reached the spot she was seeking, and
paused. There it was--the whole pitiful scene! His hemp brake; the
charred rind of a stump where he had kindled a fire to warm his hands;
the remnant of the shock fallen over and left unfinished that last
afternoon; trailing across his brake a handful of hemp partly broken
out.

She surveyed it all with wistful tenderness. Then she looked away to
the house. She could see the window of his room at which she had sat
how many days, gazing out toward this field! On his bed in that room he
was now stretched weak and white, but struggling back into health.

She came closer and gazed down at his frozen boot prints. How near his
feet had drawn to that long colder path which would have carried him
away from her. How nearly had his young life been left, like the hand
of hemp he last had handled--half broken out, not yet ready for strong
use and good service. At that moment one scene rose before her memory:
a day at Bethlehem nigh Jerusalem; a young Hebrew girl issuing from her
stricken house and hastening to meet Him who was the Resurrection and
the Life; then in her despair uttering her one cry:--"Lord, if Thou
hadst been here, my brother had not died."

The mist of tears blinded Gabriella, whose love and faith were as
Martha's. She knelt down and laid her cheek against the coarse hemp
where it had been wrapped about his wrist.

"Lord," she said, "hadst Thou not been here, hadst Thou not heard my
prayer for him, he would have died!"

XXIII

Spring, who breaks all promises in the beginning to keep them in the
end, had ceased from chilling caprice and withdrawals: the whole land
was now the frank revelation of her loveliness. Autumn--the hours of
falling and of departing; spring--season of rise and of return. The
rise of sap from root to summit; the rise of plant from soil to sun;
the rise of bud from bark to bloom; the rise of song from heart to
hearing: vital days. And days when things that went away come back,
when woods, fields, thickets, and streams are full of returns.

Gabriella was not disappointed. Those provident old tree-mothers on the
orchard slope, whose red-cheeked children are autumn apples, had not
let themselves be fatally surprised by the great February frost: their
bark-cradled bud-infants had only been wrapped away the more warmly
till danger was over. For many days now the hillside had been a grove
of pink and white domes under each of which hung faint frag