“It is only a Christmas card, but so lovely, I know your artistic taste cannot fail to admire it; and it may brighten your cheerless room.  It is the three-hundred-dollar-prize-card, and particularly beautiful.”

“Thank you, dear Miss Gordon.  It may help to deaden the merciless stings of memory, which all day long has tortured me by unrolling the past, where my Christmas days stand out like illuminated capitals on black-letter pages.”

Deaden the stings of memory?  What spell suddenly evoked the image of her invalid mother, all the details of the attic room, the litter of pencils on the table; the windows of a florist’s shop where, standing on the pavement, she had studied hungrily the shapes of the blossoms poverty denied her as models; the interior of the Creche, which she had penetrated in order to sketch the heads of sleeping babies, as a study for cherubs?

Leo had almost reached the door, when a passionate, indescribably mournful cry arrested her steps.

“Too late!—­too late!  O, God!  What a cruel mockery!”

Beryl stood leaning against the railing of the altar, with the light of the setting sun falling aslant on the gilded card she held up in one hand; on her white convulsed face, where tears fell in a scalding flood.  Retracing her steps, Leo said falteringly: 

“In my efforts to comfort you, have I only wounded more sorely?  How have I hurt you?  What can I do?”

“No—­no! you are an angel of pity, hovering over an abyss of ruin, whose darkest horrors you only imagine faintly.  What can you do?  Nothing, but pray to God to paralyze my tongue, and grant me death, before I lose my last clutch on faith, and curse my Creator, and drift down to eternal perdition!  It was hard enough before, but this mockery maddens.”

With a sudden abandonment, she hurled the card away, threw her arms around Leo’s neck and sobbed unrestrainedly.  Tenderly the latter held her shivering form, as the proud head fell on her shoulder; and after a time, Beryl lifted a face white as an annunciation lily, drenched by tropical rain.

“I thought misfortune had emptied all her vials, and that I was nerved, because there was nothing more to dread.  But the worst is always behind, and this is the irony of fate.  You think that merely a rhetorical metaphor, a tragic trope?  How should you know?  That Christmas card is the solitary dove I sent out to hunt a resting-place for mother and for me, when the flood engulfed us.  It was my design sent to Boston, to compete for the prizes offered.  How I dreamed, how I toiled!  Haunting the flower shops for a glimpse of heartsease, and passion flowers, and stars of Bethlehem; begging a butcher at the abattoir to spare a lamb, until I could sketch it; kneeling by cradles in the public Creche to get the full red curve of a baby’s sucking lips, as they forsook the bottle, the dimple in the tiny hands, the tendrils of hair on the satin brow!