of something quite unbearable but quite unbanishable,—a vision, and a vision which must be entertained alone.
"Stay here and keep shop," her uncle said with sudden brusqueness, forcing her down into his own chair at the desk. "I can see no one; talk to no one; hear from no one. I am going up-stairs!"
"Up-stairs" meant the long, half-attic room in which Hampstead slept. It ran the length of the cottage. There were windows in the gables, and dormers were chopped in upon the side toward the Bay. At one end, pushed back toward the eaves, was a bed, fenced from the eye by a folding screen. Far at the other end was a table, a student-lamp and a few books. Between lay a long, rug-strewn space which Hampstead called his "tramping ground."
Here, when he wished to retire most completely from the public reach, he made his lair. Upon that rug-strewn space he had tramped out many of the problems of his ministry. In the past week he had walked miles between one gable window and the other, and stopped as many times to gaze out through the dormer windows over the crested tops of palms to the dancing waters on the Bay.
But now he had retreated there, not to be alone, but because he felt a sudden longing for companionship; and for a certain and particular companionship. That touch of Tayna's soft cheek upon his own had brought with stinging poignancy the recollection of what the presence of Bessie would be now,—Bessie as she once had been, dear, loyal, sympathetic, wise; as she had begun to be again before that last trip east; as she would have been when she returned and found him still strong and faithful.
Yet now she would never come. She was in Chicago to-day—no, upon the Atlantic. Last week was her final week. She had been getting her degree there while his
