a vast
national movement among the women of her people. In her surroundings
and ensuing struggles she had much use for that saving sense of humor
which had been poured into her veins out of the deep clear wells of her
ancestors; need also of that radiant, bountiful light which still fell
upon her from the skies of the past; but more than these as staff to
her young hands, cup to her lips, lamp to her feet, oil to her daily
bruises, rest to her weary pillow, was reliance on Higher Help. For the
years--and they seemed to her many and wide--had already driven
Gabriella, as they have driven countless others of her sex, out of the
cold, windy world into the church: she had become a Protestant devotee.
Had she been a Romanist, she would long ere this have been a nun. She
was now fitted for any of those merciful and heroic services which keep
fresh on earth the records of devoted women. The inner supporting stem
of her nature had never been snapped; but it had been bruised enough to
give off life-fragrance. Adversity had ennobled her. In truth, she had
so weathered the years of a Revolution which had left her as destitute
as it had left her free, that she was like Perdita's rosemary: a flower
which keeps seeming and savor all the winter long. The North Wind had
bolted about her in vain his whitest snows; and now the woods were
turning green.

It was merely in keeping with Gabriella's nature, therefore, that as
she grew to know the people among whom she had come to stay, their
homes, their family histories, one household and one story should have
engaged her deep interest: David's parents and David's career. As she
drove about the country, visiting with the farmer's wife, there had
been pointed out a melancholy remnant of a farm, desperately resisting
absorption by some one of three growing estates touching it on three
sides. She had been taken to call on the father and mother; had seen
the poverty within doors, the half-ruined condition of the outhouses;
had heard of their son, now away at the university; of how they had
saved and he had struggled. A proud father it was who now told of his
son's magnificent progress already at college.

"Ah," she exclaimed, thinking it over in her room that night, "this is
something worth hearing! Here is the hero in life! Among these
easy-going people this solitary struggler. I, too, am one now; I can
understand him."

During the first year of her teaching, there had developed in her a
n