Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/95

A Puritan Bohemia. It was a mistake, he said, to care for the sick and the afflicted, the relics of the past. One should face toward the future, spending all one's effort on those for whom there is still hope.

It was midwinter. Morning after morning Mrs. Kent was wakened by the sound of the shovelling of snow. It fell with a thud, like the dropping of sod upon coffin-lids. To her bitter questioning as to why so great a love had been given her only to be taken away, no answer came, until, in a brief moment of experience on a cloudy winter day, she caught a sudden flash of the hidden meanings of things.

Her old feeling of the senselessness of all she did had followed her that afternoon. Only the mechanical acts of existence were left her, for the past was slipping, and she could not hold it back. She saw herself passing into a gray indifference.

As she climbed the tenement-house stairs she clung to the railing. She was dazed. Everything seemed crumbling away like ropes of sand. Then she summoned