help myself. Help _myself_! For
the first time in my life I put up an earnest prayer for help out of
myself. The words, coming as such words come but few times in life, out
from the very depths of the heart, brought with them their softening
influence. The tears sprung forth, those tears which I thought I should
never shed again, and I burst into a passionate fit of crying, the
passionate crying of a child. It shook me from head to foot with its
hysterical convulsions, but it left me at last calmer, soothed into
stillness, with only now and then those choking after-sobs which I,
child like, sent forth there on the bosom of the only mother I had ever
known,--our kindly mother Earth.

The sun was going down when I rose up, soothed and comforted, and
strengthened, too, for a time. I would do what I could. I would live
down this grief: how I knew not, but the way would come to me. And
gathering up my hair, which had fallen around me, I stopped, on my way
home, by a running stream, and bathed my eyes and forehead until I was
fit to appear before my step-mother. She did not question me; she was
too used to my unexplained absences since I had grown out of her
control. Sufficient for her that my tasks were always performed;
sufficient for her, that, that very evening, I threw myself with an
apparently untiring energy into the household work,--that I never rested
a moment till she herself closed the house and insisted that I should go
to bed. I slept that night,--after such fatigue, it was impossible but
that I should,--and woke in the morning with a renewed determination to
struggle against my sorrow.

Alas! alas! I thought I had only to resolve. I thought the struggle
would be but once. How little I knew of the daily, almost hourly,
changes of feeling,--of the despondency, the despair, that would come, I
knew not why, directly upon my most earnest resolves, my hardest
struggles,--of the weakness that would make me at times give up all
struggling as useless,--of the mad hope that would sometimes arise that
something, some outward change, I did not dare to say what, would bring
me some relief!

I had at least the courage to keep away from the sight of all that was
so miserable to me. I did not see George Hammond for weeks, and he--ah!
there was the bitterness--he did not miss me.

And so the weary days went on. It is wonderful what endurance there is
in a young heart,--for how long a time it can beat off suffering all day