Brownleigh through their summer visits, and others who had known her
husband, kept her well supplied with the latest and always the best of
everything--history, biography, essays and fiction. But there were also
books of a deep spiritual character, and magazines that showed a new
world, the religious world, to the girl. She read with zest all of them,
and enjoyed deeply the pleasant converse concerning each. Her eyes were
being opened to new ways of living. She was beginning to know that there
was an existence more satisfying than just to go from one round of
amusement to another. And always, more than in any other thing she read,
she took a most unusual interest in home missionary literature. It was
not because it was so new and strange and like a fairy tale, nor because
she knew her friend enjoyed hearing all this news so much, but because
it held for her the story of the man she now knew she loved, and who had
said he loved her. She wanted to put herself into touch with
surroundings like his, to understand better what he had to endure, and
why he had not dared to ask her to share his life, his hardship--most
of all why he had not thought her worthy to suffer with him.

When she grew tired of reading she would go out into the kitchen and
help Amelia Ellen. It was her own whim that she should learn how to make
some of the good things to eat for which Amelia Ellen was famous. So
while her society friends at home went from one gay scene to another,
dancing and frivolling through the night and sleeping away the morning,
Hazel bared her round white arms, enveloped herself in a clean
blue-checked apron, and learned to make bread and pies and gingerbread
and puddings and doughnuts and fruit-cake, how to cook meats and
vegetables and make delicious broths from odds and ends, and to concoct
the most delectable desserts that would tempt the frailest appetite.
Real old country things they were--no fancy salads and whips and froths
that society has hunted out to tempt its waning taste till everything
has palled. She wrote to one of her old friends, who demanded to know
what she was doing so long up there in the country in the height of the
season, that she was taking a course in Domestic Science and happily
recounted her menu of accomplishments. Secretly her heart rejoiced that
she was become less and less unworthy of the love of the man in whose
home and at whose mother's side she was learning sweet lessons.

There came letters,