To the Jamestown women we have known through their treatment of Myron Holder we say farewell gladly, only asking them—
"HAVE YE DONE WELL? They moulder flesh and bone,
Who might have made this life's envenomed dream
A sweeter draught than ye shall ever taste, I deem."
CHAPTER XXIII.
"God gives him painful bread, and for all wine
Doth feed him on sharp salt of simple tears,
And bitter fast of blood."
"Come—pain ye shall have and be blind to the ending!
Come—fear ye shall have 'mid the sky's overcasting!
Come—change ye shall have, for far are ye wending!
Come—no crown ye shall have for your thirst and your fasting!"
Myron Holder, in the blue garb of a professional nurse, stood one spring morning looking out of one of the high windows in the great hospital where she worked. Three years had passed since that daybreak when she turned her back on Jamestown. With what trembling steps she had made her way to town, to the house of the doctor who had attended old Mr. Carroll! He had suggested to her the vocation of professional nursing, having observed her natural aptitude for it when she was tending Mr. Carroll. He had given her his address, and bade her come to him if she decided to adopt the course he had indicated. She had done so, and, through his recommendation, she had obtained admittance to this hospital. Since then she had worked and studied hard, and had gained her certificate as a trained nurse.
She had gone forth from Jamestown "lonely as a cloud," and not without sorrow. The wild flower that grows by the bleakest roadside wilts and droops for a time, at least, when transplanted to even the most sheltered garden. The stunted cedar, clinging to a crevice in the granite, drawing its meagre juices hardly from the niggard soil, yellows and dies when rent by the resistless wind from its rocky resting-place. The barrenness of the mountain-side seems kinder to it than the green meadows to which it is hurled.
For some little time Myron was bewildered by the strange world which she had entered, but it did not remain long strange; it soon developed familiar phases.
She bore forever the burden of the hateful pledge the Reverend Mr. Fletcher had wrung from her. In the old, harsh days of Puritanical prudery and intolerance, the Evil Woman bore upon her breast a flamy insignia of shame—a beacon warning all not to trust their hopes or fears or joys to that perfidious bosom which had been false to its own womanhood, a something which could be seen afar off, a mute, yet eloquent, cry: "Unclean—Unclean!"