alarmed and distressed her--was, in itself, the reason of her own
unrest and discontent. She felt, rather, in a vague, instinctive way,
that the source of her parent's trouble was somehow identical with the
cause of her own unhappiness. But what was it that caused her father's
affliction and her own dissatisfied and restless mental state? The
young woman questioned herself in vain.

Pausing at one of the turns in the stairway, she stood for some time
looking at the life that lay before her, as though wondering if the
answer to her questions might not be found somewhere in that familiar
scene.

But the Mill, with its smoking stacks and the steady song of its
industry, had no meaning for her. The dingy, dust-veiled Flats spoke a
language that she was not schooled to understand. The farms of the
valley beyond the river, so beautiful in their productiveness, were as
meaningless to her as the life on some unknown planet. To her the busy
city with its varied interests was without significance. The many homes
on the hillside held, for her, nothing. And yet as she looked she was
possessed of a curious feeling that everything in that world before her
eyes was occupied with some definite purpose--was living to some fixed
end--was a part of life--belonged to life. Below her, on the road at
the foot of the cliffs, an old negro with an ancient skeleton of a
horse and a shaky wreck of a wagon was making slow progress toward the
Flats. To Helen, even this poor creature was going somewhere--to some
definite place--on some definite mission. She felt strangely alone.

In those years of the war Adam Ward's daughter, like many thousands of
her class, had been inevitably forced into a closer touch with life
than she had ever known before. She had felt, as never before, the