those
years than now), she felt no doubt that when the clouds marshalled
across his clear vision from the minds of others had been withdrawn, he
would once more behold the Sun of Righteousness as she did. Gabriella
as by intuition reasoned that a good life most often leads to a belief
in the Divine Goodness; that as we understand in others only what we
are in ourselves, so it is the highest elements of humanity that must
be relied upon to believe in the Most High: and of David's lofty nature
she possessed the whole history of his life as evidence.

Her last act, then, the night before had been, in her nightgown, on her
knees, to offer up a prayer that he might be saved from the influences
of false teachers and guided back to the only Great One. But when a
girl, with all the feelings which belong to her at that hour, seeks
this pure audience and sends upward the name of a man on her spotless
prayers, he is already a sacred happiness to her as well as a care.

On this day she was radiant with tender happiness. The snow of itself
was exhilarating. It spread around her an enchanted land. It buried out
of sight in the yard and stable lots all mire, all ugly things. This
ennoblement of eternal objects reacted with comic effect on the
interior of the house itself; outside it was a marble palace,
surrounded by statuary; within--alas! It provoked her humor, that
innocent fun-making which many a time had rendered her environment the
more tolerable.

When she went down into the parlor early that evening to await David's
coming, this gayety, this laughter of the generations of men and women
who made up her past, possessed her still. She made a fresh
investigation of the parlor, took a new estimate of its peculiar
furnishings. The hearthstones--lead color. The mohair furniture--cold
at all temperatures of the room and slippery in every position of the
body. The little marble-top table on which rested a glass case holding
a stuffed blue jay clutching a varnished limb: tail and eyes stretched
beyond the reach of muscles. Near the door an enormous shell which, on
summer days, the cook blew as a dinner horn for the hands in the field.
A collection of ambrotypes which, no matter how held, always caused the
sitter to look as though the sun was shining in his eyes. The violence
of the Brussels carpet. But the cheap family portraits in thin wooden
frames--these were Gabriella's delight in a mood like this.

The first time she saw these