derness
When man and maid as one together walk
And Love is grown.

Oh, dim, dim autumn days of sobbing rain
When on the fields the ripened hemp is spread
And woods are brown.
No land, no land like this for mortal pain
When Love stands weeping by the sweet, sweet bed
For Love cut down.

Ah, dark, unfathomably dark, white winter days
When falls the sun from out the crystal deep
On muffled farms.
No land, no land like this for God's sad ways
When near the tented fields Love's Soldier lies asleep
With empty arms.

The verses were too sorrowful for this day, with its new, half-awakened
happiness. Had Gabriella been some strong-minded, uncompromising New
England woman, she might have ended her association with David the
night before--taking her place triumphantly beside an Accusing Judge.
Or she might all the more fiercely have set on him an acrid conscience,
and begun battling with him through the evidences of Christianity, that
she might save his soul. But this was a Southern girl of strong, warm,
deep nature, who felt David's life in its simple entirety, and had no
thought of rejecting the whole on account of some peculiarity in one of
its parts; the white flock was more to her than one dark member.
Inexpressibly dear and sacred as was her own church, her own faith, she
had never been taught to estimate a man primarily with reference to
his. What was his family, how he stood in his profession, his honorable
character, his manners, his manhood--these were what Gabriella had
always been taught to look for first in a man.

In many other ways than in his faith and doubt David was a new type of
man to her. He was the most religious, the only religious, one she had
ever known--a new spiritual growth arising out of his people as a young
oak out of the soil. Had she been familiar with the Greek idea, she
might have called him a Kentucky autochthon. It was the first time also
that she had ever encountered in a Kentuckian the type of student
mind--that fitness and taste for scholarship which sometimes moves so
unobtrusively and rises so high among that people, but is usually
unobserved unless discovered pre-eminent and commanding far from the
confines of the state.

Touching his scepticism she looked upon him still as she had thought of
him at first,--as an example of a sincere soul led astray for a time
only. Strange as were his views (and far stranger they seemed in