THE BROOK IN THE WAY.

About this time Missy broke down, and had the first illness of her life. St. John came up to her, and brought one of the newly-imported Sisters to nurse her. She would have rebelled against this, if she had been in condition to rebel. She was not, however, and could only submit.

What is the use of going through her illness? We have most of us been ill, and know the dark rooms we are led through, and the hopelessness, and helplessness, and weariness; the foreign land we seem to be in, with well people stealing on tip-toe out of our sight to eat their comfortable dinners, with kind attendants reading the morning paper behind the window curtains, with faithful affection smothering yawns through our tossing, sleepless nights. Yes, everybody is well and we are sick. Everybody is in life, and we are in some strange, half-way place, that is not life nor death. We may be so near eternity, and yet we cannot think of it; so wretched, so wretched, the fretted body cannot turn its thoughts away from itself. We are alone as far as earth goes, and alone, as far as any nearness to Heaven feels. What is the good of it all? What have we gained (if we ever get back) by this journey into a strange land, that didn't seem to be joyous but grievous? Well, a great many things, perhaps, but one thing almost certainly: Detachment. It is scarcely possible to love life and see good days with the same zest after this sorrowful journey. It abates one's relish for enjoyment, it tempers one's thirst for present pleasures; it loosens one's hold upon things mundane. That is the certain good it does, and the uncertain, how infinite!

Poor Missy felt like a penitent child, after that illness of hers. She did not feel any better, nor any surer that she should be any stronger or wiser; but she felt the certainty that she had put a very wrong value upon things, and that life was a very different matter from what she had been considering it. She felt so ashamed of her self-will, so humbled about her own judgment. She still did not like long black dresses on men or women, but she felt very much obliged to St. John and the good Sister for all the weeks they had spent in taking care of her. And although stained glass windows, and swinging lamps, and church embroidery did not appeal to her in the least; she began to understand how they might appeal to people of a different temperament. Let it not be imagined that Missy came out of this a lamb of meekness. On the contrary, she was very exacting about her broth, and once cried because the nurse would not keep Miss Varian out of the room. But then she was more sorry for it than she had been in the habit of being, and made Miss Varian a handsome apology the first time she was well enough to see her.

She looked out of the window, across the road, upon the trees just budding into loveliness on the lawn of her dearest home, and wondered that she should have thought it mattered so very much whether she lived in this house or in that, considering it was not going to be forever, either here or there.

St. John came and sat down by her one afternoon, as she lay in a great easy chair, looking out at the spring verdure and the soft declining sunshine. She had never got to talking of very deep things to St. John, since her unhappy controversy with him, but she felt so sure that he would not talk of anything that she objected to, that she was at her ease with him. They talked about the great tulip tree on the lawn, that they could just see from the window, and the aspens by the gate, just large-leaved enough to shiver in the softly-moving breeze. Then Missy forced herself to ask if a tenant had been found for the house, and he answered her, yes, and also, that he had heard that the Andrews' place was rented too.

"I'm sorry," he said, "that Mr. Andrews has gone away from here. I felt as if it were the sort of place he might have been happy in, and much respected. Did you ever get to know him well? I remember that you took a fancy to the children."

"I saw a good deal of them last summer," said Missy, wearily. How far off last summer seemed!

"What a terrible life!" said St. John, musingly. "Not one man in a thousand could have borne what he did; it was almost heroic, and yet I think my first impression was that he was common-place."

"I don't understand," said Missy, "tell me."

"It isn't possible you don't know about his wife?"

So St. John told her something that she certainly hadn't known before about his wife. St. John had learned it from others; the story had been pretty well known in an English town where he had been the year before, and had come to him in ways that put it beyond any doubt. Mr. Andrews had married a young woman, of French extraction, of whom nobody seemed to know anything, but that she was distractingly pretty. After three or four years she had proved to be the very worst woman that could be imagined. She had a lover, who was the father of Gabrielle; she had married just in time to conceal her shame from the world and from her husband. They went to Europe after the little girl's birth, and in about two years Jay was born. When he was a few months old, the suspicions of the husband were aroused by some accidental circumstance. The lover had followed them, and had renewed his correspondence with her. Some violent scenes occurred. She professed penitence and promised amendment. Her next move was a bungling conspiracy with her lover to poison her husband. A horrid exposÉ of the whole thing threatened. It was with difficulty suppressed, the man fled, leaving her to bear all. In her rage and despair she took poison, and barely escaped dying. It was managed that the thing never came to trial. Mr. Andrews, out of pity for the miserable creature, whose health was permanently destroyed by her mad act, resolved not to abandon her to destruction. His love for his little son, and his compassion for the poor little bastard girl, induced him still to shelter her, and to keep up the fiction of a home for their sakes.

"I don't think," said St. John, "one could fancy a finer action. Protecting the woman who had attempted his life, adopting the child who had been palmed off upon him, establishing a home which must have been full of bitterness all the time. There are not many men who could have done this. It seems to me utter self-renunciation. Doesn't it seem so to you?"

"How long have you known this?" cried Missy, bursting into tears. "Oh! St. John, if you had only told me! You might have saved me from being—so unjust."