Heriot's Choice: A Tale

'Man's importunity is God's opportunity.'
'O fair, O fine, O lot to be desired! Early and late my heart appeals to me, And says, O work, O will—Thou man, be fired, To earn this lot— she says— I would not be A worker for mine own bread, or one hired For mine own profit. O, I would be free To work for others; love so earned of them Should be my wages and my diadem. '—Jean Ingelow.
'Say yes, Milly.'
Three short words, and yet they went straight to Milly's heart. It was only the postscript of a long, sorrowful letter—the finale brief but eloquent—of a quiet, dispassionate appeal; but it sounded to Mildred Lambert much as the Macedonian cry must have sounded of old: 'Come over and help us.'
Mildred's soft, womanly nature was capable of only one response to such a demand. Assent was more than probable, and bordered on certainty, even before the letter was laid aside, and while her cheek was yet paling at the thought of new responsibilities and the vast unknown, wherein duty must tread on the heel of inclination, and life must press out thought and the worn-out furrows of intro- and retrospection.
And so it was that the page of a negative existence was turned; and Mildred agreed to become the inmate of her brother's home.
'Aunt Milly!' How pleasant it would be to hear that again, and to be in the centre of warm young life and breathless activity, after the torpor of long waiting and watching, and the hush and the blank and the drawn-out pain, intense yet scarcely felt, of the last seven years.
To begin life in its fulness at eight-and-twenty; to taste of its real sweets and bitters, after it had offered to her nothing but the pale brackish flavour of regret for a passing youth and wasted powers, responsive rather than suggestive (if there be such monstrous anomaly on the whole face of God's creation), nothing being wasted, and all pronounced good, that comes direct from the Divine Hand. To follow fresh tracks when the record of the years had left nothing but the traces of the chariot-wheels of daily monotonous duties that dragged heavily, when summer and winter and seed-time and harvest found Mildred still through those seven revolving courses of seasons within the walls of that quiet sickroom.