E ARDEN'S mother had not only been Mrs. Gray's cousin, but her
particular friend as well. The two girls had been brought up together,
had shared their studies and secrets and girlish fun, and had scarcely
ever been separated for a week, until suddenly a change came which
separated them for all the rest of their lives.

Pretty Candace Van Vliet went up to New Haven on her nineteenth birthday
to see what a college commencement was like, and at the President's
reception afterward met Henry Arden, the valedictorian of the graduating
class, a handsome fellow just twenty-one years old. He came of plain
farming-people in the hill country of Connecticut; but he was clever,
ambitious, and his manners had a natural charm, to which his four years
of college life had added ease and the rubbing away of any little rustic
awkwardness with which he might have begun. Candace thought him
delightful; he thought her more than delightful. In short, it was one of
the sudden love-affairs with which college commencements not
infrequently end, and in the course of a few weeks they engaged
themselves to each other.

Henry was to be a minister, and his theological course must be got
through with before they could marry. Three years the course should have
taken, but he managed to do it in a little more than two, being spurred
on by his impatient desire for home and wife, and a longing, no less
urgent, to begin as soon as possible to earn his own bread and relieve
his father from the burden of his support. No one knew better than he
with what pinching and saving and self-sacrifice it had been made
possible for him to get a college education and become a clergyman; what
daily self-denials had been endured for his sake in that old yellow
farm-house on the North Tolland hills. He was the only son, the only
child; and his father and mother were content to bear anything so long
as it gave him a chance to make the most of himself.

It is not an uncommon story in this New England of ours. Many and many a
farm-house could tell a similar tale of thrift, hard work, and parental
love. The bare rocky acres are made to yield their uttermost, the cows
to do their full duty, the scanty apples of the "off year" are carefully
harvested, every pullet and hen is laid under contribution for the great
need of the moment,--the getting the boys through college. It is both
beautiful and pitiful, as all sacrifices must be; but the years of
effort and struggle do not alwa