There were fragmentary delicacies enough left, of one kind and another, at any rate, to make all the Colonel’s family uncomfortable for the next week.  It bid fair to take as long to get rid of the remains of the great party as it had taken to make ready for it.

In the mean time Mr. Bernard had been dreaming, as young men dream, of gliding shapes with bright eyes and burning cheeks, strangely blended with red planets and hissing meteors, and, shining over all, the white, un-wandering star of the North, girt with its tethered constellations.

After breakfast he walked into the parlor, where he found Miss Darley.  She was alone, and, holding a school-book in her hand, was at work with one of the morning’s lessons.  She hardly noticed him as he entered, being very busy with her book,—­and he paused a moment before speaking, and looked at her with a kind of reverence.  It would not have been strictly true to call her beautiful.  For years,—­since her earliest womanhood,—­those slender hands had taken the bread which repaid the toil of heart and brain from the coarse palms which offered it in the world’s rude market.  It was not for herself alone that she had bartered away the life of her youth, that she had breathed the hot air of schoolrooms, that she had forced her intelligence to posture before her will, as the exigencies of her place required,—­waking to mental labor,—­sleeping to dream of problems,—­rolling up the stone of education for an endless twelvemonth’s term, to find it at the bottom of the hill again when another year called her to its renewed duties, schooling her temper in unending inward and outward conflicts, until neither dulness nor obstinacy nor ingratitude nor insolence could reach her serene self-possession.  Not for herself alone.  Poorly as her prodigal labors were repaid in proportion to the waste of life they cost, her value was too well established to leave her without what, under other circumstances, would have been a more than sufficient compensation.  But there were others who looked to her in their need, and so the modest fountain which might have been filled to its brim was continually drained through silent-flowing, hidden sluices.

Out of such a life, inherited from a race which had lived in conditions not unlike her own, beauty, in the common sense of the term, could hardly find leisure to develop and shape itself.  For it must be remembered, that symmetry and elegance of features and figure, like perfectly formed crystals in the mineral world, are reached only by insuring a certain necessary repose to individuals and to generations.  Human beauty is an agricultural product in the country, growing up in men and women as in corn and cattle, where the soil is good.  It is a luxury almost monopolized by the rich in cities, bred under glass like their forced pine-apples and peaches.  Both in city and country, the evolution of the physical harmonies which make music to our eyes requires a combination