"It's not too late yet for you to have that experience, Mrs. Bradley. I am sure your heart can still be profoundly stirred by some great love."
"Oh, I know that, Miss Tracy. I know that. But to love without being loved in return—that's torture; it's not happiness."
"And why shouldn't you be loved in return?"
"I don't know. Oh, I don't know. Do you think, do you imagine, by the wildest stretch of hope and fancy do you conceive it to be possible that my love should be returned?"
She had risen to her feet. Her voice was tremulous with excitement. Her eyes had in them that appealing look that had pierced to the depth of Barry Malleson's heart. But she did not wait for Miss Tracy to answer her. She turned abruptly toward the door.
"I must go now," she said. "It's already dusk. And it's a long way home."
When she reached the hall she faced about. There was something she still wanted to say.
"Don't take it to heart, Miss Tracy. Your own broken romance, I mean. He was never the man for you. You have ideals. He has none. There are a thousand women with whom he will be just as well satisfied as he would have been with you. But for you there is but one man in all the world. And when he comes to you you will know him, and you will love him, and you will be supremely, oh, supremely happy. For there's nothing so beautiful, so wonderful, so heavenly in a woman's life as this love for the one man, if only he loves her."
That it came from her heart as well as from her lips, this message of hope and comfort, there could be no shadow of doubt. Her eyes were full of it, her countenance was aglow with it. But what lay back of it in her own life's experience that should give it such eloquent and passionate voice?
Before Ruth could recover sufficiently from her sur-
