The Grahams were all at home again, and Eugene and his bride had been for several weeks fairly settled in their elegant new house. Beulah had seen none of the family since their return, for her time was nearly all occupied, and as soon as released from school she gladly hurried out to her little home. One evening as she left the academy Mr. Graham's spirited horses dashed up to the gate, and the coachman handed her a note. It was from Mrs. Graham.

"MISS BENTON:

"Cornelia is quite indisposed, and begs that you will call and see her this afternoon. As it threatens rain, I send the carriage.

"S. GRAHAM."

Beulah crumpled the note between her fingers, and hesitated. The coachman perceived her irresolution, and hastened to say:

"You needn't be afraid of the horses, miss. Miss Nett' rides so much they are tamed down."

"I am not at all afraid of the horses. Has Cornelia been sick since her return from the North?"

"Why, miss, she came home worse than ever. She has not been downstairs since. She is sick all the time now."

Beulah hesitated no longer. Mrs. Graham met her at the door, and greeted her more cordially than she had done on any previous occasion. She looked anxious and weary, and said, as she led the way to her daughter's apartment:

"We are quite uneasy about Cornelia; you will find her sadly altered." She ushered Beulah into the room, then immediately withdrew.

Cornelia was propped up by cushions and pillows in her easy-chair; her head was thrown back, and her gaze appeared to be riveted on a painting which hung opposite. Beulah stood beside her a moment, unnoticed, and saw with painful surprise the ravages which disease had made in the once beautiful face and queenly form. The black, shining hair was cut short, and clustered in thick, wavy locks about the wan brow, now corrugated as by some spasm of pain. The cheeks were hollow and ghastly pale; the eyes sunken, but unnaturally large and brilliant; and the colorless lips compressed as though to bear habitual suffering. Her wasted hands, grasping the arms of the chair, might have served as a model for a statue of death, so thin, pale, almost transparent. Beulah softly touched one of them, and said:

"Cornelia, you wished to see me."

The invalid looked at her intently, and smiled.

"I thought you would come. Ah, Beulah, do you recognize this wreck as your former friend?"

"I was not prepared to find you so changed; for until this afternoon I was not aware your trip had been so fruitless. Do you suffer much?"

"Suffer! Yes; almost all the time. But it is not the bodily torture that troubles me so much—I could bear that in silence. It is my mind, Beulah; my mind."

She pointed to a chair; Beulah drew it near her, and Cornelia continued:

"I thought I should die suddenly; but it is to be otherwise The torture is slow, lingering. I shall never leave this house again, except to go to my final home. Beulah, I have wanted to see you very much; I thought you would hear of my illness and come. How calm and pale you are! Give me your hand. Ah, cool and pleasant; mine parched with fever. And you have a little home of your own, I hear. How have things gone with you since we parted? Are you happy?"

"My little home is pleasant, and my wants are few," replied Beulah.

"Have you seen Eugene recently?"

"Not since his marriage."

A bitter laugh escaped Cornelia's lips, as she writhed an instant, and then said:

"I knew how it would be. I shall not live to see the end, but you will. Ha, Beulah! already he has discovered his mistake. I did not expect it so soon; I fancied Antoinette had more policy. She has dropped the mask. He sees himself wedded to a woman completely devoid of truth; he knows her now as she is—as I tried to show him she was before it was too late; and, Beulah, as I expected, he has grown reckless—desperate. Ah, if you could have witnessed a scene at the St. Nicholas, in New York, not long since, you would have wept over him. He found his bride heartless; saw that she preferred the society of other gentlemen to his; that she lived only for the adulation of the crowd; and one evening, on coming home to the hotel, found she had gone to the opera with a party she knew he detested. Beulah, it sickens me when I think of his fierce railings, and anguish, and scorn. He drank in mad defiance, and when she returned greeted her with imprecations that would have bowed any other woman, in utter humiliation, into the dust. She laughed derisively, told him he might amuse himself as he chose, she would not heed his wishes as regarded her own movements. Luckily, my parents knew nothing of it; they little suspected, nor do they now know, why I was taken so alarmingly ill before dawn. I am glad I am to go so soon. I could not endure to witness his misery and disgrace."

She closed her eyes and groaned.

"What induced her to marry him?" asked Beulah.

"Only her own false heart knows. But I have always believed she was chiefly influenced by a desire to escape from the strict discipline to which her father subjected her at home. Her mother was anything but a model of propriety; and her mother's sister, who was Dr. Hartwell's wife, was not more exemplary. My uncle endeavored to curb Antoinette's dangerous fondness for display and dissipation, and she fancied that, as Eugene's wife, she could freely plunge into gayeties which were sparingly allowed her at home. I know she does not love Eugene; she never did; and, assuredly, his future is dark enough. I believe, if she could reform him she would not; his excesses sanction, or at least in some degree palliate, hers. Oh, Beulah, I see no hope for him!"

"Have you talked to him kindly, Cornelia? Have you faithfully exerted your influence to check him in his route to ruin?"

"Talked to him? Aye; entreated, remonstrated, upbraided, used every argument at my command. But I might as well talk to the winds and hope to hush their fury. I shall not stay to see his end; I shall soon be silent and beyond all suffering. Death is welcome, very welcome."

Her breathing was quick and difficult, and two crimson spots burned on her sallow cheeks. Her whole face told of years of bitterness, and a grim defiance of death, which sent a shudder through Beulah, as she listened to the panting breath. Cornelia saturated her handkerchief with some delicate perfume from a crystal vase, and, passing it over her face, continued:

"They tell me it is time I should be confirmed; talk vaguely of seeing preachers, and taking the sacrament, and preparing myself, as if I could be frightened into religion and the church. My mother seems just to have waked up to a knowledge of my spiritual condition, as she calls it. Ah, Beulah, it is all dark before me; black, black as midnight! I am going down to an eternal night; down to annihilation. Yes, Beulah; soon I shall descend into what Schiller's Moor calls the 'nameless yonder.' Before long I shall have done with mystery; shall be sunk into unbroken rest." A ghastly smile parted her lips as she spoke.

"Cornelia, do you fear death?"

"No; not exactly. I am glad I am so soon to be rid of my vexed, joyless life; but you know it is all a dark mystery; and sometimes, when I recollect how I felt in my childhood, I shrink from the final dissolution. I have no hopes of a blissful future, such as cheer some people in their last hour. Of what comes after death I know and believe nothing. Occasionally I shiver at the thought of annihilation; but if, after all, revelation is true, I have something worse than annihilation to fear. You know the history of my skepticism; it is the history of hundreds in this age. The inconsistencies of professing Christians disgusted me. Perhaps I was wrong to reject the doctrines because of their abuse; but it is too late now for me to consider that. I narrowly watched the conduct of some of the members of the various churches, and, as I live, Beulah, I have never seen but one who practiced the precepts of Christ. I concluded she would have been just what she was without religious aids. One of my mother's intimate friends was an ostentatious, pharisaical Christian; gave alms, headed charity lists; was remarkably punctual in her attendance at church, and apparently very devout; yet I accidentally found out that she treated a poor seamstress (whom she hired for a paltry sum) in a manner that shocked my ideas of consistency, of common humanity. The girl was miserably poor, and had aged parents and brothers and sisters dependent on her exertions; but her Christian employer paid her the lowest possible price, and trampled on her feelings as though she had been a brute. Oh, the hollowness of the religion I saw practiced! I sneered at everything connected with churches, and heard no more sermons, which seemed only to make hypocrites and pharisees of the congregation. I have never known but one exception. Mrs. Asbury is a consistent Christian. I have watched her, under various circumstances; I have tempted her, in divers ways, to test her, and to-day, skeptic as I am, I admire and revere that noble woman. If all Christians set an example as pure and bright as hers, there were less infidelity and atheism in the land. If I had known even half a dozen such I might have had a faith to cheer me in the hour of my struggle. She used to talk gently to me in days past, but I would not heed her. She often comes to see me now; and though I do not believe the words of comfort that fall from her lips, still they soothe me; and I love to have her sit near me, that I may look at her sweet, holy face, so full of winning purity. Beulah, a year ago we talked of these things. I was then, as now, hopeless of creeds, of truth, but you were sure you would find the truth. I looked at you eagerly when you came in, knowing I could read the result in your countenance. Ah, there is no peace written there! Where is your truth? Show it to me."

She twined her thin, hot fingers round Beulah's cold hand, and spoke in a weary tone. The orphan's features twitched an instant, and her old troubled look came back, as she said:

"I wish I could help you, Cornelia. It must be terrible, indeed, to stand on the brink of the grave and have no belief in anything. I would give more than I possess to be able to assist you, but I cannot; I have no truth to offer you; I have yet discovered nothing for myself. I am not so sanguine as I was a year ago, but I still hope that I shall succeed."

"You will not; you will not. It is all mocking mystery, and no more than the aggregated generations of the past can you find any solution."

Cornelia shook her head, and leaned back in her chair.

"Philosophy promises one," replied Beulah resolutely.

"Philosophy! Take care! That hidden rock stranded me. Listen to me. Philosophy, or, what is nowadays its synonym, metaphysical systems, are worse than useless. They will make you doubt your own individual existence, if that be possible. I am older than you; I am a sample of the efficacy of such systems. Oh, the so-called philosophers of this century and the last are crowned heads of humbuggery! Adepts in the famous art of"

"'Wrapping nonsense round,
With pomp and darkness, till it seems profound.'"

"They mock earnest, enquiring minds with their refined, infinitesimal, homeopathic 'developments' of deity; metaphysical wolves in Socratic cloaks. Oh, they have much to answer for! 'Spring of philosophy!' ha! ha! They have made a frog pond of it, in which to launch their flimsy, painted toy barks. Have done with them, Beulah, or you will be miserably duped."

"Have you lost faith in Emerson and Theodore Parker?" asked Beulah.

"Yes; lost faith in everything and everybody, except Mrs. Asbury. Emerson's atheistic fatalism is enough to unhinge human reason; he is a great and, I believe, an honest thinker, and of his genius I have the profoundest admiration. An intellectual Titan, he wages a desperate war with received creeds, and, rising on the ruins of systems, struggles to scale the battlements of truth. As for Parker, a careful perusal of his works was enough to disgust me. But no more of this, Beulah—so long as you have found nothing to rest upon. I had hoped much from your earnest search; but since it has been futile, let the subject drop. Give me that glass of medicine. Dr. Hartwell was here just before you came. He is morose and haggard; what ails him?"

"I really don't know. I have not seen him for several months—not since August, I believe."

"So I supposed, as I questioned him about you; and he seemed ignorant of your movements. Beulah, does not life look dreary and tedious when you anticipate years of labor and care? Teaching is not child's sport. Are you not already weary in spirit?"

"No, I am not weary; neither does life seem joyless. I know that I shall have to labor for a support; but necessity always supplies strength. I have many, very many sources of happiness, and look forward, hopefully, to a life of usefulness."

"Do you intend to teach all your days? Are you going to wear out your life over primers and slates?"

"Perhaps so. I know not how else I shall more easily earn a subsistence."

"I trust you will marry, and be exempted from that dull, tedious routine," said Cornelia, watching her countenance.

Beulah made a gesture of impatience.

"That is a mode of exemption so extremely remote that I never consider it. I do not find teaching so disagreeable as you imagine, and dare say at fifty (if I live that long) I shall still be in a schoolroom. Remember the trite line:"

"'I dreamed, and thought that life was beauty
I woke, and found that life was duty'"

"Labor, mental and physical, is the heritage of humanity, and happiness is inseparably bound up with the discharge of duty. It is a divine decree that all should work, and a compliance with that decree insures a proper development of the moral, intellectual, and physical nature."

"You are brave, Beulah, and have more of hope in your nature than I. For twenty-three years I have been a petted child; but life has given me little enjoyment. Often have I asked, Why was I created? for what am I destined? I have been like a gilded bubble, tossed about by every breath! Oh, Beulah! often, in the desolation of my heart, I have recalled that grim passage of Pollok's, and that that verily I was that

"'Atom which God
Had made superfluously, and needed not
To build creation with, but back again
To nothing threw, and left it in the void,
With everlasting sense, that once it was!'"

"My life has not been useful, it has been but joyless, and clouded with the shadow of death from my childhood."

Her voice was broken, and tears trickled over her emaciated face. She put up her thin hand and brushed them away, as if ashamed of her emotion.

"Sometimes I think if I could only live, and be strong, I would make myself useful in the world—would try to be less selfish and exacting, but all regrets are vain, and the indulged child of luxury must take her place in the pale realms of death along with the poverty-stricken and laboring. Beulah, I was in pain last night, and could not sleep, and for hours I seemed to hear the words of that horrible vision: 'And he saw how world after world shook off its glimmering souls upon the sea of Death, as a water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the waves.' Oh! my mind is clouded and my heart hopeless, it is dismal to stand alone as I do, and confront the final issue, without belief in anything. Sometimes, when the paroxysms are severe and prolonged, I grow impatient of the tedious delay, and would spring, open-armed, to meet Death, the deliverer."

Beulah was deeply moved, and answered, with a faltering voice and trembling lip:

"I wish I could comfort and cheer you; but I cannot—I cannot! If the hand of disease placed me to-day on the brink beside you, I should be as hopeless as you. Oh, Cornelia! it makes my heart ache to look at you now, and I would give my life to be able to stand where you do, with a calm trust in the God of Israel; but—"

"Then be warned by my example. In many respects we resemble each other; our pursuits have been similar. Beulah, do not follow me to the end! Take my word for it, all is dark and grim."

She sank back, too much exhausted to continue the conversation, and
Beulah rose to go.

"Can't you stay with me?" said the feeble girl.

"No; my companionship is no benefit to you now. If I could help you
I would not leave you at all."

She pressed her lips to the forehead furrowed by suffering, and hastened away.

It was dusk when she reached home, and, passing the dining room, where the tea table awaited her arrival, she sought her own apartment. A cheerful fire blazed in welcome; but just now all things were somber to her vision, and she threw herself into a chair and covered her face with her hands. Like a haunting specter, Cornelia's haggard countenance pursued her, and a dull foreboding pointed to a coming season when she, too, would quit earth in hopeless uncertainty. She thought of her guardian and his skeptical misanthropy. He had explored every by-path of speculation, and after years of study and investigation had given up in despair, and settled down into a refined pantheism. Could she hope to succeed better? Was her intellect so vastly superior to those who for thousands of years had puzzled by midnight lamps over these identical questions of origin and destiny? What was the speculation of all ages, from Thales to Comte, to the dying girl she had just left? Poor Beulah! For the first time her courage forsook her, and bitter tears gushed over her white cheeks. There was no stony bitterness in her face, but an unlifting shadow that mutely revealed the unnumbered hours of strife and desolation which were slowly bowing that brave heart to the dust. She shuddered, as now, in self- communion, she felt that atheism, grim and murderous, stood at the entrance of her soul, and threw its benumbing shadow into the inmost recesses. Unbelief hung its murky vapors about her heart, curtaining it from the sunshine of God's smile. It was not difficult to trace her gradual progress if so she might term her unsatisfactory journey. Rejecting literal revelation, she was perplexed to draw the exact line of demarcation between myths and realities; then followed doubts as to the necessity, and finally as to the probability and possibility, of an external, verbal revelation. A revealed code or system was antagonistic to the doctrines of rationalism; her own consciousness must furnish the necessary data. But how far was "individualism" allowable? And here the hydra of speculation reared its horrid head; if consciousness alone furnished truth, it was but true for her, true according to the formation of her mind, but not absolutely true. Admit the supremacy of the individual reason, and she could not deny "that the individual mind is the generating principle of all human knowledge; that the soul of man is like the silkworm, which weaves its universe out of its own being; that the whole mass of knowledge to which we can ever attain lies potentially within us from the beginning; that all truth is nothing more than a self-development."

She became entangled in the finely spun webs of ontology, and knew not what she believed. Her guardian's words rang in her ears like a knell. "You must accept either utter skepticism, or absolute, consistent pantheism."

A volume which she had been reading the night before lay on the table, and she opened it at the following passage:

"Every being is sufficient to itself; that is, every being is, in and by itself, infinite: has its God, its highest conceivable being, in itself. The object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God! Consciousness of God is self- consciousness; by his God, you know the man, and by the man, his God: the two are identical! Religion is merely the consciousness which a man has of his own, not limited, but infinite, nature; it is an early form of self-knowledge. God is the objective nature of the understanding."

Thus much Feuerbach offered her. She put down the book and leaned her head wearily on her hands. A light touch on her arm caused her to glance up, and Mrs. Williams' anxious face looked down at her.

"What is the matter with you, Beulah? Are you sick?"

"No; I am as well as usual." She hastily averted her head.

"But something troubles you, child!"

"Yes; a great many things trouble me; but I am used to troubles, you know, and can cope with them unaided."

"Won't you tell me what they are, Beulah?"

"You cannot help me, or I would. One cause of sorrow, however, is the approaching death of a friend whom I shall miss and mourn. Cornelia Graham cannot live much longer. I saw her this evening, and found that she has become sadly altered."

"She is young to die," said the matron, with a sigh.

"Yes; only twenty-three."

"Perhaps her death will be the means of reclaiming my poor boy."

Beulah shook her head, and Mrs. Williams added:

"She has lived only for this world and its pleasures. Is she afraid of the world to come? Can she die peacefully?"

"She will die calmly, but not hopefully. She does not believe in
Christianity."

She felt that the matron was searching her countenance, and was not surprised when she said falteringly:

"Neither do you believe in it. Oh, Beulah! I have known it since you came to reside under the same roof with me, and I have wept and prayed over you almost as much as over Eugene. When Sabbath after Sabbath passed, and you absented yourself from church, I knew something was wrong. Beulah, who has taught you infidelity? Oh, it would have been better that you too had followed Lilly, in the early days when you were pure in heart! Much as I love you, I would rather weep over your grave than know you had lived to forget God."

Beulah made no reply; and, passing her hands tenderly over the girl's head, she continued:

"When you came to me, a little child, I taught you your morning and evening prayers. Oh, Beulah! Beulah! now you lay down to sleep without a thought of prayer. My child, what is to become of you?"

"I don't know. But do not be distressed about me; I am trying to do my duty just as conscientiously as though I went to church."

"Don't deceive yourself, dear child. If you cease to pray and read your Bible, how are you to know what your duty is? How are you to keep yourself 'pure and unspotted from the world'? Beulah, a man without religion is to be pitied; but, oh! a Godless woman is a horror above all things. It is no marvel you look so anxious and hollow-eyed. You have forsaken the 'ways of pleasantness and the paths of peace.'"

"I am responsible to no one for my opinions."

"Yes, you are; responsible to God, for he has given truth to the world, and when you shut your eyes, and willingly walk in darkness, he will judge you accordingly. If you had lived in an Indian jungle, out of hearing of Gospel truth, then God would not have expected anything but idolatry from you; but you live in a Christian land; in the land of Bibles, and 'to whom much is given, much will be expected.' The people of this generation are running after new doctrines, and overtake much error. Beulah, since I have seen you sitting up nearly all night, pouring over books that rail at Jesus and his doctrines, I have repented the hour I first suggested your educating yourself to teach. If this is what all your learning has brought you to, it would have been better if you had been put out to learn millinery or mantua-making. Oh, my child, you have been my greatest pride, but now you are a grief to me!"

She took Beulah's hand in hers, and pressed her lips to it, while the tears fell thick and fast. The orphan was not unmoved; her lashes were heavy with unshed drops, but she said nothing.

"Beulah, I am fifty-five years old; I have seen a great deal of the world, and, I tell you, I have never yet known a happy man or woman who did not reverence God and religion. I can see that you are not happy. Child, you never will be so long as you wander away from God. I pray for you; but you must also pray for yourself. May God help you, my dear child!"

She left her, knowing her nature too well to hope to convince her of her error.

Beulah remained for some time in the same position, with her eyes fixed on the fire, and her forehead plowed by torturing thought. The striking of the clock roused her from her reverie, and, drawing a chair near her desk, she took up her pen to complete an article due the next day at the magazine office. Ah, how little the readers dreamed of the heavy heart that put aside its troubles to labor for their amusement! To-night she did not succeed as well as usual; her manuscript was blurred, and, forced to copy the greater part of it, the clock struck three before she laid her weary head on her pillow.