have realized her situation with natural human pangs. Youth only comes
once--especially to a woman; and

No hand can gather up the withered fallen
petals of the Rose of youth.

Petal by petal, Margaret had watched the rose of her youth fading and
falling. More than all her sisters, she was endowed with a zest for
existence. Her superb physical constitution cried out for the joy of
life. She was made to be a great lover, a great mother; and to her,
more than most, the sunshine falling in muffled beams through the
lattices of her mother's sick-room came with a maddening summons
to--live. She was so supremely fitted to play a triumphant part in the
world outside there, so gay of heart, so victoriously vital.

At first, therefore, the renunciation, accepted on the surface with so
kind a face, was a source of secret bitterness and hidden tears. But
time, with its mercy of compensation, had worked for her one of its many
mysterious transmutations, and shown her of what fine gold her
apparently leaden days were made. She was now thirty-three; though, for
all her nursing vigils, she did not look more than twenty-nine, and was
now more than resigned to the loss of the peculiar opportunities of
youth--if, indeed, they could be said to be lost already. "An old maid,"
she would say, "who has cheerfully made up her mind to be an old maid,
is one of the happiest, and, indeed, most enviable, people in all the
world."

Resent the law as we may, it is none the less true that renunciation
brings with it a mysterious initiation, a finer insight. Its discipline
would seem to refine and temper our organs of spiritual perception, and