on; I will rest here."

She sat down upon a bank by the roadside, turned away her head, and
closed her eyes. It was long before the tumult in her nature subsided.
If she reflected, with a sense of relief, "nothing was said,"
the thought immediately followed, "but all is known." It was
impossible,--yes, clearly impossible; and then came such a wild longing,
such an assertion of the right and truth and justice of love, as made
her seem a miserable coward, the veriest slave of conventionalities.

Out of this struggle dawned self-knowledge, and the strength which is
born of it. When she returned to the house, she was pale and weary, but
capable of responding to Betty Rambo's constant cheerfulness. The next
day she left for the city, without having seen Leonard Clare again.

II.

Henry Rambo married, and brought a new mistress to the farm-house.
Betty married, and migrated to a new home in another part of the
State. Leonard Clare went back to his trade, and returned no more in
harvest-time. So the pleasant farm by the Brandywine, having served its
purpose as a background, will be seen no more in this history.

Miss Bartram's inmost life, as a woman, was no longer the same. The
point of view from which she had beheld the world was shifted, and she
was obliged to remodel all her feelings and ideas to conform to it. But
the process was gradual, and no one stood near enough to her to remark
it. She was occasionally suspected of that "eccentricity" which, in
a woman of five-and-twenty, is looked upon as the first symptom of a
tendency to old-maidenhood, but which is really the sign of an earnest
heart struggling with the questions of life. In the society of cities,
most men give only the shallow, flashy surface of their natures to the
young women they meet, and Miss Bartram, after that revelation of the
dumb strength of an ignorant man, sometimes grew very impatient of the
platitudes and affectations which came to her clad in elegant words, and
accompanied by irreproachable manners.

She had various suitors; for that sense of grace and repose and sweet
feminine power, which hung around her like an atmosphere, attracted
good and true men towards her. To some, indeed, she gave that noble,
untroubled friendship which is always possible between the best of the
two sexes, and when she was compelled to deny the more intimate appeal,
it was done with such frank sorrow, such delicate tenderness, that
she never lost the frie