“I met her pretty often during those months that Helen Lavery was running her round,” she said at length. “It always seemed to me to have a touch of the heroic, that absurd effort she was making to ‘qualify’ herself, so that she might be of use to him. I can see her doing something quite big, if she thought it would help him.” “I’ve fixed you up all right at the hospital,” he said. “It was good of you to think of coming home. Don’t go away, for a bit.” It was the first time he had asked anything of her.!

“What has become of them?” persisted Miss Tolley. “Are they yours?” she asked. She had never connected them with the works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might have learnt that they were known as “Allway’s Folly.”

The painted doll that the child fancied! the paint washed off and the golden hair all turned to drab? Could one be sure of “getting used to it,” of “liking it better?” And the poor bewildered doll itself! How could one expect to make of it a statue: “The Woman of the People.” One could only bruise it. Years afterwards, listening to the overture to Tannhäuser, there came back to her the memory of that night. Ever through the mad Satanic discords she could hear, now faint, now conquering, the Pilgrims’ onward march. So through the jangled discords of the world one heard the Song of Life. Through the dim aeons of man’s savage infancy; through the centuries of bloodshed and of horror; through the dark ages of tyranny and superstition; through wrong, through cruelty, through hate; heedless of doom, heedless of death, still the nightingale’s song: “I love you. I love you. I love you. We will build a nest. We will rear our brood. I love you. I love you. Life shall not die.” There was something about the poor, foolish painted face, as it looked up pleadingly, that gave it a momentary touch of beauty.