vanish. As she lay back in her chair looking out upon the moving
leaves and waving boughs, she allowed the past to come back to her. How
far away seemed the golden days of her Southern childhood. Almost her
first recollection of sorrow, certainly the first that made any deep
impression upon her heart, was when the men carried out her father in
a black box and when, leaving the big house with the wide pillared
veranda, she was taken to the chilly North. How terribly vivid was the
memory of her miserable girlhood, poverty pressed and loveless, her
soul beating like a caged bird against the bars of the cold and rigid
discipline of her aunt's well-ordered home. Then came the first glad
freedom from dependence when first she undertook to earn her own bread
as a teacher. Freedom and love came to her together, freedom and love
and friendship in the Manse and the Old Stone Mill. With the memory
of the Mill, there rose before her, clear-limned and vividly real, one
face, rugged, strong, and passionate, and the thought of him brought a
warmer light to her eyes and a stronger beat to her heart. Every feature
of the moonlight scene on the night of the barn-raising when first she
saw him stood out with startling distinctness, the new skeleton of the
barn gleaming bony and bare against the sky, the dusky forms crowding
about, and, sitting upon a barrel across the open moonlit space of the
barn floor, the dark-faced lad playing his violin and listening while
she sang. At that point it was that life for her began.

A new scene passed before her eyes. It was the Manse parlour, the music
professor with dirty, claw-like fingers but face alight with rapturous
delight playing for her while she sang her first great oratorio aria.
She could feel to-day that mysterious thrill in the dawning sense of new
powers as the old man, with his hands upon her shoulders, cried in his
trembling, broken voice, "My dear young lady, the world will listen to
you some day!" That was the beginning of her great ambition. That day
she began to look for the time when the world would come to listen.
Then followed weary days and weeks and months and years, weary with
self-denials new to her and with painful struggling with unmusical
pupils, for she needed bread; weary with heart-breaking strivings
and failings in the practice of her art, but, worst of all, weary to
heart-break with the patronage of the rich and flattering friends--how
she loathed it--of whom Dr. Bull