orgens' wife was walking across the way
with a covered dish in her hands.... In the dish, you say, there was
only some crude cottage cheese for Aurora Lane? Was that all you saw?
Seek again: for you, too, are human and neither may you escape the great
things of life, nor ought you to miss its great discoveries.

Mrs. Nels Jorgens had on no hat. Her gown was God knows what--gingham or
calico or silk or cloth of gold, who shall say? She was a woman of
fifty-eight. Her sunken stomach protruded far below her flattened and
withered bosom as she walked. Her stringy hair was gray and uncomely.
But her face--now her face--have you not seen it? Perhaps not in the
city. But the little supper in the city (not yet come to the time of
sack-cloth) was by no means so great a thing as the service of Mrs. Nels
Jorgens, the wagon-maker's wife, when she carried across to Aurora Lane
a dish of something for her luncheon.

And others came. From the byways of this late cruel-hearted village came
women, surely not cruel-hearted after all. They seemed to have some
common errand. They were paying off the debt of years, though what they
brought was not in silver dishes and there was no bubbling wine. So far
from calling this a merciless, ignorant town, a hopeless town, at noon
of that day, had you been there and seen these women and their ways, you
would have called it charitable, kindly, beautiful; though after all it
was and had been only human.

Over the breathless maples there seemed now to hang a stratum of another
atmosphere, as sensible, as appreciable, as though a physical thing
itself. The sympathy of Spring Valley was awake at last--after twenty
years!

"'Rory, I just thought I'd come over and bring you a dish of this--I had
some already made. I said to myself, says I, if we can eat this all the
time, maybe you can just once"--it was the old jest, humble but kind. It
sounded wondrous sweet to Aurora Lane--after twenty years.

After these had gone away again, a little awed by the white, sad
dignity of Aurora Lane--even nature seemed to relent. Ben McQuaid and
the little milliner were cooled by swiftly revolving electric fans
yonder in the city. But along in the evening of this summer day in
Spring Valley the leaves of the maples were stirred by softly moving
breezes done by nature's hand.

"Aaron," said old Silas Kneebone to his crony, "seems like we're goin'
to get a change of weather. Maybe the hot spell's broke at last."

"I'