What might he not aspire to, if properly guided?  No, she did not believe him to be, unscrupulous—­but merely ignorant:  a man who was capable of such love as she felt was in him, a man whom she could love, could not mean to be unscrupulous.  Defence of him leaped to her own lips.

“You did not know what you were doing,” she said.  “I was sure of it, or I would not have come to you.  Oh, Jethro! you must stop it—­you must prevent this election.”

Her eyes met his, her own pleading, and the very wind without seemed to pause for his answer.  But what she asked was impossible.  That wind which he himself had loosed, which was to topple over institutions, was rising, and he could no more have stopped it then than he could have hushed the storm.

“You will not do what I ask—­now?” she said, very slowly.  Then her voice failed her, she drew her hands together, and it was as if her heart had ceased to beat.  Sorrow and anger and fierce shame overwhelmed her, and she turned from him in silence and went to the door.

“Cynthy,” he cried hoarsely, “Cynthy!”

“You must never speak to me again,” she said, and was gone into the storm.

Yes, she had failed.  But she did not know that she had left something behind which he treasured as long as he lived.

In the spring, when the new leaves were green on the slopes of Coniston, Priest Ware ended a life of faithful service.  The high pulpit, taken from the old meeting house, and the cricket on which he used to stand and the Bible from which he used to preach have remained objects of veneration in Coniston to this day.  A fortnight later many tearful faces gazed after the Truro coach as it galloped out of Brampton in a cloud of dust, and one there was watching unseen from the spruces on the hill, who saw within it a girl dressed in black, dry-eyed, staring from the window.

CHAPTER VII

Out of the stump of a blasted tree in the Coniston woods a flower will sometimes grow, and even so the story which I have now to tell springs from the love of Cynthia Ware and Jethro Bass.  The flower, when it came to bloom, was fair in life, and I hope that in these pages it will not lose too much of its beauty and sweetness.

For a little while we are going to gallop through the years as before we have ambled through the days, although the reader’s breath may be taken away in the process.  How Cynthia Ware went over the Truro Pass to Boston, and how she became a teacher in a high school there;—­largely through the kindness of that Miss Lucretia Penniman of whom we have spoken, who wrote in Cynthia’s behalf to certain friends she had in that city; how she met one William Wetherell, no longer a clerk in Mr. Judson’s jewellery shop, but a newspaper man with I know not what ambitions—­and limitations in strength of body and will; how, many, many years afterward, she nursed him tenderly through a sickness and—­married him, is all told in a paragraph.  Marry him she did, to take care of him, and told him so.  She made no secret of the maternal in this love.