was thoroughly alive. She had never had any education other than
that of the neighborhood district school, for her desires and
ambitions had all pointed to the management of the house, the
farm, and the dairy. Jane, on the other hand, had gone to an
academy, and also to a boarding-school for young ladies; so had
Aurelia; and after all the years that had elapsed there was still
a slight difference in language and in manner between the elder
and the two younger sisters.
Jane, too, had had the inestimable advantage of a sorrow; not the
natural grief at the loss of her aged father and mother, for she
had been resigned to let them go; but something far deeper. She
was engaged to marry young, Tom Carter, who had nothing to marry
on, it is true, but who was sure to have, some time or other.
Then the war broke out. Tom enlisted at the first call. Up to
that time Jane had loved him with a quiet, friendly sort of
affection, and had given her country a mild emotion of the same
sort. But the strife, the danger, the anxiety of the time, set
new currents of feeling in motion. Life became something other
than the three meals a day, the round of cooking, washing,
sewing, and churchgoing. Personal gossip vanished from the
village conversation. Big things took the place of trifling ones,
--sacred sorrows of wives and mothers, pangs of fathers and
husbands, self-denials, sympathies, new desire to bear one
another's burdens. Men and women grew fast in those days of the
nation's trouble and danger, and Jane awoke from the vague dull
dream she had hitherto called life to new hopes, new fears, new
purposes. Then after a year's anxiety, a year when one never
looked in the newspaper without dread and sickness of suspense,
came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without so
much as asking Miranda's leave, she packed her trunk and started