until it had offered
itself unsolicited. Every girl born into the world was destined for a
heritage of love or of barrenness--yet she was forbidden to exert
herself either to invite the one or to avoid the other. For, in spite of
the fiery splendour of Southern womanhood during the war years, to be
feminine, in the eyes of the period, was to be morally passive.

"Your father has come to see your dress, dear," said her mother in the
voice of a woman from whom sentiment overflowed in every tone, in every
look, in every gesture.

Turning quickly, Virginia met the smiling eyes of the rector--those
young and visionary eyes, which Nature, with a wistful irony, had placed
beneath beetling brows in the creased and wrinkled face of an old man.
The eyes were those of a prophet--of one who had lived his life in the
light of a transcendent inspiration rather than by the prosaic rule of
practical reason; but the face belonged to a man who had aged before his
time under the accumulated stress of physical burdens.

"How do I look, father? Am I pretty?" asked Virginia, stretching her
thin young arms out on either side of her, and waiting with parted lips
to drink in his praise.

"Almost as beautiful as your mother, and she grows lovelier every day
that she lives, doesn't she?"

His adoring gaze, which held the spirit of beauty as a crystal holds the
spirit of light, passed from the glowing features of Virginia to the
lined and pallid face of his wife. In that gaze there had been no shadow
of alteration for thirty years. It is doubtful even if he had seen any
change in her since he had first looked upon her face, and thought it
almost unearthly in its angelic fairness. From the physical union they
had entered into that deeper union of souls in which the body dissolves
as the shadow dissolves into the substance, and he saw her always as
she had appeared to him on that first morning, as if the pool of
sunlight in which she had stood had never darkened around her. Yet to
Virginia his words brought a startled realization that her mother--her
own mother, with her faded face and her soft, anxious eyes--had once
been as young and radiant as she. The love of her parents for each other
had always seemed to her as natural and as far removed from the
cloudless zone of romance as her own love for them--for, like most young
creatures, she regarded love as belonging, with bright eyes and rosy
cheeks, to the blissful period of youth.

"I hear