“’Allegory’—­eh?  You forget your story, I think, Doctor Blecker,”—­with a frown.

The Doctor stopped to help her to jelly, with a serious face, and then went on.  “She turned round at last.  I did not look up at her, only said,—­

“‘I will not write the letter.’

“‘Go on,’ she said.

“I wrote it, then; but when I went to give it to her, my heart failed me.

“‘Lizzy,’ I said, ‘you shall not do this thing.’

“She looked so childish and pitiful, standing there!

“’You think you are cutting yourself off from your chance of love through all time by it,—­just for Grey and the others.’

“Her eyes filled at that; she could not bear the kind word, you see.

“‘Yes, I do, Doctor Blecker,’ she said.  ’Nobody ever loved me but Uncle Dan.  Since he went away, I have gone every day to his house, coming nearer to him that way, growing purer, more like other women.  There’s a picture of his mother there, and his sister.  They are dead now, but I think their souls looked at me out of those pictures and loved me.’

“She came up, her head hardly reaching to the top of the chair I sat on, half smiling, those strange gray eyes of hers.

“’I thought they said,—­“This is Lizzy:  this is the little girl Daniel loves.”  Every day I’d kneel down by that dead lady’s chair, and pray to God to make me fit to be her son’s wife.  But he’s dead now,’ drawing suddenly back, ‘and I am going to be—­an opera-singer.’

“‘Not unless by your own free will,’ I said.

“She did not hear me, I think, pulling at the fastening about her throat.

“’Daniel would say it was the Devil’s calling.  Daniel was all I had.  But he don’t know.  I know.  God means it.  I might have lived on here, keeping myself true to his notions of right:  then, when I went yonder, he would have been kind to me, he would have loved me,’—­looking out through the rain, in a dazed way.

“‘The truth is, Lizzy,’ I said, ’you have a power within you, and you want to give it vent; it’s like a hungry devil tearing you.  So you give up your love-dream, and are going to be an opera-singer.  That’s the common-sense of the matter.’

“I sealed the letter, and gave it to her.

“‘You think that?’

“That was all she answered.  But I’m sorry I said it; I don’t know whether it was true or not.  There,—­that is the whole story.  I never told it to Grey before.  You can judge for yourselves.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Sheppard, “let me go with you to see your sister in New York.  Some more coffee, please.  My cup is cold.”

* * * * *

A clear, healthy April night:  one of those bright, mountain-winded nights of early spring, when the air is full of electric vigor,—­starlight, when the whole earth seems wakening slowly and grandly into a new life.