Of lovers Mary Ellen would hear of none, and this was Franklin’s sole consolation.  Yet all day as he laboured there was present in his subconsciousness the personality of this proud and sweet-faced girl.  Her name was spelled large upon the sky, was voiced by all the birds.  It was indeed her face that looked up from the printed page.  He dared not hope, and yet shrunk from the thought that he must not, knowing what lethargy must else ingulf his soul.  By day a sweet, compelling image followed him, until he sought relief in sleep.  At night she was again the shadowy image of his dreams.  Reason as well as instinct framed excuses for him, and he caught himself again arguing with the world that here was destiny, here was fate!  Wandering blindly over all the weary intervening miles, weak and in need of strength to shelter her, tender and noble and gentle, worthy of love and needing love and care in these rude conditions for which she was so unfit—­surely the stars had straightened out his life for him and told him what to do!  He heard so clearly the sweet, imperious summons which is the second command put upon animate nature:  First, to prevail, to live; second, to love, to survive!  Life and love, the first worthless without the latter, barren, flowerless, shorn of fruitage, branded with the mark of the unattained.  As tree whispers unto tree, as flower yearns to flower, so came the mandate to his being in that undying speech that knows no change from the beginning to the end of time.

Against this overwhelming desire of an impetuous love there was raised but one barrier—­the enduring resistance of a woman’s will, silent, not strenuous, unprotesting, but unchanged.  To all his renewed pleadings the girl said simply that she had no heart to give, that her hope of happiness lay buried on the field of Louisburg, in the far-off land that she had known in younger and less troubled days.  Leaving that land, orphaned, penniless, her life crushed down at the very portal of womanhood, her friends scattered, her family broken and destroyed, her whole world overturned, she had left also all hope of a later happiness.  There remained to her only the memory of a past, the honour that she prized, the traditions which she must maintain.  She was “unreconstructed,” as she admitted bitterly.  Moreover, so she said, even could it lie in her heart ever to prove unfaithful to her lover who had died upon the field of duty, never could it happen that she would care for one of those who had murdered him, who had murdered her happiness, who had ruined her home, destroyed her people, and banished her in this far wandering from the land that bore her.

“Providence did not bring me here to marry you,” she said to Franklin keenly, “but to tell you that I would never marry you—­never, not even though I loved you, as I do not.  I am still a Southerner, am still a ‘rebel.’  Moreover, I have learned my lesson.  I shall never love again.”