Although Gabriella had joyously greeted the day, as bringing
exemption from stifling hours in school, her spirits had drooped
ere evening with monotony. There were no books in use among the
members of that lovable household except school-books; they were
too busy with the primary joys of life to notice the secondary
resources of literature. She had no pleasant sewing. To escape the
noise of the pent-up children, she must restrict herself to that
part of the house which comprised her room. A walk out of doors was
impracticable, although she ventured once into the yard to study
more closely the marvels of the ice-work; and to the edge of the
orchard, to ascertain how the apple trees were bearing up under
those avalanches of frozen silver slipped from the clouds.

So there were empty hours for her that day; and always the emptiest
are the heaviest--those unfilled baskets of time which strangely
become lightest only after we have heaped them with the best we
have to give. Gabriella filled the hour-baskets this day with
thoughts of David, whose field work she knew would be interrupted
by the storm, and whose movements about the house she vainly tried
to follow in imagination.

Two months of close association with him in that dull country
neighborhood had wrought great changes in the simple feeling with
which she had sought him at first. He had then been to her only a
Prodigal who had squandered his substance, tried to feed his soul
on the swinish husks of Doubt, and returning to his father's house
unrepentant, had been admitted yet remained rejected: a Prodigal
not of the flesh and the world but of the spirit and the Lord. But
what has ever interested the heart of woman as a prodigal of some