fort with a zeal and an intelligence
that left nothing undone. This had been her mission in life. Her mother
had died when Helen was a little child, leaving herself and her brother,
who was some years older, to the care of the father. Helen remembered
her mother only as a pale, beautiful lady in a trailing robe, who fell
asleep one day, and was mysteriously carried away--the lady of a dream.

The boy--the brother--rode forth to the war in 1862, and never rode back
any more. To the father and sister waiting at home, it seemed as if he
had been seized and swept from the earth on the bosom of the storm that
broke over the country in that period of dire confusion. Even Rumor,
with her thousand tongues, had little to say of the fate of this poor
youth. It was known that he led a squad of troopers detailed for special
service, and that his command, with small knowledge of the country, fell
into an ambush from which not more than two or three extricated
themselves. Beyond this all was mystery, for those who survived that
desperate skirmish could say nothing of the fate of their companions.
The loss of his son gave Mr. Eustis additional interest in his daughter,
if that were possible; and the common sorrow of the two so strengthened
and sweetened their lives that their affection for each other was in the
nature of a perpetual memorial of the pale lady who had passed away, and
of the boy who had perished in Virginia.

When Helen's father died, in 1867, her mother's sister, Miss Harriet
Tewksbury, a spinster of fifty or thereabouts, who, for the lack of
something substantial to interest her, had been halting between woman's
rights and Spiritualism, suddenly discovered that Helen's cause was the
real woman's cause; whereupon she went to the lonely and grief-stricken
girl, and with that fine efficiency which the New England woman acquires
from the air, and inherits from history, proceeded to minister to her
comfort. Miss Tewksbury was not at all vexed to find her niece capable
of taking care of herself. She did not allow that fact to prevent her
from assuming a motherly control that was most gracious in its
manifestations, and peculiarly gratifying to Helen, who found great
consolation in the all but masculine energy of her aunt.

A day or two after Dr. Buxton's visit, the result of which has already
been chronicled, Miss Tewksbury's keen eye detected an increase of the
symptoms that had given her anxiety, and their development wa