hining like blue flowers in the band of
sunlight that fell through the dormer-window, she quivered to the early
sweetness of honeysuckle as though it were the charmed sweetness of love
of which she had dreamed in the night. She was only one of the many
millions of women who were awaking at the same hour to the same miracle
of Nature, yet she might have been the first woman seeking the first man
through the vastness and the mystery of an uninhabited earth. Impossible
to believe that an experience so wonderful was as common as the bursting
of the spring buds or the humming of the thirsty bees around the
honeysuckle arbour!

Slipping out of bed, she threw her dressing-gown over her shoulders, and
kneeling beside the window, drank in the flower-scented air of the May
morning. During the night, the paulownia trees had shed a rain of violet
blossoms over the wet grass, where little wings of sunshine, like golden
moths, hovered above them. Beyond the border of lilies-of-the-valley she
saw the squat pinkish tower of the church, and beneath it, in the
narrow churchyard, rose the gleaming shaft above the grave of the
Confederate soldier. On her right, in the centre of the crooked path,
three negro infants were prodding earnestly at roots of wire-grass and
dandelion; and brushing carelessly their huddled figures, her gaze
descended the twelve steps of the almost obliterated terrace, and
followed the steep street down which a mulatto vegetable vendor was
urging his slow-footed mule.

A wave of joy rose in her breast, and she felt that her heart melted in
gratitude for the divine beauty of life. The world showed to her as a
place filled with shining vistas of happiness, and at the end of each of
these vistas there awaited the unknown enchanting thing which she called
in her thoughts "the future." The fact that it was the same world in
which Miss Priscilla and her mother lived their narrow and prosaic lives
did not alter by a breath her unshakable conviction that she herself was
predestined for something more wonderful than they had ever dreamed of.
"He may come this evening!" she thought, and immediately the light of
magic suffused the room, the street outside, and every scarred roof in
Dinwiddie.

At the head of her bed, wedged in between the candle stand and the
window, there was a cheap little bookcase of walnut which contained the
only volumes she had ever been permitted to own--the poems of Mrs.
Hemans and of Adelaide Anne P