No!—­she began to see her life as the Vicar saw it:  pledged to large causes, given to drudgeries—­necessary, perhaps noble, for which the happy are not meant.  This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers much longer.  If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden, surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the world rang in her ears—­wild voices!—­speaking universal, terrible, representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close, close to her heart.  No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she best could.  Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own youth, grief for her parents.  She must turn to the poor in that mood she had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself—­the mood of one seeking an opiate, an anaesthetic.  The scrubbing of hospital floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of them deaden thought—­these were what she turned to as the only means by which life could be lived.

Oliver!—­No hope for him?—­at thirty-six!  His career broken—­his ambition defeated.  Nothing before him but the decline of power and joy; nights of barren endurance, separating days empty and tortured; all natural pleasures deadened and destroyed; the dying down of all the hopes and energies that make a man.

She threw herself down beside the open window, burying her face on her knees.  Would they never let her go to him?—­never let her say to him:  “Oliver, take me!—­you did love me once—­what matters what came between us?  That was in another world.  Take my life—­crush out of it any drop of comfort or of ease it can give you!  Cruel, cruel—­to refuse!  It is mine to give and yours to spend!”

Juliet Sparling’s daughter.  There was the great consecrating, liberating fact!  What claim had she to the ordinary human joys?  What could the ordinary standards and expectations of life demand from her?  Nothing!—­nothing that could stem this rush of the heart to the beloved—­the forsaken and suffering and overshadowed beloved.  Her future?—­she held it dross—­apart from Oliver.  Dear Sir James!—­but he must learn to bear it—­to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for herself.  What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but just this:  to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver—­to bring him the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love?  And if it were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena, where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and throw herself blindly into the fight.  Perhaps some heavenly voice might still speak through it; perhaps, beyond its jar, some ineffable reunion might dawn—­