She had always been an individual girl—one who thought for herself, who set high ideals for herself, who believed that one only does one’s duty by living at one’s highest and noblest.
When she was a mere girl she had become acquainted with a young college-student, and their friendship ripened into love. When she became engaged to Ralph Leland, Marion looked upon her betrothal as no less sacred than a marriage vow. When, after a few years of study and close confinement in a theological seminary, Leland had shown symptoms of consumption and been ordered to Colorado, her mother was slowly nearing her death, with the same disease. It had wrung her heart with anguish to decide between them, but Leland had said:
“Stay with your mother, Marion. She cannot live long and needs you with her to the end. I shall live many years, and, I feel confident, may yet entirely recover. It is hard, but your mother can have but a year or two at the most. I hope to live for many years. And we could neither of us be happy if we remembered her here, sorrowing and suffering alone.”
And so Marion had staid to nurse her dying mother, and Ralph Leland had gone west to seek health and strength. In two months he was seized with congestion of the lungs and died suddenly, away from all friends and apart from her.
What Marion suffered at this time, only a woman can understand. What she endured, only a woman who has gone down into the blackness of despair can conceive. Her mother failing gradually, her lover gone, what wonder that, for a time, life seemed a blank?
After the first, she had not talked about Ralph, but nursed his memory silently, day and night. For eighteen months, she took sole care of her mother, seeing her slip away into the “great unknown,” inch by inch. Never did the mother realize that she was going to die, and she constantly made plans for the next season when she was going to be “so much better.” Often Marion, knowing she was soon to be motherless, would leave her low seat near her mother, and stand behind the invalid’s chair to hide the tears that welled up, even while she agreed with the invalid’s plans.
Day by day, the gnawing agony of seeing her mother slowly dying before her melted into and overshadowed the loss of that love which was to have shielded and defended her till death. But she never gave way, before mortal eyes, to her sorrow; and she never failed to minister to the mother who so needed her care.
By and by she was left alone. Then, for the first time, did the awful sense of loss overpower her. For days she did not sleep or take any nourishment. Then she rallied and girded herself for the struggle for existence which such women must make, and which, in her case, had been eased by the door which Salome had opened to her.
Through all her trials and discouragement, Ralph Leland had been a present reality to her. Even since the first blackness of darkness she had believed that somewhere, somehow, she would meet him as of old, and they would live again for each other. Then she came to believe that he loved her still, wherever in God’s great universe he might be.
“When he was in Colorado,” she used to say to herself, “I never had a doubt that he loved me still. If he had gone to the farthest corner of the earth I should not have dreamed of his forgetting me. Why should I now, when he has only gone to a remoter part of the universe?”