If she had been given time this new heart-life, with thoughts and hopes springing from it like flowers, would have restored her elasticity.  Scoville’s manly visage, his eyes, so often mirthful, always kind, would have become so real to her fancy that the pallid, drawn features of the suffering, the dying and the dead, would have faded from her memory.  So would have faded also the various aspects of passion from which she had shrunk, frightened by its hot breath.  Her days would have been filled with the beautiful, innocent dreams of a young girl’s first love so inspired as to cast out fear.

But the ruthless Moloch of war could not permit anything so ideal, so heavenly, as this.

Mrs. Waldo came down from the apartment to which her son had been removed and joined the girl on the veranda.  “Ah!” she exclaimed, “I have taken solid comfort all day in the thought that you were sleeping, and now you are still resting.  I want to see the color in your cheeks again, and the tired look all gone from your eyes before we go.”

“You don’t know how I dread to have you go,” replied Miss Lou.  “From the first your son did more for me than I could do for him.  The smile with which he always greeted me made me feel that nothing could happen beyond remedy, and so much that was terrible was happening.”

“Well, my child, that’s the faith I am trying to cherish myself and teach my boy.  It is impossible for you to know what a black gulf opened at my feet when my noble husband was killed early in the war.  Such things, happily, are known only by experience, and many escape.  Then our cause demanded my only son.  I face death with him in every battle, every danger.  He takes risks without a thought of fear, and I dare not let him know the agony of my fear.  Yet in my widowhood, in the sore pressure of care and difficulty in managing a large plantation in these times, I have found my faith in God’s love adequate to my need.  I should still find it so if I lost my boy.  I could not escape the suffering, but I would not sorrow as without hope.”

“How much I would give for the certainty of such a faith!” said Miss Lou sadly.  “Sometimes, since Captain Hanfield died, I think I feel it.  And then—­oh, I don’t know.  Things might happen which I couldn’t meet in your spirit.  If I had been compelled to marry my cousin I feel that I should have become hard, bitter and reckless.”

“You poor, dear little girl!  Well, you were not compelled to marry him.  Don’t you see?  We are saved from some things and given strength to bear what does happen.  Don’t you worry about yourself, my dear.  Just look up and trust.  Happily, the sun of God’s love shines on just the same, unaffected by the passing clouds of our feelings and experiences.  He sees the end and knows all about the peaceful, happy eternity before us.  You dear, worn-out little child!  His love is ever about you like my arms at this moment,” and the old lady drew the girl to her in an impulse of motherly tenderness.