what was it she said to me? Oh! I am going again—I am partly there now! Don't you see it? Is that the Lower Orchard? Are those the gray gables of the Farm?"

Her voice thrilled strangely and her eyes were staring, vague: it was as if she hung between sleep and waking. I looked where she pointed, but it was only an enormous ledge of gray rock, curiously slanted, and I said so, softly.

"It is only a rock, broken at the gable angle, dear."

Then she faced me, herself perfectly.

"Oh, you think so?" she answered me with a smile.

The words were strange enough in themselves, but without them her manner would have taught me that she was going to speak of stranger things yet, and I was not disappointed.

"It was just such a day as this," she began, "and the smell of the apples always takes me back, though never as strongly as now. We were in the orchard ... ah, my dear, you will tell it wonderfully well when I have told you, and many will learn as I have learned, but you can never make them see the Dame as I saw her!"

Then she told me the tale of that adventure.

"What you need," said her friend, the great physician, "is change. Change and rest. Where can you go and be sure of absolute quiet?"

"I cannot tell you," she said wearily, "there is always something that I must do——"

"——or think that you must do," he interrupted her.

"It is all the same," she said.

He sighed, and looked at her quietly for a long time.

"It has taken me fifty years to learn that, my dear child," said he, "and you toss it at me in a moment's talk. Since you have learned it, why are you not well and happy?"

"Since I have learned it, I can never be," she told him, and again he looked long at her.

"What is that that you are trying to do?" he asked her at last. "Think carefully and tell me in one sentence."

"I have already thought carefully," she said, "and I can tell you. I am trying to live my husband's life, which I ought not to give up, my children's life, which I must not give up, and my own life, which I cannot give up."

He looked even longer than before at her and the late sun slipped down the polished fittings of his desk and down the gilded covers of the book-filled shelves behind him. Longer than before he looked and the lines deepened in his face and his eyes seemed to grow deeper in his head as she looked back at him. At last he spoke.

"My child," he said, "if I were a poor and hungry doctor it is not to be doubted that I should give you something in a bottle and tell you to come to me again. But I am a wealthy physician and I can afford to tell you truth. I can do nothing for you. You must cure yourself, or fail to do it so completely that I shall be needed to enable you to fail again. When you have repeated this last process sufficiently, I shall no longer be thus enabled and you will die. That is all."

"Die?" said she; "I shall die?"

"You will die," he said, "with everything that the world calls good fortune in your lap. With no excuse for doing so, but with every reason to be glad that you are doing so. Leaving behind you someone who needed you and more whom you needed. Now go home and think, and before you go, drink this."

Silently he poured out for her a tiny glassful of some colourless, aromatic liquid and in silence she drank it and left the room, where the dying sun glinted upon the gilded books. It seemed to her that he touched a bell on the desk with his hand, and though the cordial had already begun to affect her head strangely, she was able to observe that it was in answer to this bell that his office nurse appeared at the door as she reached it and put a steadying arm behind her.

"Come this way," said the nurse, "and sit a moment; do you feel a little dizzy?"

"A little," she answered, and her voice seemed to come from far away; "I am afraid that drink was stronger than it should have been ... if I could sit down ... the doctor...."

She knew that the nurse was helping her to a couch in a tiny room she had never been in before; she knew that she sank upon it and that the nurse settled her upon a bright crimson cushion; she heard her soothing murmur and nodded to show that she was not alarmed, only vexed at her own weakness, and then she ceased to struggle with the overwhelming drowsiness that oppressed her, and slept.

When she woke it was dark in the room. In the street the electric lights glowed, and the people passed steadily by the window; was it midnight, she wondered, or only early dusk? How strange that the doctor and the nurse had forgotten her!

"But, of course he would not have wished me waked," she said, and rose, straightened her dress, waited a moment, and then pulled impatiently at an old-fashioned bell-rope that hung by the door. There was no answer. Again she rang, but the house lay dark and silent. A little housemaid with brown, startled eyes, came at last, just as she was beginning to grow alarmed at the darkness and stillness, and stared at her.

"Was it you that rang, madam?" asked this little housemaid; "the doctor is out: he will not be back to-night."

"And the nurse?" she inquired, vexed at this lack of thought of her.

"The nurse has gone long ago, madam, for the night."

A flood of nervous anger broke over her.

"How disgraceful!" she cried; "how unkind! To leave me here like this! What time is it, pray?"

"It is very late, madam; I could not tell you the hour."

The little housemaid yawned and pressed her tumbled cap straight.

She bit her lips to keep herself from angry tears and rushed through the heavy street door, down the stone steps, out upon the pavement. Angrily she sped along, brushing by the people, who, in turn, stumbled rudely against her. The jostling crowd brimmed her eyes; she walked as one in a mist.

"How cruel everyone is to me!" she whispered to herself and walked faster. Suddenly a thought came to her. Where was she going? Surely she ought not to attempt to walk all the way to her home, so late at night? She must call a carriage. She fumbled vaguely in the little bag at her wrist, but no purse was there; only a few small coins.

"I must get into a street-car," she thought dully, and just then a noisy, lighted street-car rushed toward her on a cross-street and she entered it as it stopped to take in a group of workmen. They shouldered by her roughly, and one of them laid his greasy bundle half upon her lap; she shrunk into a corner. She held out her coin to the brisk collector, but he passed her by, took one from all of the others, and left her, shaking, haunted by a nameless dread.

"Here is my fare!" she called to him, but he, whistling, left her in her corner.

She hid her face in her hands and tried to control her whirling thoughts, but her brain raced like a mill stream and her legs shook under her trailing skirt. All too late she remembered that her carriage was waiting for her at the doctor's: she ought not to have rushed into the street. She was giddy and confused, and knew that her mind was the mind of one in the grip of fever. On and on the street-car rumbled; one by one the workmen brushed by her and got out.

"Have I been here hours or minutes?" she wondered, but dared not speak.

Now she was alone in the car. She peered through the window and saw that it was passing over water; the lights blurred in the dark, shining mirror below.

"Oh, this is wrong! I should never have come this way!" she moaned, and knew that she was lost,