Hand in hand they walked to the door, and Leo pitied the future of this woman, whose lover was a wandering outlaw, with a price set upon his head; and beneath her gray flannel habit, Beryl’s heart was torn with conflicting emotions, as she watched the placid, proud face, that showed no vestige of the storm of disappointment which had stranded her sweetest hope in life.

“Good-bye, Beryl; God keep you in His tender care.”

“Good-bye, dear Miss Gordon.  I will pray for your happiness, so long as I live.”

She stooped, drew Leo’s hands to her face, pressed her trembling lips twice upon them; then turned quickly, and locked herself in the studio.

Is it true, that “Orestes and Pylades have no sisters?”

CHAPTER XXXIII.

A Persian proverb tells us:  “A stone that is fit for the wall is not left in the way.”  Strong artistic aspirations will plough through arid sands, leap across bottomless chasms, toil over bristling obstacles, climb bald, freezing crags to reach that shining plateau, where “beauty pitches her tents”, and the Ideal beckons.  Favorable environment is the steaming atmosphere that fosters, forces and develops germs which might not survive the struggle against adverse influences, in uncongenial habitat; but nature moulds some types that attain perfection through perpetual elementary warfare which hardens the fibre, and strengthens the hold; as in those invincible algx towering in the stormy straits of Tierra del Fuego, swept from Antartic homes toward the equator,—­defying the fierce flail of surf that pulverizes rock, “Breed is stronger than pasture; and no matter how savage a stepmother the circumstances of life may prove, the inherited psychological strain will sometimes dominate, and triumph.”  According to the Talmud:  “A myrtle, even in a desert, remains a myrtle”.

From her tenth year, Beryl had begun to build her castle in the Spain of Art; daubed its walls with wonderful frescoes, filled its echoing corridors with heroic men and lovely women of the classic ages; and through its mullioned windows looked into an enchanted land, clothed with that witching “light that never was on sea or land”.  When all else on earth was sombre and dun-hued, sunlight and moonlight still gilded those magical towers.  In darkest nights, through hissing rain and hurtling hail, she caught the glitter of its starry vanes smiling through murkiness, and above the wail and sob of the storms that had swept over the waste places of her youth, she heard the divine melodies which the immortal harper, Hope, played always in the marvellous palace of the Muses.

In early girlhood she had followed her father into the solemn mysteries of Greek Tragedy; and in that vast white temple dedicated to the inexorable Fates, where predestined victims moved like marble images to their immolation, her own plastic nature had been moulded in unison with the classic cult.  Among the throng of Attic types, an immortal statue of filial devotion and sisterly love had attracted her irresistibly, and to Antigone she rendered the homage of a boundless admiration, an unwavering fealty.