There was never any more trouble for her in that household. They made only two demands: that she eat whatever was put on the table and love them. Whatever was put on the table was good; and they were all lovable. They were one live, disorderly menagerie of nothing but love. But love is not the only essential of life; and its phenomena can be trying.

Here, then, in this remote neighborhood of plain farmers, in a little district school situated on a mud road, Gabriella began alone and without training her new life,—attempt of the Southern girl to make herself self-supporting in some one of the professions,—sign of a vast national movement among the women of her people. In her surroundings and ensuing struggles she had much use for that saving sense of humor which had been poured into her veins out of the deep clear wells of her ancestors; need also of that radiant, bountiful light which still fell upon her from the skies of the past; but more than these as staff to her young hands, cup to her lips, lamp to her feet, oil to her daily bruises, rest to her weary pillow, was reliance on Higher Help. For the years—and they seemed to her many and wide—had already driven Gabriella, as they have driven countless others of her sex, out of the cold, windy world into the church: she had become a Protestant devotee. Had she been a Romanist, she would long ere this have been a nun. She was now fitted for any of those merciful and heroic services which keep fresh on earth the records of devoted women. The inner supporting stem of her nature had never been snapped; but it had been bruised enough to give off life-fragrance. Adversity had ennobled her. In truth, she had so weathered the years of a Revolution which had left her as destitute as it had left her free, that she was like Perdita's rosemary: a flower which keeps seeming and savor all the winter long. The North Wind had bolted about her in vain his whitest snows; and now the woods were turning green.

It was merely in keeping with Gabriella's nature, therefore, that as she grew to know the people among whom she had come to stay, their homes, their family histories, one household and one story should have engaged her deep interest: David's parents and David's career. As she drove about the country, visiting with the farmer's wife, there had been pointed out a melancholy remnant of a farm, desperately resisting absorption by some one of three growing estates touching it on three sides. She had been taken to call on the father and mother; had seen the poverty within doors, the half-ruined condition of the outhouses; had heard of their son, now away at the university; of how they had saved and he had struggled. A proud father it was who now told of his son's magnificent progress already at college.

"Ah," she exclaimed, thinking it over in her room that night, "this is something worth hearing! Here is the hero in life! Among these easy-going people this solitary struggler. I, too, am one now; I can understand him."

During the first year of her teaching, there had developed in her a noble desire to see David; but one long to be disappointed. He did not return home during his vacation; she went away during hers. The autumn following he was back in college; she at her school. Then the Christmas holidays and his astounding, terrible home-coming, put out of college and church. As soon as she heard of that awful downfall, Gabriella felt a desire to go straight to him. She did not reason or hesitate: she went.

And now for two months they had been seeing each other every few days.

Thus by the working out of vast forces, the lives of Gabriella and David had been jostled violently together. They were the children of two revolutions, separate yet having a common end: she produced by the social revolution of the New World, which overthrew mediaeval slavery; he by the intellectual revolution of the Old World, which began to put forth scientific law, but in doing this brought on one of the greatest ages of religious doubt. So that both were early vestiges of the same immeasurable race evolution, proceeding along converging lines. She, living on the artificial summits of a decaying social order, had farthest to fall, in its collapse, ere she reached the natural earth; he, toiling at the bottom, had farthest to rise before he could look out upon the plains of widening modern thought and man's evolving destiny. Through her fall and his rise, they had been brought to a common level. But on that level all that had befallen her had driven her as out of a blinding storm into the church, the seat and asylum of religion; all that had befallen him had driven him out of the churches as the fortifications of theology. She had been drawn to that part of worship which lasts and is divine; he had been repelled by the part that passes and is human.

XVI

Although Gabriella had joyously greeted the day, as bringing exemption from stifling hours in school, her spirits had drooped ere evening with monotony. There were no books in use among the members of that lovable household except school-books; they were too busy with the primary joys of life to notice the secondary resources of literature. She had no pleasant sewing. To escape the noise of the pent-up children, she must restrict herself to that part of the house which comprised her room. A walk out of doors was impracticable, although she ventured once into the yard to study more closely the marvels of the ice-work; and to the edge of the orchard, to ascertain how the apple trees were bearing up under those avalanches of frozen silver slipped from the clouds.