Samuel!  Are we soon to be on the move once more?’ When she said that I could not answer, for I was speechless with very shame at thinking of the wretched life I had given her; but I knew well enough that it would end in our moving again and pushing on to the north, deeper into the woods, and that she would be with me and take her share in this hard business of beginning anew—­as cheerful and capable and good-humoured as ever, without one single word of reproach or spitefulness.”

He was silent after that, and seemed to ponder long his sorrow and the things which might have been.  Maria, sighing, passed a hand across her face as though she would brush away a disquieting vision; but in very truth there was nothing she wished to forget.  What she heard had moved her profoundly, and she felt in a dim and troubled way that this story of a hard life so bravely lived had for her a deep and timely significance and held some lesson if only she might understand it.

“How little do we know people!” was the thought that filled her mind.  Since her mother had crossed the threshold of death she seemed to wear a new aspect, not of this world; and now all the homely and familiar traits endearing her to them were being overshadowed by other virtues well-nigh heroic in their quality.

To pass her days in these lonely places when she would have dearly loved the society of other human beings and the unbroken peace of village life; to strive from dawn till nightfall, spending all her strength in a thousand heavy tasks, and yet from dawn till nightfall never losing patience nor her happy tranquillity; continually to see about her only the wilderness, the great pitiless forest, and to hold in the midst of it all an ordered way of life, the gentleness and the joyousness which are the fruits of many a century sheltered from such rudeness—­was it not surely a hard thing and a worthy?  And the recompense?  After death, a little word of praise.

Was it worth the cost?  The question scarcely framed itself with such clearness in her mind, but so her thoughts were tending.  Thus to live, as hardly, as courageously, and to be so sorely missed when she departed, few women were fit for this.  As for herself ...

The sky, flooded with moonlight, was of a wonderful lambency and depth; across the whole arch of heaven a band of cloud, fashioned strangely into carven shapes, defiled in solemn march.  The white ground no longer spoke of chill and desolateness, for the air was soft; and by some magic of the approaching spring the snow appeared to be only a mask covering the earth’s face, in nowise terrifying—­a mask one knew must soon be lifted.

Maria seated by the little window fixed her unconscious eyes upon the sky and the fields stretching away whitely to the environing woods, and of a sudden it was borne to her that the question she was asking herself had just received its answer.  To dwell in this land as her mother had dwelt, and, dying thus, to leave behind her a sorrowing husband and a record of the virtues of her race, she knew in her heart she was fit for that.  In reckoning with herself there was no trace of vanity; rather did the response seem from without.  Yes, she was able; and she was filled with wonderment as though at the shining of some unlooked-for light.