and where the generations of her family had been leaders, there
were kind offers of aid, secret condolences, whispered regrets,
visible distress: her resolve was a new thing for a girl in those
years. She could, indeed, in a way, have kept her place; but she
could not have endured the sympathy, the change, with which she
would have been welcomed--and discarded. She made trial of this a
few times and was convinced: up to the day of the cruel discovery
of that, Gabriella had never dreamed what her social world could be
to one who had dropped out of it.

Her church and the new life--these two had been left her. She no
longer had a pew, but she had her faith and this was enough; for it
always gave her, wherever she was, some secret place in which to
kneel and from which to rise strengthened and comforted. As for the
fearful fields of work into which she had come, a strange and
solitary learner, these had turned into the abiding, the living
landscapes of life now. Here she had found independence--sweet,
wholesome crust; found another self within herself; and here found
her mission for the future--David. So that looking upon the
disordered and planless years, during which it had often seemed
that she was struggling unwatched, Gabriella now believed that
through them she had most been guided, When many hands had let hers
go, One had taken it; when old pathways were closed, a new one was
opened; and she had been led along it--home.

David's illness had deepened beyond any other experience her faith
in an overruling Providence. His return to health was to her a
return from death: it was an answer to her prayers: it was a
resurrection. Henceforth his life was a gift for the second time to
himself, to her, to the world for which he must work with all his