Now for so attractive a girl as Margaret to be merged in so dreary, undistinguished a class was manifestly preposterous.  It was a stupid misapplication of human material.  A plainer face and a more homespun fibre would have served the purpose equally well.

Margaret was by no means so much a saint of self-sacrifice as not to have realized her situation with natural human pangs.  Youth only comes once—­especially to a woman; and

    No hand can gather up the withered fallen
        petals of the Rose of youth.

Petal by petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and falling.  More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for existence.  Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of life.  She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her, more than most, the sunshine falling in muffled beams through the lattices of her mother’s sick-room came with a maddening summons to—­live.  She was so supremely fitted to play a triumphant part in the world outside there, so gay of heart, so victoriously vital.

At first, therefore, the renunciation, accepted on the surface with so kind a face, was a source of secret bitterness and hidden tears.  But time, with its mercy of compensation, had worked for her one of its many mysterious transmutations, and shown her of what fine gold her apparently leaden days were made.  She was now thirty-three; though, for all her nursing vigils, she did not look more than twenty-nine, and was now more than resigned to the loss of the peculiar opportunities of youth—­if, indeed, they could be said to be lost already.  “An old maid,” she would say, “who has cheerfully made up her mind to be an old maid, is one of the happiest, and, indeed, most enviable, people in all the world.”

Resent the law as we may, it is none the less true that renunciation brings with it a mysterious initiation, a finer insight.  Its discipline would seem to refine and temper our organs of spiritual perception, and thus make up for the commoner experience lost by a rarer experience gained.  By dedicating herself to her sick mother, Margaret undoubtedly lost much of the average experience of her sex and age, but almost imperceptibly it had been borne in upon her that she made some important gains of a finer kind.  She had been brought very close to the mystery of human life, closer than those who have nothing to do beyond being thoughtlessly happy can ever come.  The nurse and the priest are initiates of the same knowledge.  Each alike is a sentinel on the mysterious frontier between this world and the next.  The nearer we approach that frontier, the more we understand not only of that world on the other side, but of the world on this.  It is only when death throws its shadow over the page of life that we realize the full significance of what we are reading.  Thus, by her mother’s bedside, Margaret was learning to read the page of life under the illuminating shadow of death.