d rose from it, hungry still,
at dawn.

And oh, when hope began to die, I saw it all; saw it in the weary eyes;
heard it in the step that lagging past my door, climbed to its task, its
hopeless task, again. I saw it in the cheek where hunger,--the hunger of
the common herd--had set its fangs upon the delicate bloom. To ask for
bread meant to receive a stone, a stone like unto the stones cast at
her, that one in old Jerusalem. Perhaps she hungered too; who dares
judge, since Christ himself refused to condemn.

She tried at shops at last, but no man wanted modest Quaker maids to
measure off their goods. The shop-girl's smile was part and parcel of
the bargain, and if the smile beguiled a serpent in man's clothing, why
the girl must look to that.

One night I sought her room, her tidy little nest--my poor solitary
birdling--and found her at her work, her old task of writing. She had
gone back to it. There were rings about the eyes where tears were
forbidden visitors. I took the poor head in my arms.

"Don't, Claudia," I cried. "The youth is all gone from your face."
"That's right," she said. "It left my heart long ago, and face and heart
should have a common correspondence."

And then she laughed, as if to cheat my old ears with the sound of
merriment.

"I needed stamps," she said. "The question rested, stamps _vs._ supper.
Like a true artist I made my choice for art. But see here. That
manuscript when it is finished, means _no more hunger_. Something tells
me it will succeed, and save me. So I have called it _Refuge_, and on it
I have staked my last hope."

She playfully tapped the tidy page, and laughed again. But her words had
a solemn earnestness about them to which her pale pinched face lent
something still of awe.

Day after day I watched her, as day after day the battle became too much
for her. Too much? I spoke too quickly when I said so. She was a mystery
to me. I felt but could not understand her life, and its grand,
heart-breaking changes. She had planned for something which she could
not reach. The doors to it were closed. Her starving woman's soul called
for food; the husks were offered in its stead; the bestial, grovelling,
brutish swine's husks. She refused them. Her soul would make no
compromise with swine. She was so strong, and _had_ been so full of hope
I could not understand her. You who have studied the tricks of the human
heart, you who have held your own while faith died in your bosom, or y