of youth, and love, and hope.
Perhaps this is why my heart turned to her in her sweet youth and
guileless innocence. I used to fancy, when I saw her, a child under the
old-fashioned locust's shade that fell about her father's modest place,
that she was unlike other children. She had a thoughtful face--not
beautiful, but soulful. I thank God now that the child was spared that
curse. Fate set snares enough without that deadliest one of beauty. Yet
she had soul; her eyes betrayed its strength and mirrored its deep
passion,--that mightiest, holiest passion which men call _genius_. Her
genius merely budded; fate set its heel against the plant and crushed
it.

I knew her from her birth; knew her strong-hearted mother, and her
gentle father, who slipped the noose of life when Claudia was a tiny
thing, too young to more than lisp his name. Yet, with his last breath
he blessed her, and blessed the man into whose arms he placed her, and
left her to his care.

"You have said you owe me something," said the dying man; "if so, pay it
to my child, my girl-babe, in fatherly advice and guidance."

That man had been a felon and would have met a felon's doom but for the
friend whose child had been confided to his guidance. He had saved him
by silence and by loans which had beggared him in lending. He was a
strong man, and left his daughter something of his strength for
heritage, and that was all. But from her mother, her great-souled
mother, the child received enough of courage, and of hope, and faith,
and energy, to make her life a _sure_ thing at all events.

I lost her 'twixt the years of girl and womanhood, for both of us were
poor, and I took such scanty living here and there as offered. But one
day she found me out, and begged me to go with her to her old home under
the locust trees. All were dead but her; she was alone; needed me for
protection, and I, she argued, needed part of the old roof, too large
for one small head.

"There's a mortgage on it, dear," she told me, "but I am young and
strong, and have some education and some little energy; and,--" she
laughed, "the note is held by that old boy-friend of my father who
promised to look out for me, you know. So I have no fears of being
turned out homeless, Gertie."

So I went, and tried to be to her a friend. Instead, I was her
lover--her worshipper. Her soul, as it opened to me day after day,
expanding under the _vise_ of poverty, took on such strength, such
grandeur, th