me in to put the last dish on the
table,--a cosy, snug table, set for four. Heroic dreams with poets, I
suppose, make them unfit for food other than some feast such as Eve set
for the angel. But then Margret was no poet. So, with the kindling of
her hope, its healthful light struck out, and warmed and glorified
these common things. Such common things! Only a coarse white cloth,
redeemed by neither silver nor china, the amber coffee, (some that
Knowles had brought out to her father--"thrown on his hands; he
couldn't use it,--product of slave-labour!--never, Sir!") the delicate
brown fish that Joel had caught, the bread her mother had made, the
golden butter,--all of them touched her nerves with a quick sense of
beauty and pleasure. And more, the gaunt face of the blind old man,
his bony hand trembling as he raised the cup to his lips, her mother
and the Doctor managing silently to place everything he liked best near
his plate. Wasn't it all part of the fresh, hopeful glow burning in
her consciousness? It brightened and deepened. It blotted out the
hard, dusty path of the future, and showed warm and clear the success
at the end. Not much to show, you think. Only the old home as it once
was, full of quiet laughter and content; only her mother's eyes clear
shining again; only that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no man
anything but courtesy. The glow deepened, as she thought of it. It
was strange, too, that, with the deep, slow-moving nature of this girl,
she should have striven so eagerly to throw this light over the future.
Commoner natures have done more and hoped less. It was a poor gift,
you think, this of the labour of a life for so plain a duty; hardly
heroic. She knew it. Yet, if there lay in this coming labour any
pain, any wearing effort, she clung to it desperately, as if this
should banish, it might be, worse loss. She tried desperately, I say,
to clutch the far, uncertain hope at the end, to make happiness out of
it, to give it to her silent gnawing heart to feed on. She thrust out
of sight all possible life that might have called her true self into
being, and clung to this present shallow duty and shallow reward.
Pitiful and vain so to cling! It is the way of women. As if any human
soul could bury that which might have been, in that which is!

The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes,
heeded the transient flush of enthusiasm but little. Even the pleasant
cheery t