temperament
seemed for awhile to have been consumed in the fire. She came out of it
more like her mother. She was gentler than she used to be, and
especially gentle and good to her mother; and she had not only grown to
resemble her in a greater tranquillity and easy-goingness, but to have
come into her ambitions and desires. The change surprised Mrs. Saunders
a good deal; up to this time it had always surprised her that Cornelia
should not have been at all like her. She sometimes reflected, however,
that if you came to that, Cornelia's father had never been at all like
her, either.

It was only a passing phase of the girl's evolution. With the return of
perfect health and her former strength, she got back her old energetic
self, but of another quality and in another form. Probably she would
have grown into the character she now took on in any case; but
following her convalescence as it did, it had a more dramatic effect.
She began to review her studies and her examination papers before the
doctor knew it, and when the county examiners met in June she was ready
for them, and got a certificate authorizing her to teach for a year.
With this she need not meet the poor occasions of any such forlorn
end-of-the-earth as Burnt Pastures. She had an offer of the school at
Hartley's Mills, and she taught three terms there, and brought home a
hundred and fifty dollars at the end. All through the last winter she
drew, more or less, and she could see better than any one else that she
had not fallen behind in her art, but after having let it drop for a
time, had taken it up with fresh power and greater skill. She had come
to see things better than she used, and she had learned to be faithful
to what she saw, which is the great matter in all the arts.

She had never formulated this fact, even if she knew it; and Mrs.
Burton was still further from guessing what it was that made Cornelia's
sketches so much more attractive than they were, when the girl let her
look at them, in one of her proud, shy confidences. She said, "I do
wish Mr. Ludlow could see these, Nelie."

"Do you think he would be very much excited?" asked the girl, with the
sarcastic humor which had risen up in her to be one of the reliefs of
her earlier intensity.

"He ought to be," said Mrs. Burton. "You know he _did_ admire your
drawings, Nelie; even those you had at the fair, that time."

"Did he?" returned the girl, carelessly. "What did he say?"

"Well, he said