a moment he half relented in his purpose, thinking, perhaps, her
work for life was hard enough. But no: this woman had been
planned and kept by God for higher uses than daughter or wife or
mother. It was his part to put her work into her hands.

The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out
through the hills. A sleepy, quiet road. The restless dust of
the town never had been heard of out there. It went wandering
lazily through the corn-fields, down by the river, into the very
depths of the woods,--the low October sunshine slanting warmly
down it all the way, touching the grass-banks and the corn-fields
with patches of russet gold. Nobody in such a road could be in a
hurry. The quiet was so deep, the free air, the heavy trees, the
sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one could be sure of
finding them the same a hundred years from now. Nobody ever was
in a hurry. The brown bees came along there, when their work was
over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the road-side
in a voluptuous stupor of delight. The cows sauntered through
the clover by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in it
and sleeping outright. The country-people, jogging along to the
mill, walked their fat old nags through the stillness and warmth
so slowly that even Margret left them far behind. As the road
went deeper into the hills, the quiet grew even more penetrating
and certain,--so certain in these grand old mountains that one
called it eternal, and, looking up to the peaks fixed in the
clear blue, grew surer of a world beyond this where there is
neither change nor death.

It was growing late; the evening air more motionless and cool;
the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now;