haps, after all! If she really could, even in some slight
thing, care most for the life and spirit underneath, to keep this sweet
and pleasant, and the fruit of it a daily good, and not a bitterness; if
she could begin by holding herself undisturbed, though obliged to wear a
collar that stood up behind and turned over in front with those lappet
corners she had always thought so ugly,--yes, even though the waterfall
should leak out and ripple over stubbornly,--though these things must go
on for twenty-four hours at least, and these twenty-four hours be spent
unwillingly in a dull country tavern, where the windows looked out from
one side into a village street, and from the other into stable and
clothes yards! There would be something for her to do: to keep bright
and help to keep the others bright. There was a hope in it; the life
was more than raiment; it was better worth while than to have only got
on the nice round collar and dainty cuffs that fitted and suited her, or
even the little bead net that came over in a Marie Stuart point so
prettily between the small crimped puffs of her hair.

A little matter, nothing to be self-applauding about,--only a straw;
but--if it showed the possible way of the wind, the motive power that
might be courted to set through her life, taking her out of the
trade-currents of vanity? Might she have it in her, after all? Might she
even be able to come, if need be, to the strength of mind for wearing an
old gray straw bonnet, and bearing to be forty years old, and helping to
adorn the young and beautiful for looks that never--just so--should be
bent again on her?

Leslie Goldthwaite had read of martyr and hero sufferance all her life,
as she had looked upon her poor one-eyed fellow-traveler to-day; the
pang of sympathy had always been: "These things have been borne, are
being borne, in the world; how much of the least of them could I
endure,--I, looking for even the little things of life to be made
smooth?" It depended, she began faintly and afar off to see, upon where
the true life lay; how far behind the mere outer covering vitality
withdrew itself.

CHAPTER IV.

MARMADUKE WHARNE.

Up--up--up,--from glory to glory!

This was what it seemed to Leslie Goldthwaite, riding, that golden June
morning, over the road that threaded along, always climbing, the chain
of hills that _could_ be climbed, into the nearer and nearer presence of
those mountain majesties, penetrating farther