To find our treasure of love greater than we had dared to dream—what rarer joy has earth? And when the poor derelict soul clung to his wife and found in her a help sufficient for his needs, his was a rapture not less profound than that of the poet-husband when he opened the sonnets in which a woman's soul had poured itself, counting the ways and measuring the depth and the height of her wifely love.
Aunt Jane pushed her spectacles up on her forehead, folded her hands, and leaned back in her chair, lost in the reverie that generally followed the telling of a story, while I gazed at the tremulous fire light, and felt the cord of human sympathy drawing me closer to the people of her day and time.
As an artist finishes a picture, and then goes lovingly back to strengthen a line or deepen a tint, so every story told by Aunt Jane made more vivid to me her portraits of these men and women who were the friends of her youth. I had known Sam, the jovial, careless, sceptical one; Milly, quick of temper, sharp of tongue, swift to act and swift to repent—just a plain farmer and a plain farmer's wife. But by the light of this tale of triumph I saw them again. Sam, the man who met and vanquished the dragon of thirst, Milly, the woman whose love was strong enough to hold and redeem; and in my thought each rises to heroic stature and stands touched forevermore "with something of an angel light." For it is not battles that drench the earth with the blood of her sons, but these unchronicled victories of the spirit that lift man from the clod to the star and make him even greater than the angels.