lips far away, in an unechoing distance:--

"The Shadow?--Yes. I see it in all faces. It lies on the valley yonder;
in the air; on every mortal brow and lip it gathers deeper yet. Violet,
you, too, share the Shadow!"

Slowly, as if his words froze her, Violet rose and turned toward him;
a light shone from her eyes that melted their dark depths into the
radiance of high noon; and she spoke with a thrilled, yet unfaltering
tone:--

"Yes, I share it, it is true. I feel and see the gloom; but if the
Shadow haunts me, Roger Pierce, ask your own heart who cast it there!
When we were first friends, I knew nothing of that darkness. I tried
with all purity and compassion to draw you upward into light; and for
reward, you have wrapped your own blackness round me, and hate your own
doing. My work is over,--is in vain! It remains only that I free myself
from this Shadow, and leave you to the mercy of a Power with whom no
such Presence can cope,--in whom no darkness nor shadow may abide."

She turned to leave him with these words, but cast back a look of such
love and tender pity, that she seemed to Roger the very Spirit that had
borne Sunny away.

Bewildered and pained to the heart, he groped his way homeward, and
night lapsed into morning, and returned and went again more than once,
ere sleep returned to his eyes.

Violet kept no vigils; she wept herself asleep as a child against its
mother's bosom, and loving eyes guarded that childlike rest. But Roger's