"You may resume your play, Ferdinand," she said, and her voice was very sad but without a touch of scorn; "you may resume your play. It is not you who have killed this child; it is I."

Then, stooping over the lifeless body, she raised it in her arms, and, in the midst of a yet more perfect stillness, as in the presence of a being of a holier and a loftier world, the Princess Isoline disappeared with her burden into the forest depths.

She followed the path under the narrow avenue, where she had once walked with Mark, till she reached her quiet and melancholy house; and, entering at once into the hall, she deposited her burden upon the long table, where the household was wont to dine. She laid it with the feet at one end of the board, and, straightening the stiffening limbs, she knelt down before it and buried her face in her hands.

"The good are not happy, and the happy are not good"—was she then good because she was so miserable? Ah no! Or was this wretchedness a wicked thing? Again, surely not!

As she lay thus, crushed and beaten down, her form contorted with sobs, a quiet footstep roused her, and, raising her eyes, she saw the Prince through her blinding tears. He was standing by the table, near the head of the child. His face was very pale, and the eyes had lost the habitual languor of their expression, and were full of an earnest tender grief. The Princess rose, and they looked each other straight in the eyes. Through the mist of tears the Prince's form became refined and purified, and he stood there with a beauty hitherto altogether unknown, even to her.

"I told this child, Isoline," he said; "I told this child that I had done well to send for him."

"Ferdinand," she said again, "it is not you who have done this; it is I." She stopped for a moment to recover control, and went on more passionately—"I, who pretended to the devoted life! in which alone he could breathe; I, to whom he looked for help and strength; I, who deserted him and gave a false report of the promised land."

The Prince looked at her with eyes full of compassion, but did not reply.

"You did what you could," continued his sister; "your effort was surely a noble one. More, in fact; you came to the help of his faith against evil. It is always so! The children of the world act always better than the children of light!"

In her self-abasement and despair the Princess did not remember Mark's words, that the greatest trial of his faith had been the Prince: a tolerance which is kindly and even appreciative, and yet, as with a clearness of a farther insight stands indifferently aside, must always be the great trial of simple faith.

"It is easier, Isoline," said her brother at last, "to maintain a low standard than a high. It seems to me that we have both been wrong, but yours is the nobler fault. You attempted an impossible flight—a flight which human nature has no wings strong enough to achieve. As for me, this has been a terrible shock—more than I could have thought possible, I who fancied myself so secure and so serene. That such a terrible chance could happen shows how unstable are the most finished schemes of life. I fancied that my life was an art, and I dreamed that it might be perfected—as a religious art. Fool that I was! How can life or religion be an art when the merest accident can dissolve the entire fabric at a blow? No art can exist in the presence of an impalpable mystery, of an unknown, inappeasable, implacable Force."

"No," said the Princess; "art is not enough!—morality, virtue, love even, is not enough. None of these can pierce the veil. Nothing profits, save the Divine Humanity, which, through the mystery of Sacrifice, has entered the unseen. You know, Ferdinand," and she looked up through her tears with a sad smile, "in your art there was always in old times a mystery."

She rose as she said this, and stood more lovely than ever in her grief and in her faith; and the Prince moved a step forward, and put his hand upon the breast of the child. As they stood, looking each other full in the eyes, in the notorious beauty of their order and of their race, it might have seemed to a sanguine fancy that, over the piteous victim of earth's failure, art and religion for the moment were at one.