better, brighter bubble than either had been before. Neither cares a tittle for its chance companion's previous history, or for what the other bubbles say. Curiosity as to another's past is the prerogative of small-spirited man, as is also the dread of adverse criticism. Now the commingling bubbles are one of Nature's little parables, and my conception of ideal sympathy."

His eyes were upon her now, and, strangely impelled, her own came round to meet them.

"I'm not wholly sure that I get your meaning," she said, feeling that he exacted a reply. "Is it that association and sympathy are merely the result of chance?"

"Chance is only a word that we use to express the workings of a force beyond our understanding." He stooped and picked up a little stone, weighed it momentarily in his palm, and then, reversing his hand, let it fall. "One would hardly be apt to call it chance," he added, "that, after leaving my hand, that pebble reached the ground. If we understood destiny as we understand gravitation, we should not say that our present meeting was due to chance, but rather that it was the logical outcome of a natural law."

There was a long pause, during which he glanced at her more than once, with the seemingly careless but actually keenly observant air of a skilled physician studying a nervous patient. She was a little frightened, she confessed to herself, as she gathered her wits, staring at the bit of river which was visible from where they stood, and the slopes beyond. For weeks she had been prey to an apathy which was only broken, at intervals, by an outburst of passionate revolt. Now, in some inexplicable fashion, the burden seemed to have slipped from her shoulders, and the feeling of depression was replaced by one of uplifting, of unreasonable exhilaration. The sensation was vaguely familiar to her, and, groping for a clue, she found its parallel in the preliminary action of ether, which she had taken a year or so before. Through the growing, not unpleasurable, dizziness which came upon her thus, the man's voice made its way.

"Let me try to explain myself more clearly," he was saying. "Something—God, or chance, or destiny, or whatever you choose to call it—led me around that last turn of the road at a moment when, if I'm not mistaken, a fellow being came to the snapping-point of self-control. I can't think our meeting without significance. I believe I was sent to help you. The question is, whether you're broad and generous and courageous enough to take for granted a formal introduction, and the gradual evolution of acquaintance into intimacy, up to the moment when you would naturally turn to me, as your most loyal friend, for sympathy. And I think you will do that."

Once more Helen looked at him. Her mind was curiously clouded, but the sensation gave her no uneasiness. Instead, she felt that she was smiling.

"I think you will do it," he repeated.

He was holding out his hand with the confidence of one who knows it will be accepted, and, after a moment, she laid her own within it. His fingers closed firmly on hers, and, of a sudden, the world drew in about her, graying, as under the touch of fog. Her last perception was of his eyes fixed full on hers with an expression of quiet amusement.

"I'm faint," she murmured, "I am—faint—"

When she came to herself, his eyes still held her.

"In the strange, unknowable book of Fate," he said, "it was written, from the beginning of time, that you and I should meet upon a dull hillside in late November, and—and that all that has been should be!"

Before she had time to answer, he had left her.

Briefly she stood, dizzy and perplexed, and then, after one great leap, her heart seemed to shudder and stand still. She was in the sordid little living-room of the Kingsbridge cottage, and outside the day was glooming into twilight!

Without power to move, she watched from the window the man who had just gone, pass down the path and through the gate, and, turning, wave a farewell, before he hurried away in the direction of the station. Then she was fully aroused by the entrance of the postman, and went slowly to meet him at the door. There was only one letter, but this was directed in her husband's unsteady hand, and, as she opened it, the contents leapt at her like a blow:

"Helen:"

"Let me be as brief as you will think me brutal. When this reaches you I shall already be far at sea—with another woman. I have seen how you despised me, and I think that you know this, and that I hate you for it. I shall not ask you to forgive me, for I, too, have many things to forgive. If you had understood me, much that has happened might never have been. But what is past is past. Let us bury it and have done."

"John."

For minutes, which seemed an eternity, Helen stood, fingering the wretched sheet, and gazing straight before her with blank, unwinking eyes. Then, with a rush, came remembrance, and with it a great wave of relief. Before she fully comprehended her intention, she was at the gate of the cottage. But there she halted, with a nameless sense of loss and desperation. From the distance had come the yelp of a signalled locomotive, and then a dozen short, choking pants, as it dragged the reluctant train into motion. He had gone!

"But he will come back!" she murmured, "and, that he may come sooner, I will write."

It was only towards the end of her black, sleepless night that she remembered that she did not even know his name.

Late autumn slid gloomily into winter, and winter into spring, before she realized that he would never come. To her father she had written nothing of Vane's desertion. For a year past, his name had not been mentioned in their letters, so the omission was no longer noted, and Mr. Sterling's remittances enabled her to live in material comfort. She clung to the forlorn little cottage with a vague feeling that by it alone could she be traced when He should come back for her; but took a servant, a slovenly little wench, who moved in a circumambient odour of carbolic acid, and amassed dust under beds and sofas as a miser hoards his gold.

Helen herself saw nothing, heeded nothing. Save in the impulse which followed her reading of Vane's letter, her mind was never wholly clear from the shadow which had descended upon it at the moment of that hand-grip on the hillside. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, she sat at the window, motionless, listening for the creak of the gate, the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path, which would tell her that He had returned.

With spring the disillusion came, and she crept back to the shelter of her father's house, but to no change, save slow and listless surrender to the inevitable. Sometimes they heard her whispering to herself, as she sat, with some book which they had brought her, unopened on her knee—odd scraps of sentences, and broken phrases, without apparent relevancy or connection. The family physician, a friend from boyhood of Andrew Sterling, tapped his forehead significantly at such times as these, and the hands of the two men would meet in a grasp of mutual understanding.

One night in late August her child was born, and the west wind that brought a new soul to the Sterling door, pausing an instant in its passing, gathered up, and in its kind arms bore away, on its pathless flight into the Great Unknown, the tired spirit of Helen Vane.

CHAPTER I.

MR.