golden and broad--" If it was gold the world needed--and her husband had told them so emphatically that it was--why just a section of the street up there--only think what could be accomplished with a block--"all golden!"

But perhaps her humor was not of a healthy sort this morning; for her heart was cold as ice, and she feared that she might shriek aloud in fiendish glee.

During the weeks that followed she found her work difficult to perform; all her tasks were irksome. But with a desperate courage, and a resolution born of her will, she held herself to the minutest details of every task that came to her. As the weeks slipped by a peculiar strained look grew upon her face. Her husband noticed that the bloom was fading from her cheeks and an unattractive pallor taking its place, and the thought came to him that perhaps his wife was burdened with too many cares.

"Are you not so well as usual, Evelyn?" he asked her one day.

A nervous flush covered, for the time, the tired look on her face.

"Not so well, perhaps, just of late," she replied. She raised her eyes to his, and he noticed a strange expression in their depths.

But with a sort of supreme despair she clung to her work, and devoted herself to her various duties. Yet she found herself little by little obliged to give up much that she had undertaken, for there were days when pain and physical weakness overcame her.

One evening after his usual hour of study, Mr. Thorpe laid aside his books and went in search of his wife. She was indisposed and had kept her room during the day. He found her noiselessly walking back and forth through the room, with her hands pressed close against her temples. She wore a loose gown, which fell in long folds about her, and revealed her tall and ghost-like in the dim light. Mr. Thorpe stood for a moment and regarded her in silence. Her face was haggard, and her eyes were set in dark circles. Her movements were slow and mechanical, as though her body was a thing apart from the spirit which impelled it. Her whole attitude and appearance suggested the embodiment of an overmastering pain.

Mr. Thorpe stepped to her side. "Evelyn, my dear," he said, "you are in great pain. Why did you not call me? You should have help; direct me and I will bring you some remedy."

"I have tried many remedies," she said. "I do not believe anything will relieve me. A headache has to have its own time."

She assured her husband that there was nothing that he could do to relieve her, and begged him to retire and leave her alone.

In the small hours of the night she crept to her bed, pale and worn, like some wounded thing that has been engaged in deadly combat with a foe. The pain had burned itself out, and the sleep of exhaustion came to her.

The severity of his wife's attacks alarmed Mr. Thorpe, and he begged her to lay down still more of the burden of her work. But she was not ready to do this, and continued her self-appointed tasks with all the strength at her command. Yet there was something in look and manner, something indescribable, unlike her real self, that caused Mr. Thorpe a vague feeling of apprehension for the future.

It was at this time that Mr. Thorpe's cousin, Pauline, came to make her home at the parsonage. She was a middle-aged woman, strong and vigorous and possessed of a goodly share of common sense and plain practicality. Having missed making a home for herself, she very sensibly made herself at home wherever she was.

"I love the Lord with all my heart," she was wont to say, "and I can work for him quite as well in one place as in another."

There was something in her strong and wholesome personality that caused one to trust her instinctively. And gradually, as Mrs. Thorpe was obliged to lay them down, she assumed the household cares; and cheerfully from day to day she took upon herself the burden of the work, and managed the girl in the kitchen with more tact and discretion than Mrs. Thorpe had ever been able to command.

"I do not believe that life holds any problems for Pauline," was Mrs. Thorpe's mental comment, "or that she has any doubts or fears with which to contend."

Now Mr. Thorpe pleaded with his wife and tried to induce her to lay aside all her cares in order that she might regain her health. But she insisted that she was not ill, and that she should not fail in her work; and she devoted herself with renewed zeal to her outside duties. Yet the days came closer together when she was obliged to keep her room, and not infrequently her bed for the day.

At such times Mr. Thorpe had fallen into the way of summoning the family physician, Dr. Eldrige.

The old doctor would shake his head and declare it to be a case of "nerves." And one day when Mrs. Thorpe's suffering was unusually severe, he said to Mr. Thorpe in his characteristically blunt, brusque manner:

"If you wish to keep that wife of yours out of the grave or the lunatic asylum, you will have to put a stop to this eternal gad and go she persists in."

Mr. Thorpe's face paled.

"I have tried to induce my wife to give up her work," he said, "but she clings to it persistently."

"Well, she will not cling to anything in this world much longer unless she changes her course," was his gruff rejoinder. He saw the pain in Mr. Thorpe's face, and noted the look of fear that leaped into his eyes; but it did not affect him. Other people's troubles never caused him a moment's concern. He often assured himself that a man who ministered to the ills of the human family needed a level head and a good hard heart to go with it.

Pauline, who overheard the conversation, made no mention of it to Mrs. Thorpe, but said:

"I cannot understand how Dr. Eldrige holds his popularity. He seems a rough, unfeeling man."

"He has the reputation of being the best physician in town," Mrs. Thorpe replied. "I always feel that I dare not be ill any longer after I have faced him. I have heard, too, that he treats his patients most skillfully when he is partially under the influence of liquor."

"I do not see how you and Maurice dare trust him, Evelyn. The human organism at the mercy of a half-drunken man! This, to me, seems like a terrible thing."

"You lose sight of the main facts, Pauline, and cavil at minor things. We of the human family must have a physician; with our sensitive bodies, our nerves so finely adjusted to feel the slightest discord, and to sting and quiver with pain, we must have a physician. Providence sends our ills, and it takes a skillful physician to correct them, and so if only he be skillful, there is nothing else that counts."

This was not the first time that Pauline had detected a strain of covert bitterness in Mrs. Thorpe's speech, and the tone in which she spoke more than the words alone troubled her now. In her philosophy all that which she could not understand was "Providence," and to yield to the iron Hand of it was the whole duty of a Christian. Yet there was a tone of pleading, rather than anything dictatorial, in her voice as she replied:

"We can trust the hand of Providence, Evelyn, whatever of pain and sickness comes to us."

There was a slight