here. But
the eyes are brown--reddish brown, with enough white at the corners to
make them seem liquid; only liquid is not the word. For they are
radiant--remember that word, for we may come back to it, after we are
done with the brow--a wide brow--low enough for Dickens and Thackeray
and Charlotte Bronte, and for Longfellow and Whittier and Will Carleton
in his day, and high enough for Tennyson at the temples, but not so high
but that the gate of the eyes has to shut wearily when Browning would
sail through the current of her soul. As to hair--Heaven knows there is
plenty of that, but it had rather a checkered career. As she clung to
her mother's apron and waved her father away to war, she was a
tow-headed little tot, and when he came back from the field of glory he
thought he could detect a tendency to red in it, but the fire smouldered
and went out, and the hair turned brown--a dark brown with the glint of
the quenched fires in it when it blew in the sun. Now frame a glowing
young face in that soft waving hair, and you have a picture that will
speak, and if the picture should come to life and speak as it was in the
year of our Lord 1873, the first word of all the words in the big fat
dictionary it would utter would be Bob. And so you may lift up your face
and take your name and place in this story--Molly Culpepper, heroine.
And when you lift your face, we may see something more than its pretty
features: we shall see a radiant soul. For scientists have found out
that every material thing in this universe gives off atomic particles of
itself, and some elements are more radiant than others. And there is a
paralleling quality in the spiritual world, and some souls give off more
of their colour and substance than others, though what it is they
radiate we do not know. Even the scientists do not know the material
things that the atoms radiate, so why should we be asked to define the
essence of souls? Yet from the soul of Molly Culpepper, in joy and in
sorrow, in her moments of usefulness and in her deepest woe, her soul
glowed and shed its glory, and she grew even as she gave her substance
to the world about her. For that is the magic of God's mystery of life.

And now having for the moment finished our discussion on the
radio-activity of souls, let us go back to the story.

Mary Barclay rode home from her son's wedding that night with Bob
Hendricks and Molly Culpepper. They were in a long line of buggies
that began to sca