For it had been given to Angela, living so much alone, and thinking so long and deeply upon these great mysteries of our being, to soar to the heights of a noble faith.  To the intense purity of her mind, a living heaven presented itself, a comfortable place, very different from the vague and formularised abstractions with which we are for the most part satisfied; where Arthur and her mother were waiting to greet her, and where the great light of the Godhead would shine around them all.  She grew to hate her life, the dull barrier of the flesh that stood between her and her ends.  Still she ate and drank enough to support it, still dressed with the same perfect neatness as before, still lived, in short, as though Arthur had not died, and the light and colour had not gone out of her world.

One day—­it was in March—­she was sitting in Mr. Fraser’s study reading the “Shakespeare” which Arthur had given to her, and in the woes of others striving to forget her own.  But the attempt proved a failure; she could not concentrate her thoughts, they would continually wander away into space in search of Arthur.

She was dressed in black; from the day that she heard her lover was dead, she would wear no other colour, and as she gazed, with her hands idly clasped before her, out at the driving sleet and snow, Mr. Fraser thought that he had never seen statue, picture, or woman of such sweet, yet majestic beauty.  But it had been filched from the features of an immortal.  The spirit-look which at times had visited her from a child now continually shone upon her face, and to the sight of sinful men her eyes seemed almost awful in their solemn calm and purity.  She smiled but seldom now, and, when she did, it was in those grey eyes that the radiance began:  her features scarcely seemed to move.

“What are you thinking of, Angela?”

“I am thinking, Mr. Fraser, that it is only fourteen weeks to-day since Arthur died, and that it is very likely that I shall live another forty or fifty years before I see him.  I am only twenty-one, and I am so strong.  Even this shock has not hurt me.”

“Why should you want to die?”

“Because all the beauty and light has gone out of my life; because I prefer to trust myself into the hands of God rather than to the tender mercies of the world; because he is there, and I am here, and I am tired of waiting.”

“Have you no fear of death?”

“I have never feared death, and least of all do I fear it now.  Why, the veriest coward would not shrink back when the man she loved was waiting for her.  And I am not a coward, and if I were told that I must die within an hour, I could say, ’How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!’ Cannot you understand me?  If all your life and soul were wrapped up in one person, and she died, would you not long to go to her?”

Mr. Fraser made no reply for a while, but in his turn gazed out at the drifting snow, surely not more immaculately pure than this woman who could love with so divine a love.  At length he spoke.