are who effuse their experience every day
for the benefit of by-standers; this girl's were pale hazel, clear,
meaningless at times, but when her soul did force itself to the light
they gave it fit utterance. Women with hair and eyes like those, with
passionate lips and strong muscles like Grey Gurney's, are children,
single-natured all their lives, until some day God's test comes: then
they live tragedies, unconscious of their deed.

The night was singularly clear, in its quiet: only a few dreamy trails
of gray mist, asleep about the moon: far off on the crest of the closing
hills, she fancied she could see the wind-stir in the trees that made a
feathered shadow about the horizon. She leaned on the stile, looking
over the sweep of silent meadows and hills, and slow--creeping
watercourses. The whole earth waited, she fancied, with newer life and
beauty than by day: going back, it might be, in the pure moonlight,
to remember that dawn when God said, "Let there be light." The girl
comprehended the meaning of the night better, perhaps, because of the
house she had left. Every night she came out there. She left the clothes
and spareribs behind her, and a Something, a Grey Gurney that might have
been, came back to her in the coolness and rest, the nearer she drew to
the pure old earth. She never went down into those mossy hollows, or
among the shivering pines, with a soiled, tawdry dress; she wore always
the clear, primitive colors, or white,--Grey: it was the girl's only bit
of self-development. This night she could see McKinstry's figure, as he
went down the path through the rye-field. He was stooping, leading Lizzy
by the hand, as a nurse might an infant. Grey thrust the currant-bushes
aside eagerly; she could catch a glimpse of the girl's face in the
colorless light. It always had a livid tinge, but she fancied it was red
now with healthy blushes; her eyes were on the ground: in the house they
looked out from under their heavy brows on their daily life with a tired
coldness that made silly Grey ashamed of her own light-heartedness. The
man's common face was ennobled with such infinite tenderness and pain,
Grey thought the help that lay therein would content her sister. It was
time for the girl's rest to come; she was sick of herself and of life.
So the tears came to Grey's eyes, though to the very bottom of her heart
she was thankful and glad.

"She has found home at last!"--she said; and, maybe, because something
in the