“But you’ll come to a better future,” he cried, his mild blue eyes watery and red.

“Shall I?  When I die?” was her reply as she passed her hand wearily over her forehead, and wished—­ah, how ardently!—­that the question might answer itself now at once.

But the young live against their will, and Leam, though bruised and broken, had still the grand vitality of youth to support her.  Of the stuff of which in a good cause martyrs, in a bad criminals, are made, she accepted her position at Windy Brow with the very heroism of resignation.  She never complained, though every circumstance, every condition, was simply torture; and so soon as she saw what she was expected to do, she did it without remonstrance or reluctance.  Her life there was like a lesson in a foreign language which she had undertaken to learn by heart, and she gave herself to her task loyally.  But it was suffering beyond even what Emmanuel Gryce supposed or Keziah ever dreamed of.  She, with the sun of the South in her veins, her dreams of pomegranates and orange-groves, of music and color and bright blue skies, of women as beautiful as mamma, of that one man—­not of the South, but fit to have been the godlike son of Spain—­suddenly translated from soft and leafy North Aston to a bleak fell-side in the most desolate corner of Cumberland—­where for lush hedges were cold, grim gray stone walls, and the sole flowers to be seen gorse which she could not gather, and heather which had no perfume—­to a house set so far under the shadow that it saw the sun only for three months in the year, and where her sole companion was old Keziah Gryce, ill-favored in person, rough of mood if true of soul, or creatures even worse than herself;—­she, with that tenacious loyalty, that pride and concentrated passion, that dry reserve and want of general benevolence characteristic of her, to be suddenly cast among uncouth strangers whose ways she must adopt, and who were physically loathsome to her; dead to the only man she loved, his love for her killed by her own hand, herself by her own confession accursed; and to bear it all in silent patience,—­was it not heroic?  Had she been more plastic than she was, the effort would not have been so great.  Being what she was, it was grand; and made as it was for penitence, it had in it the essential spirit of saintliness.  For saintliness comes in small things as well as great, and George Herbert’s swept room is a true image.  There was saintliness in the docility with which she rose at six and went to bed at nine; saintliness in the quiet asceticism with which she ate porridge for breakfast and porridge for supper—­at the first honestly believing it either a joke or an insult, and that they had given her pigs’ food to try her temper; saintliness in the silence with which she accepted her dinners, maybe a piece of fried bacon and potatoes, or a huge mess of apple-pudding on washing-days, or a plate of poached eggs cooked in a pan not over