y and in a clearer light. Above all, her heart was wrung
with pity for Stephen--Stephen, with no comforting woman's hand to help
him in his sore trouble; Stephen, bearing his losses alone, his burdens
and anxieties alone, his nursing and daily work alone. Oh, how she felt
herself needed! Needed! that was the magic word that unlocked her better
nature. "Darkness is the time for making roots and establishing plants,
whether of the soil or of the soul," and all at once Rose had become a
woman: a little one, perhaps, but a whole woman--and a bit of an angel,
too, with healing in her wings. When and how had this metamorphosis come
about? Last summer the fragile brier-rose had hung over the river and
looked at its pretty reflection in the placid surface of the water. Its
few buds and blossoms were so lovely, it sighed for nothing more. The
changes in the plant had been wrought secretly and silently. In some
mysterious way, as common to soul as to plant life, the roots had
gathered in more nourishment from the earth, they had stored up strength
and force, and all at once there was a marvelous fructifying of the
plant, hardiness of stalk, new shoots everywhere, vigorous leafage, and
a shower of blossoms.

But everything was awry: Boston was a failure; Claude was a weakling and
a flirt; her turquoise ring was lying on the river-bank; Stephen did
not love her any longer; her flower-beds were ploughed up and planted in
corn; and the cottage that Stephen had built and she had furnished, that
beloved cottage, was to let.

She was in Boston; but what did that amount to, after all? What was
the State House to a bleeding heart, or the Old South Church to a pride
wounded like hers?

At last she fell asleep, but it was only by stopping her ears to the
noises of the city streets and making herself imagine the sound of
the river rippling under her bedroom windows at home. The backyards of
Boston faded, and in their place came the banks of the Saco, strewn
with pine-needles, fragrant with wild flowers. Then there was the bit of
sunny beach, where Stephen moored his boat. She could hear the sound of
his paddle. Boston lovers came a-courting in the horse-cars, but hers
had floated downstream to her just at dusk in a birch-bark canoe, or
sometimes, in the moonlight, on a couple of logs rafted together.

But it was all over now, and she could see only Stephen's stern face as
he flung the despised turquoise ring down the river-bank.