without question. But Pa and Lydia, and Len with his egotism, and Ma
with her trials, were nothing to Martie now. In battle, in pestilence,
or after a great fire, she would have risen head and shoulders above
them all, would have worked gloriously to reestablish them. She
supposed that she loved them dearly. But so terrible was the hunger of
her heart for her share of life--for loving, serving, planning, and
triumphing--that she would have swept them all aside like cobwebs to
grasp the first reality flung her by fate.

Not to stagnate, not to smother, not to fade and shrink like
Lydia--like Miss Fanny at the library, and the Baxter girls at the
post-office! Every healthy young fibre of Martie's soul and body
rebelled against such a fate, but she could not fully sense the
barriers about her, nor plan any move that should loosen her bonds.
Martie believed, as her parents believed, that life was largely a
question of "luck." Money, fame, friends, power, to this man; poverty
and obscurity and helplessness to that one. Wifehood, motherhood,
honour and delight to one school girl; gnawing, restless uselessness to
the next. "I only hope you girls are going to marry," their mother
would sometimes say plaintively; "but I declare I don't know who--with
all the nice boys leaving town the way they do! Pa gives you a good
home, but he can't do much more, and after he and I go, why, it will be
quite natural for you girls to go on keeping house for Len--I suppose."

Martie's sensitive soul writhed under these mournful predictions.
Dependence was bitter to her, Len's kindly patronage stung her only a
little less than his occasional moods of cheerful masculine contempt.
He meant to take care of his sisters, he wasn't ever going to marry. Pa
needn't worry, Len said. The house was mortgaged, Martie knew; their
father's business growing less year by year; there would be no great
inheritance, and if life was not satisfying now, when she had youth and
plenty, what would it be when Pa was gone?

It was all dark, confusing, baffling, to ignorant, untrained nineteen.
The sense of time passing, of opportunities unseen and ungrasped, might
well make Martie irritable, restless, and reckless. Happiness and
achievement were to be bought, but she knew not with what coinage.

To-day the darkness had been shot by a gleam of living light. Through
Rodney Parker's casual gallantries Martie's eyes looked into a new
world. It was a world of loving, of r