g
princess with the Spanish face he dared not say a word to her.

He would suggest to her meekly that things might be different. She would
retaliate with some sarcasm that would reduce him to silence for two
days at least. Yet she loved, after a fashion of her own, this great,
stolid man who admired her with all his heart, and loved her with his
whole soul.

So time passed until she was seventeen, and the quiet farm life was
unendurable to her.

"Uncle," she would say, "let me go out into the world. I want to see it.
I want something to do. I often think I must have two lives and two
souls, I long so intensely for more than I have to fill them."

He could not understand her. She had the farm and the dairy.

"Be content," he would answer, "be content, my lady lass, with the home
God has given you."

"I want something to do. If I did all the work on this and twenty other
farms it would not touch my heart and soul. They are quite empty. People
say it is a battlefield. If it be one, I am sitting by with folded
hands. Inactivity means death to me."

"My lady lass, you can find plenty to do," he answered, solemnly.

"But not of the kind I want."

She paced up and down the large kitchen, where everything was polished
and bright; the fire-light glowed on the splendid face and figure--the
face with its unutterable beauty, its restless longing, its troubled
desires.

Some fear for the future of the beautiful, restless, passionate girl
came over the man, who watched her with anxious eyes. It began to dawn
upon him, that if he were to shut a bright-eyed eagle up in a cage, it
would never be happy, and it was very much the same kind of thing to
shut this lovely, gifted girl in a quiet farmhouse.

"You will be married soon," he said, with a clumsy attempt at comfort,
"and then you will be more content."

She flashed one look of scorn from those dark, lustrous eyes that should
have annihilated him. She stopped before him, and threw back her head
with the gesture of an injured queen.

"May I ask," she said, "whom you suppose I will marry?"

He looked rather frightened, for he began to perceive he had made some
mistake, though he could not tell what; he thought all young girls liked
to be teased about sweethearts and marriage; still he came valiantly to
the front.

"I mean that you will surely have a sweetheart some day or other," he
said, consolingly, though the fire from those dark eyes startled him,
and her scarle