excitements of the day, she was not yet ready for sleep. She must have the luxuries of consciousness; she must tread the roomy spaces of reflection, and be quieted by their largeness. And so she had gone to her windows, and had remained there for a long time looking out upon the night.

The street beneath was dimly lighted. Traffic had almost ceased. Now and then a car sped past. The thoroughfare along here is level and broad and smooth, and being skirted on one side by the park, it offers the illusive freedom of a country road. Across the street at the foot of the park a few lights gleamed scant amid the April foliage. She began at the foot of the hill and followed the line of them upward, upward over the face of the rock, leading this way and that way, but always upward. There on the height in the darkness loomed the cathedral.

Often during the trouble and discouragement of years it had seemed to her that her own life and every other life would have had more meaning if only there had been, away off somewhere in the universe, some higher evil intelligence to look on and laugh, to laugh pitilessly at everything human. She had held on to her faith because she must hold on to something, and she had nothing else. Now as she stood there, following the winding, steep road over the rock, her thoughts went back and searched once more along the wandering pathway of her years; and she said within herself that a Power greater than any earthly had led her with her son to the hidden goal of them both, the cathedral.

The next day brought no disappointment: he had rushed home and thrown himself into her arms and told her that he was accepted. He was to sing in the choir. The dream was a reality.

Later that day the choir-master himself had come down to speak to her when the pupil was not present. He was guarded in his words, but could not conceal the enthusiasm of his mood.

"I do not know what it may develop into," he said,-"that is something we cannot foretell,-but I believe it will be a great voice in the world. I do know that it will be a wonderful voice in the choir."

She stood before him mute with emo

"You have made no mistake," she said. "It is a great voice, and he will have a great career."

The choir-master was impatient to have the lessons begin. She asked for a few days to get him in readiness. She needed them, she said to herself; he could not make his first appearance at the school in white linen knickerbockers.

This school would be his first, for she had taught him at home, haunted by a sense of responsibility that he must be specially guarded. Now just as the unsafe years came on, he would be safe in that fold. When natural changes followed, as follow they must later on, and his voice broke, and then came again, whatever afterward befell, behind would be the memories of his childhood. And when he had grown to full manhood, when he was an old man and she no longer with him, wherever on the earth he might wander or might work, always he would be going back to those years in the cathedral: they would be his safeguard, a consecration to the end.

Now a few days later she stood in the same favorite spot, at her windows; and it was her favorite hour to be there, the coming on of twilight.

All day until nearly sundown a cold April rain had fallen. These contradictory days of young green and winter cold the pious folk of older lands and ages named the days of the ice saints. They really fall in May, but this had been like one of them. So raw and chill had been the atmosphere of the grateless garret that the window-frames had been fastened down, their rusty catches clamped.

At them she stood looking out and looking up and away toward a scene of splendor in the heavens.

It was sunset, the rain was over, the sky had cleared. She had been tracing the retreating line of sunlight. First it crossed the street to the edge of the park, then crossed the wet grass at the foot of the slope; then it passed upward over the bowed, dripping shrubbery and lingered on the tree-tops along the crest; and then it had flamed out far off on the western sky behind the cathedral.

It was a gorgeous spectacle in nature.

The cathedral seemed not to be situated in the city, not to be based on the rocks of the island, but risen out of infinite space, and to abide on the eternity of light. Long she gazed into that vision, full of happiness at last, full of peace, full of prayer.

Standing at her windows at that hour, she stood on the pinnacle of her life.

row.

over and Sometimes

From the dark, slippery street shrill, familiar sounds rose to her ear, and drew her attention downward, and she smiled. He was down there at play with friends whose parents lived in the houses of the She laughed as those victorious cries reached the upper air. Leaning forward, she pressed her face against the window-pane and peered watched the group of them. she could see them and sometimes not as they struggled from one side of the street to the other. No one younger or older, stronger or weaker, was ever defeated down there; everybody at some time got worsted; no one was ever defeated. All the whipped were conquerors. Unconquerable children! She said to herself that she must learn a lesson from them once more.

With her face still against the glass she caught sight of something approaching carefully up the street. It was the car of a physician who had a patient in one of the houses near by. It was his hour to make his call. He guided the car himself, and the great mass of tons of weight responded to his guidance as if it possessed intelligence, as if it entered into his foresight and caution: it became to her, as she watched it, almost conscious, almost human. She thought of it as being like some great characters in human life which need so little to make them go easily and make them go right. A wise touch, and their enormous influence is sent whither it should be sent by a pressure that would not push a leaf.

She chid herself once more that in a world where the great is good she had so often been hard and bitter; that many a time she had found pleasure in setting the empty cup of her life out under the clouds and catching the very showers as though they were drops of gall.

All at once her attention was riveted on an object up the street. Around a bend a few hundred yards away a huge,

wild object swung recklessly, unsteadily, almost striking the curb and lamp-post, and then, righting itself, came on with a rush the dark terror. Now on one side of the street, now in the middle, now on the wrong side; gliding along through the twilight, barely to be seen, creeping nearer and nearer under the shadows, on the wrong side of the street where it would not be looked for.

A bolt of horror shot through her. She pressed her face quickly against the window-panes as closely as possible, searching for the whereabouts of the lads. As she looked, the mass of them went down, the others piled on one. She thought she knew which one, -he was the strongest, -then they passed from sight, rolling in nearer to the sidewalk. And straight toward them rushed that terror of the land. She tried to throw up the sashes, to lean out and cry down to him, to wave her hands to him as she had often done with joy. She could not raise the sashes. She had not the strength left in her to turn the rusty bolts. Nor was there time. She looked again; she saw what was going to happen. Then she began with frenzy to beat against the window-sashes and to moan and stifle her moans. And then as shrill, startled screams and piteous cries came up to her, crazed now and no longer knowing what she did, she beat against the window-panes in her futile agony until they were shattered and she thrust her arms out through them with a last, blind instinct to reach him, to wave to him, to drag him out of the way. For a moment the arms hung there, and a shower of drops from her fingers splashed on the paving-stones far below. Without reason she kept on waving them more and more faintly; and then they slipped inward after the body, which dropped unconscious.

IV

IT was a gay scene over at the art school next morning. Even before the accustomed hour the big, barnlike room, with a few prize pictures of former classes scattered about the walls, and with the old academy easels standing about like a caravan of patient camels, ever loaded with new burdens, but ever traveling the same ancient sands of art-even before nine o'clock the barnlike room presented

a scene of the tumult of eager, healthy animal spirits. On the easel of every youthful worker, nearly finished, lay the portrait of the mother.

In every case it had been differently done, in all cases inadequately done; but it had been done. Hardly could any observer have failed to recognize what was there depicted. Through smearings and daubings of paint, as past the edges of concealing clouds, one caught glimpses of a serene and steadfast human radiance, made out the familiar image of that orb which in dark and pathless hours has been immutable light of the world.

The best in them had gone into the painting of this portrait, and the outgo of our best gives us the sense of our power, and the consciousness of our power yields us our enthusiasm; hence the exhilaration and energy of the studio scene.

The interest of the members of the class was not concerned solely with the portrait, however: a larger share went to the model herself. They had become strongly bound to her. All the more perhaps because she held them firmly to the understanding that her life touched theirs only at the point of the stranger in need of a small sum of money. Repulsed and baffled in their wish to know her better, they nevertheless became aware that she was undergoing a wonderful transformation. The change had begun after the ordeal of the first morning. When she returned for the second sitting, and then at later sittings, they had remarked this change, and had spoken of it to one another-that she was as a person into whose life some joyous, unbelievable event has fallen to brighten the entire future. Every day some old, cloudy care seemed to loose itself from its lurking-place and drift across her face, leaving it less obscured and thus the more real to them. Now, with the end of the sittings not far off, what they looked forward to with most regret was the last, when she, leaving her portrait in their hands, would herself vanish, taking with her both the mystery of her old sorrows and the mystery of this new happiness which covered her like a radiant veil.

Promptly at nine o'clock the teacher of the class entered, greeted them, and glanced around for the model. Not seeing her, he looked at his watch, then with out comment crossed to the easels, and

studied again the progress made the previous day, correcting, approving, guiding, encouraging. His demeanor showed that he entered into the unique enthusiasm of his class for this particular piece of work.

A few minutes were thus quickly consumed. Then, watch in hand once more, he spoke of the absence of the model:

"Something seems to detain the model this morning. But she has sent me no word, and she will no doubt be here in a few minutes."

He went back to the other end of the studio and sat down, facing them with the impressiveness which belonged to him even without speech. They fixed their eyes on him with a sudden expectancy. Whenever as now an unforeseen delay occurred, he was always prompt to take advantage of the interval with a brief talk. To them there were never enough of these brief talks, which invariably drew human life. into relationship to the art of portraiture, set the one over against the other—the turbulence of humanity and the still image. They hoped he would talk to them now; and in truth he wore the air of casting about in his mind for a theme best suited to the moment.

THAT mother, now absent, when she had blindly found her way to him, asking to pose, had fallen into good hands. He was a great teacher and he was a remarkable man, remarkable even to look at. Massively built, with a big head of black hair, an olive complexion, and a bluntly pointed, black beard, and with a mold of countenance grave and strong, he looked like great Rembrandt; like some splendid full-length portrait by Rembrandt painted as that master painted men in the prime of his power. And with shadows on him. Even when the sun beat down upon him outdoors, even when you met him in the blaze of the city streets, he seemed not altogether to have emerged from a background of shadow, to bear on himself the traces of a human night, a living darkness. There was light within him, but it did not irradiate him wholly.

Once he had been a headlong art student himself, starting out to become a great painter, a great one. After years abroad under the foremost masters and other years of self-trial with every favorable circumstance his, nature had one day