Day of Emancipation.

And yet it never occurred to her that this fact had the slightest
bearing on her personal outlook on life. On the contrary she felt in the
spiritual elation of the triumphant eloquence of her favorite preacher
a renewal of her simple religious faith. At the bottom of that religion
lay the foundation of life itself--her conception of marriage as the
supreme and only expression of woman's power in the world.

She walked back to her home on the Square, in a glow of ecstatic
emotion.

Surely God had miraculously saved her this night from the wiles of the
Devil! No matter what this eloquent discourse had meant to others, it
had renewed her faith in the old-fashioned woman and the old-fashioned
ways of the old-fashioned home. Her vision was once more clear. She was
glad Jane Anderson had come to put her to the test. She had been tried
in the fires of hell and came forth unscorched.

She stood beside her window dreaming again of the home she would build
when her Knight should stand before her revealed in beauty no words
could describe. The moon was shining now in solemn glory on the
white-shrouded Square. Temptation had only strengthened the fiber of her
soul. She knelt in the moonlight beside her couch and prayed that God
should ever keep her faith serene. She rose with a sense of peace and
joy. God would hear and answer the cry of her heart. The City might be
the Desert--it was still God's world and not a sparrow that twittered in
those bare trees or chattered on her window-ledge in the morning could
fall to the ground without His knowledge. God had put this deathless
passion in her heart; He could not deny it expression. She could bide
His time. If the day of her deliverance were near, it was good. If God
should choose to try her faith in loneliness and tears, it was His way
to make the revelation of glory the more dazzling when it came.

She drew the covering about her warm young body with the firm faith that
her hour was close at hand, and fell asleep to dream of her Knight.

CHAPTER III. FATE

Mary waked next morning with the delicious sense of impending happiness.
A wonderful dream had come to thrill her half-conscious moments,
repeating itself in increasing vividness and beauty with each awakening.
The vision had been interrupted by the unusual noise of the snow
machines on the car tracks, and yet she had fallen asleep after each
break and picked up the rapturous scene at the exact m