“But—­is there always joy?”

“Yes, though sometimes it is sadly covered up with other things.  We must find it and divide it, for only in that way it grows.  Good-night, my dear.”

He bent to kiss her, while Miriam, with her heart full of nameless yearning, watched them from the far shadows.  The sound of his footsteps died away and a distant door closed.  Soon afterward Miriam took her candle and went noiselessly upstairs, but she did not say good-night to Barbara.

[Sidenote:  Midnight]

Until midnight, the girl sat at her sewing, taking the finest of stitches in tuck and hem.  The lamp burning low made her needle fly swiftly.  In her own room was an old chest nearly full of dainty garments which she was never to wear.  She had wrought miracles of embroidery upon some of them, and others were unadorned save by tucks and lace.

When the work was finished, she folded it and laid it aside, then put away her thimble and thread.  “When the guests come to the hotel,” she thought—­“ah, when they come, and buy all the things I’ve made the past year, and the preserves and the candied orange peel, the rag rugs and the quilts, then——­”

[Sidenote:  Dying Embers]

So Barbara fell a-dreaming, and the light of the dying embers lay lovingly upon her face, already transfigured by tenderness into beauty beyond words.  The lamp went out and little by little the room faded into twilight, then into night.  It was quite dark when she leaned over and picked up her crutches.

“Dear, dear father,” she breathed.  “He must never know!”

II

Miss Mattie

Miss Mattie was getting supper, sustained by the comforting thought that her task was utterly beneath her and had been forced upon her by the mysterious workings of an untoward Fate.  She was not really “Miss,” since she had been married and widowed, and a grown son was waiting impatiently in the sitting-room for his evening meal, but her neighbours, nearly all of whom had known her before her marriage, still called her “Miss Mattie.”

[Sidenote:  “Old Maids”]

The arbitrary social distinctions, made regardless of personality, are often cruelly ironical.  Many a man, incapable by nature of life-long devotion to one woman, becomes a husband in half an hour, duly sanctioned by Church and State.  A woman who remains unmarried, because, with fine courage, she will have her true mate or none, is called “an old maid.”  She may have the heart of a wife and the soul of a mother, but she cannot escape her sinister label.  The real “old maids” are of both sexes, and many are married, but alas! seldom to each other.

[Sidenote:  A Grievance]

In his introspective moments, Roger Austin sometimes wondered why marriage, maternity, and bereavement should have left no trace upon his mother.  The uttermost depths of life had been hers for the sounding, but Miss Mattie had refused to drop her plummet overboard and had spent the years in prolonged study of her own particular boat.