pple
of lights and shadows. Ellen had a vivid perception of the beauty of
it all, and also that unrest and yearning which comes often to a
young girl in moonlight. This beauty and strangeness of familiar
scenes under the silver glamour of the moon gave her, as it were, an
assurance of other delights and beauties of life besides those which
she already knew, and along with the assurance came that wild
yearning. Ellen seemed to scent her honey of life, and at the same
time the hunger for it leaped to her consciousness. She had begun by
thinking of what Abby had said to her that afternoon, and then the
train of thought led her on and on. She quite ignored all about the
sordid ways and means of existence, about toil and privation and
children born to it. All at once the conviction was strong upon her
that love, and love alone, was the chief end and purpose of life, at
once its source and its result, the completion of its golden ring of
glory. Her thought, started in whatever direction, seemed to slide
always into that one all-comprehending circle--she could not get her
imagination away from it. She began to realize that the mind of
mortal man could not get away from the law which produced it. She
began to understand dimly, as one begins to understand any great
truth, that everything around her obeyed that unwritten fundamental
law of love, expressed it, sounded it, down to the leaves of the
trees casting their flickering shadows on the silver field of
moonlight, and the long-drawn chorus of the insects of the summer
night. She thought of Abby and how much she loved her; then that
love seemed the step which gave her an impetus to another love. She
began to remember Granville Joy, how he had kissed her that night
over the fence and twice since, how he had walked home with her from
entertainments, how he had looked at her. She saw the boy's face and
his look as plain as if he stood before her, and her heart leaped
with a shock of pain which was joy.

Then she thought of Robert Lloyd, and his face came before her.
Ellen had not thought as much of Robert as he of her. For some two
weeks after his call she had watched for him to come again; she had
put on a pretty dress and been particular about her hair, and had
stayed at home expecting him; then when he had not come, she had put
him out of mind resolutely. When her mother and aunt had joked her
about him she had been sensitive and half angry. "You know it is
nothing, mother,"