troubling him?"

She was not at all a good-looking woman, but she had a very sweet,
wistful face, and I never looked at her sad eyes without feeling
ready to go through fire and water for her. I tried now to make
light of Derrick's depression.

"He is only going through what we all of us go through," I said,
assuming a cheerful tone. "He has suddenly discovered that life is
a great riddle, and that the things he has accepted in blind faith
are, after all, not so sure."

She sighed.

"Do all go through it?" she said thoughtfully. "And how many, I
wonder, get beyond?"

"Few enough," I replied moodily. Then, remembering my role,--"But
Derrick will get through; he has a thousand things to help him which
others have not,--you, for instance. And then I fancy he has a sort
of insight which most of us are without."

"Possibly," she said. "As for me, it is little that I can do for
him. Perhaps you are right, and it is true that once in a life at
any rate we all have to go into the wilderness alone."

That was the last summer I ever saw Derrick's mother; she took a
chill the following Christmas and died after a few days' illness.
But I have always thought her death helped Derrick in a way that her
life might have failed to do. For although he never, I fancy, quite