fair to see, and that the combination of herself and a new gown was not what it had been.  She felt as if she had reached the last page of her book of life, and the ennui of middle age came over her.  She had not reached the last page; she was, of course, mistaken; but she had reached a paragraph so tremendous that it seemed to her the climax, as if there could be nothing beyond it.  She was married—­that is, she had been pronounced a wife!  There was, there could be, nothing further.  She was both afraid of, and disliked, the boy who had married her.  There was nothing ahead that she could see but a commonplace existence without romance and without love.  She as yet did not dwell upon the possible complications which might arise from her marriage.  It simply seemed to her that she should always live a spinster, although the marriage ceremony had been pronounced over her.  She began to realize that in order to live in this way she must take definite steps.  She knew that her father was not rich.  The necessity for work and earning her own living in the future began to present itself.  She made up her mind to fit herself for a teacher.

“Papa, I am going to teach,” she told her father one afternoon.

Ida had gone out.  It was two years after her marriage, and Maria looked quite a woman.  She and her father were alone.  Evelyn had gone to bed.  Maria had tucked her in and kissed her good-night.  Josephine was no longer a member of the family.  In a number of ways expenses had been retrenched.  Harry would not admit it, and Ida did not seem aware of it, but his health was slowly but surely failing.  That very day he had consulted a specialist in New York, taking his turn in the long line of waiting applicants in the office.  When he came out he had a curious expression on his face, which made more than one of the other patients, however engrossed in their own complaints, turn around and look after him.  He looked paler than when he had entered the office, but not exactly cast down.  He had rather a settled expression, as of one who had come in sight, not of a goal of triumph, but of the end of a long and wearisome journey.  In these days Harry Edgham was so unutterably weary, he drove himself to his work with such lashes of spirit, that he was almost incapable of revolt against any sentence of fate.  There comes a time to every one, to some when young, to some when old, that too great a burden of labor, or of days, renders the thought of the last bed of earth unterrifying.  The spirit, overcome with weariness of matter, droops earthward with no rebellion.  Harry, who had gotten his death-sentence, went out of the doctor’s office and hailed his ferry-bound car, and realized very little difference in his attitude from what he had done before.  He had still time before him, possibly quite a long time.  He thought of leaving Ida and the little one and Maria, but he had a feeling as if he were beginning the traversing of a circle which would in