Since her return to her father’s house, the whole life of Irene had been marked by great circumspection.  The trial through which she had passed was enough to sober her mind and turn her thoughts in some new directions; and this result had followed.  Pride, self-will and impatience of control found no longer any spur to reactive life, and so her interest in woman’s rights, social reforms and all their concomitants died away, for lack of a personal bearing.  At first there had been warm arguments with Miss Carman on these subjects, but these grew gradually less earnest, and were finally avoided by both, as not only unprofitable, but distasteful.  Gradually this wise and true friend had quickened in the mind of Irene an interest in things out of herself.  There are in every neighborhood objects to awaken our sympathies, if we will only look at and think of them.  “The poor ye have always with you.”  Not the physically poor only, but, in larger numbers, the mentally and spiritually poor.  The hands of no one need lie idle a moment for lack of work, for it is no vague form of speech to say that the harvest is great and the laborers few.

There were ripe harvest-fields around Ivy Cliff, though Irene had not observed the golden grain bending its head for the sickle until Rose led her feet in the right direction.  Not many of the naturally poor were around them, yet some required even bodily ministrations—­children, the sick and the aged.  The destitution that most prevailed was of the mind; and this is the saddest form of poverty.  Mental hunger! how it exhausts the soul and debases its heaven-born faculties, sinking it into a gross corporeal sphere, that is only a little removed from the animal!  To feed the hungry and clothe the naked mean a great deal more than the bestowal of food and raiment; yes, a great deal more; and we have done but a small part of Christian duty—­have obeyed only in the letter—­when we supply merely the bread that perishes.

Rose Carman had been wisely instructed, and she was an apt scholar.  Now, from a learner she became a teacher, and in the suffering Irene found one ready to accept the higher truths that governed her life, and to act with her in giving them a real ultimation.  So, in the two years which had woven their web of new experiences for the heart of Irene, she had been drawn almost imperceptibly by Rose into fields of labor where the work that left her hands was, she saw, good work, and must endure for ever.  What peace it often brought to her striving spirit, when, but for the sustaining and protecting power of good deeds, she would have been swept out upon the waves of turbulent passion—­tossed and beaten there until her exhausted heart sunk down amid the waters, and lay dead for a while at the bottom of her great sea of trouble!

It was better—­oh, how much better!—­when she laid her head at night on her lonely pillow, to have in memory the face of a poor sick woman, which had changed from suffering to peace as she talked to her of higher things than the body’s needs, and bore her mind up into a region of tranquil thought, than to be left with no image to dwell upon but an image of her own shattered hopes.  Yes, this was far better; and by the power of such memories the unhappy one had many peaceful seasons and nights of sweet repose.