harsh vehemence, and of a sudden stopped, and breathing fast gasped in low-voiced broken tones, “Don’t stare at me—­I am not a fool—­I am—­I am—­only the fool of a great love.  You don’t know what it means.  My God!  I have no child—­James Penhallow is to me children, husband—­all—­everything.”  She stood still, wide-eyed, staring down the garden paths, a wonder of yearning tenderness in her face, with Rivers’s letter in her hand.

“Read your letter, Aunt.”

“Yes—­yes—­I forgot it.”  She read it, and said, “It only confirms the telegram.”

The storm of passionate emotion was over.  Leila amazed and fearful of results—­twice seen before—­watched her.  “You have seen,” she said in a low voice, “the soul of a great love laid bare.  May you too some day, my child, love as I do!  Have no fear for me—­I see it in your looks.  Come in—­I have to see to things—­I have to give some orders—­there will be much to do.”  She was at once quiet, and composedly led the way into the house, the astonished girl following her.

In the hall Mrs. Penhallow said, “I fear, dear, I have left too much of the management of the house to you—­of late, I mean.  What with the farms and stables, I am not surprised that things have not been quite as James would desire.  I am going to relieve you a little.  I suppose the stables are all right.”

“They are,” returned Leila, feeling hurt.  Her aunt had not been in the kitchen or given an order for nearly a month, and house, farm and stables, had been by degrees allowed to slip into Leila’s well-trained and competent hands.  Meanwhile Ann Penhallow had gradually failed in health and lost interest in duties which had been to her, as Rivers said, what social pleasures were to some women.  She yielded by degrees and not without resistance to mere physical weakness, and under the emotional stress of war, and above all the absence of the man on whom she depended, had lapsed to McGregor’s dismay into a state of mind and body for which he had no remedy.

Every physician of large experience must have seen cases of self-created, unresisted invalidism end with mysterious abruptness and the return of mental, moral and physical competence, under the influence of some call upon their sense of duty made by calamity, such as an acute illness in the household, financial ruin, or the death of a husband.  The return of a wounded man and the need to care for him acted thus upon Ann Penhallow.

Leila looked on in surprise.  Her aunt’s astounding indifference to the results of defeat for her beloved South when she learned of her husband’s injury left the younger woman utterly bewildered.  Nothing in her own nature, as she thought it all over, enabled her to understand it, nor was her aunt’s rapid gain in health and cheerfulness during the next few days more easy to explain.  At first with effort, but very soon with increase of ability, she gradually became more and more her old self.