into its secret yet. But there was power
there, and it was the power he wanted. Her history was simple enough:
she was going into the mill to support a helpless father and mother; it
was a common story; she had given up much for them;--other women did
the same. He gave her scanty praise. Two years ago (he had keen,
watchful eyes, this man) he had fancied that the homely girl had a
dream, as most women have, of love and marriage: she had put it aside,
he thought, forever; it was too expensive a luxury; she had to begin
the life-long battle for bread and butter. Her dream had been real and
pure, perhaps; for she accepted no sham love in its place: if it had
left an empty hunger in her heart, she had not tried to fill it. Well,
well, it was the old story. Yet he looked after her kindly as he
thought of it; as some people look sorrowfully at children, going back
to their own childhood. For a moment he half relented in his purpose,
thinking, perhaps, her work for life was hard enough. But no: this
woman had been planned and kept by God for higher uses than daughter or
wife or mother. It was his part to put her work into her hands.

The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out
through the hills. A sleepy, quiet road. The restless dust of the
town never had been heard of out there. It went wandering lazily
through the corn-fields, down by the river, into the very depths of the
woods,--the low October sunshine slanting warmly down it all the way,
touching the grass-banks and the corn-fields with patches of russet
gold. Nobody in such a road could be in a hurry. The quiet was so
deep, the free air, the heavy trees, the sunshine, all so full and
certain and fixed, one could be sure of finding them the same a hundred
years from now. Nobody ever was in a hurry. The brown bees came along
there, when their work was over, and hummed into the great purple
thistles on the road-side in a voluptuous stupor of delight. The cows
sauntered through the clover by the fences, until they wound up by
lying down in it and sleeping outright. The country-people, jogging
along to the mill, walked their fat old nags through the stillness and
warmth so slowly that even Margret left them far behind. As the road
went deeper into the hills, the quiet grew even more penetrating and
certain,--so certain in these grand old mountains that one called it
eternal, and, looking up to the peaks fixed in the clear blue, grew