescent; but brief, visionary as it might be, how it broke for the moment the tense strain of suffering and endurance! There was a coming back, always a coming back, but somewhat of the pure strength of heaven's own lights seemed to come back also, to make easier to the tired heart the taking up of the burden that for a moment's renewing it dared to cast down.

A faint, quick tap on the door of her room brought Agnes back from the ampler ether above the Righi. Come in," she said gently, thinking it Fifine, the

maid.

low hair was streaked with gray, his face was lined with suffering, not with years. When this man and woman last stood face to face, neither had outpassed the glory of youth. Then the man was dazzling as a god in the untouched splendor of his manhood. Then the woman was worn and weary with her womanhood. Now it was the woman who was beautiful. Time had ripened, not withered her, and the serene light of her soul irradiated her soft eyes and suffused her delicate features, kindling them to a supernal loveliness.

Was this Agnes? It seemed to Cyril King as if his breath was going. "Mamma! "9 The intonation made Agnes look up. Was this Cyril ?

The mother and child could cry with joy at the sight of each other. The husband and wife, transfixed, gazed in silence. There was no speech, no language, no cry, at once possible to either soul. Each felt that it would be easy to sink down and die at the other's feet. This meeting, this look, this long, long look of reunion, of love, was it not joy? Was it not enough, at last, at last?

"Mamma!" Vida took her mother's hand; "mamma, papa loves you. After all he loves you, my own mamma, and I have told him over and over, though he cannot believe it, that you love him, that you have always loved him, and him only, through everything. Tell him it is true; that you do, mamma," and Vida laid her mother's hand upon her father's that hand that shook so on his heavy staff.

"Forgive!" said his quivering lips.

66

Forgive me," she answered.

I love you. I have always loved you!"

"I know it, and I know that I do not deserve it." "I know only that I cannot choose but love you. Oh, come in! Come in and rest! Vida, ring the bell, my darling. You must have food. You must lie down. How did you come across that dreadful ocean?" with a shudder. "But you have come! Both of you, my — oh, have you come? or is it a dream, another dream? I have dreamed it so often, when to wake was awful because you had not come. Vida! is it, is it you?"

Then you will be

"I will pinch you, mamma. sure." And Vida pinched her mother, then laughed over her, then cried over her, then called out, "Oh, I feel a ball in my throat bigger than one of Evelyn's hazel-nuts, yet I'm not angry, not in the least. I'm just beside myself, I'm so happy."

One autumn evening, in a salon of the Pension Wallis, there was a marriage ceremony performed, which beside the clergyman had but one witness. The witness was Vida King. The two who were wedded were Cyril King and Agnes Darcy.

pressed within their compass than in all the years that he lived before them. Measured by what really makes life, emotion, experience, growth, they made, indeed, the longest and fairest sum of his being, and held for him, so far as he had found it at all, the very treasure-trove of human life. He shrank even now from the memory of those first desolate days when he went back to life, to its exacting duties, to its negative employments, its scrutinizing eyes, and uncharitable tongues, to live, to bear life, to make the best and the most of it, under a sense of bereavement that filled not only his affections and emotions, but pervaded no less his faculties.

He did not analyze the quality of this sense of loss. Whether his soul was widowed or orphaned he did not know. But this he knew, that the kindred mind which had touched all his life with inspiration seemed now to be suddenly wrenched from it. A pure, pervasive light, that brightened all his way, had been utterly withdrawn, and he groped in the dark.

He thought that he did. Only by time was he able to discern that the lights withdrawn still shone for him. By many slow, silent, lonely steps he came to learn at last that it is by seeming loss only that we gain fruition here or hereafter. Imperceptibly his senses loosened their hold on the beloved presence; it faded more and more into the mist of the past, but the soul held fast to its possession. His friend was always his friend, not to have or to hold, but to pray for and to remember. If her gentle eyes did not light his days, they shone still upon the earth. If he could not see her face, she yet lived in the world, and wherever she was, she remembered him and cared for him. Her presence had faded from before his sight, and still not less but more she was a force in his life, a quickening inspiration to him in thought and in deed.

Year by year he grew in scholarship, in eloquence, in puissant, helpful, consecrated humanity. He was the rector of Dufferin still, because he chose to be ; but in his yearly vacations he had not shunned the larger and louder world lying beyond its plains and mountains. He had studied human life in the lowest purlieus of the cities, and in their most cultivated coteries. He had mingled with men of all classes. He had associated with women of many gifts and graces, with women gentle, wise, and good. He had many delightful acquaintances and not a few friends. Yet some way they all seemed to abide on the outskirt of what was intrinsically himself. When he returned to solitude and sat down in silence with his soul, he found after all that the most sufficing companionship that he knew was still with one far distant, whose face he might never see again. His intercourse with many types of mortals had convinced him of nothing more certainly than this, that perfect communion of mind and entire sympathy of spirit with spirit, even between two very dear to each other, is as rare in human experience as the flower of the aloe is in nature. He had come to believe that no life could call itself poor, in which had bloomed one perfect friendship. This consummate flower of human relationship blossomed once for him, and he held it still in his heart of hearts unfaded.

If nature gave hint of any growth deeper, closer, and sweeter, he knew that it was not his, he had never found it. He believed that he had held his whole being receptive to the fullest good that might come to him. He had even gone forth into the world

to see if it waited for him there. He was willing that a new, living experience should prove dearer to him than his dearest memory. And the conclusion of the whole matter was that after years of waiting, if not of seeking, he was sure that sympathy so sufficing as that which this memory held he had never found a second time; that hours so full and pure in perfect companionship as those he once spent in the log-house by the Pinnacle had never been repeated. What life gave of peace and of heart content to other men he knew not. But he knew that one woman's friendship was the best that it had given to him.

The time came when Agnes wrote to him. It was when she was reunited to the husband of her youth. She scarcely touched upon the causes of their separation, but she dwelt fully upon the joy that made them one again. It was a proof of the fulness of her friendship, that when her joy was at its full her heart went out without reserve in sympathy and fellowship to her friend. These communications had never ceased. With Vida's they formed the volumes in his library that were now personally the dearest to him; for at the close of each year he had had them bound and set among his choicest treasures. Thus, with the ocean between, his life seemed to run parallel with this trinity of life beyond its waves. Even Cyril King had written him a characteristic letter, in which he said that as he found it impossible to be rid of the rector of Dufferin, he was fain to endure him and to find out for himself what manner of fellow he was, by confessing his sins and stretching out the only hand he had left to him in fellowship.

Athel Dane's kindest impulses set slowly and reluctantly toward the man whose nature he believed had despoiled the fairest portion of his friend's life,who by selfishness and untruth had robbed her so long of woman's best boon, love and home. He acknowledged this to himself, and for weeks did not reply. One day it half dawned upon his consciousness that he felt another, a fainter yet profounder repul-ion to this man. What was it? Was it that he, Athel Dane, the rector of Dufferin, in his deepest heart rebelled against the thought of him because it was he who now possessed the soul that once made the only human light in his own existence? The moment he was sure that he could not deny to himself this repulsion, he made haste to extinguish it by answering at once in all honesty Cyril King's letter.

Agnes' letters were unstudied revelations of other lands, of their inner life and unrecorded memories. She wrote him of music and its masters, of statues, pictures, and people; of grand cathedrals, old libraries, and famous shrines; but she wrote more, and with an infinite tenderness of recognition, of unrecorded lives, and of unemblazoned places, rich to her in the memory of some unchronicled soul, or in the presence of some human being who unconsciously

made life fair or heroic.

Vida's letters at first were simply Vida's self. Over-frank, confiding, bursting with alternate loves and hates of all the new forms of life that she encountered, yet withal always a faithful record of her studies and progress to her "best beloved teacher." Then came a faithful transcript of her school life at Geneva, followed afterwards by pictures, rapid, vivid, of what she saw -the moonlit canals and mouldy palaces of Venice, the marvels of Rome (and to her its most wondrous marvels were its living models and

beggars), the pictures that she copied, the languages that she studied, and the famous people that she knew.

These pictures throbbed and glowed with the wine of her youth, and her superabounding temperament, yet each year Vida as an individual receded more and more, till at last the Vida who began to write had vanished out of sight altogether. That she still existed in a developed and modified form was proved by these pictures that she painted of external things; but the outpouring Vida, telling her "darling teacher' over and over " how much she loved him," had utterly ceased to be. Athel Dane was perfectly cognizant of the vast distance measured in mental growth and culture between the first letters and the last. He was equally aware that he missed from the later letters something that he found in the first inexpressibly delightful, the love outpouring of an impetuous, unconscious child. He dimly saw that she was more than six years older now than then, yet he could never see her in his thought other than as before, tall for her years and yet a child, in a white frock, with flowing hair, great soft eyes, and sweet, ardent, impetuous ways.

He was not thinking of her now, though in a few moments, after a long absence, he would meet her. He was thinking of her mother. He was riding slowly through the memory-haunted woods, with a sense of desired delay, of lingering, as he gathered into his heart and held fast each golden thread of the past, ere he lifted his reluctant face to confront the present. Possibly it was to be better, completer than his beloved past, this present, but he did not believe it. If it were to be, his perverse heart did not want it. Something in the very fibre of his frame shrank from change because it was change. Six years! They had touched her lightly he was sure, for had she not written him that they had been the happiest years of her life? She might look the very same that she did when he beheld her last in that room, and yet she and nothing there could scem the same, because of that third presence.

One hour before, he honestly believed that he was glad of this third presence, because with it he expected to see a light of happiness in her eyes that he had never yet seen there; and now that he was within a few moments' sight of that happiness, his heart, or some impulse in it, suddenly jumped up in revolt at the bare thought of the cause of that happiness. "If with all my striving I could only make him seem worthy of such a measureless good, I — I think I could rejoice that it is his," he said in self-defence.

This blast of swift revolt in no wise indicated the calm of his habitual mind. For years he had thought of Cyril King, as of course the husband of Agnes King; he had sincerely and unselfishly rejoiced in her happiness, yet no less now, as he approached the cottage where he had known and worshipped, unconsciously, Agnes Darcy, he longed to see her Agnes Darcy still, her little daughter by her side, both unchanged, and "no stranger, no alien," as in his hot impulse he now called Cyril King, present. No wonder he rode slowly. Before he entered the repelling presence, he was sure that he had no easy task to perform, thus to bring into subjection an alien self, the law of his emotion making war upon the law of his mind and conscience. It shall be brought under," he said, and his powerful steed moved yet more slowly than before.