and savor all the winter long. The North Wind had bolted about her
in vain his whitest snows; and now the woods were turning green.

It was merely in keeping with Gabriella's nature, therefore, that
as she grew to know the people among whom she had come to stay,
their homes, their family histories, one household and one story
should have engaged her deep interest: David's parents and David's
career. As she drove about the country, visiting with the farmer's
wife, there had been pointed out a melancholy remnant of a farm,
desperately resisting absorption by some one of three growing
estates touching it on three sides. She had been taken to call on
the father and mother; had seen the poverty within doors, the half-
ruined condition of the outhouses; had heard of their son, now away
at the university; of how they had saved and he had struggled. A
proud father it was who now told of his son's magnificent progress
already at college.

"Ah," she exclaimed, thinking it over in her room that night, "this
is something worth hearing! Here is the hero in life! Among these
easy-going people this solitary struggler. I, too, am one now; I
can understand him."

During the first year of her teaching, there had developed in her a
noble desire to see David; but one long to be disappointed. He did
not return home during his vacation; she went away during hers. The
autumn following he was back in college; she at her school. Then
the Christmas holidays and his astounding, terrible home-coming,
put out of college and church. As soon as she heard of that awful
downfall, Gabriella felt a desire to go straight to him. She did
not reason or hesitate: she went.