Margret Howth: A Story of To-day

lplessly smothered under great waves of gray cloud. Margret, looking out into t

arch, like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys were one drifting, slow-heaving mass of ashy damp. Off in the east a stifled r

stupid quiet. And now, when she had planned her life, busy, useful, contented, why need God have sent the old thought to taunt her? A wild, sickening sense of what might have been struggled up: she thrust it down,-she had kept it down all night; the old pain should not come back,-it should not. She did not think of the love she had given up as a dream, as verse-makers or sham people do; she knew it to be

heir nature have done the same,-saw themselves as others saw them: their strength drying up within them, jeered at, utterly alone. It is a trial we laugh at. I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter subjects for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many a slighted woman or a selfish man. They come out of the trial as out of martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks sometimes in a f

n the fight; force her soul down,-but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body spent and dead. One thing was certain: no curious eyes would see the struggle; the body might be nerveless or sickly, but it had the

eed was irrevocable, whether, after all, it were worth while to have done it? How mean seems the good gained! How new a

an old, bare house in the midst of dreary stubble fields, in which her life was slowly to be worn out: working for those who did

closer to his master; she put him away; she dared not suffer even that treachery to her purpose: the very circumstances that had forced her to give him up made it weak cowardice to turn again. It was a simple story, yet one which she dared not tell to herself; for it was not altogether for her father's sake she had made the sacrifice. She knew, that, though she might be near to this man Holmes as his own soul, she was a clog on him,-stood in

r own intolerable future for the moment, as she gathered up some breakfast and went with it down the lane. Morning had come; great heavy bars of light fell from behind the hills athwart the banks of gray and black fog; there was shifting, uneasy, obstinate tumult among the shadows; they did not mean to yield

here, Miss Marg'et!" she

ight, and settled the heaps of corn and tomatoes about her, preparatory for a start, Margret kept her hand on the side of the cart, and walked slowly by it down the road. Once, looking at the girl, she thought with a half smile how oddly clean she was. The flannel skirt she arranged so complacently had been washed until the colours had run madly into each other in sheer desperation; her hair wa

ll, Miss Marg'et?" she

ver go there

, '

s edge. Somehow this creature, that Nature had thrown impatiently aside as a failure, so marred, imperfect, t

d she,-what could she know-the ignorant huckster-of the eternal laws of beauty or grandeur? Nothing. Yet something in the girl's face made her think that these hills, this air and sky, were in fact alive to her,-real; that her soul, being lower, it might be, than ours, lay clos

elicate perfume. The bars of sunlight fell on the lower earth from the steep hills like pointed swords; the foggy swamp of wet vapour trembled and broke, so touched, rose at last, leaving patches of damp brilliance on the fields, and floated majestically up in radiant victor clouds, led by the conquering wind. Victory: it was in the cold, pure ether filling the heavens, in the solemn gladness of the hills. The great forests thrilling in the soft light, the very sleepy river wakening unde

the fence-bushes, that did not seem to include the eager face of the little huckster in their morning greetings. Not a golden dandelion on the road-side, not a gurgle of the plashing brown wat

id carelessly, to break the silence

kindled i

him. Things allus do come right, some time," she added

et sm

ings them right

said, turning with

not a more real verity to this girl than the Ma

in the mill?" she

andered uncertainly, as if her weak b

she said, bravely. "Th

med to be surging through her narrow thought; and when

xteen. 'T seemed longer t' me 'n 't was. 'T seemed as if I'd been there allus,-jes' forever, yoh know. 'Fore I went in,

ok in her eyes. After a while she looked at

BE something wrong in my he

kindly on the broad

everywhere, Lois,"

mothered down whatever hope had risen just then, li

them years: seemed to me like as I was part o' th' engines, somehow. T

wheels 'n' rollers was alive, starin' down at me, 'n' th' shadders o' th' looms was like snakes creepin',-creepin' anear all th' time. They was very good to me, th' hands was,-very good. Ther' 's lots o' th' Master's people down there, though they

efore her, all the tainted blood in her veins of centuries of slavery and heathenism struggling to drag her down. But a

gone, 'n' th' Lord thought 't was time to see to me,-special as th' overseer was get

rl could talk of him, pray for him; but

lessed old donkey, 'n' my room. Did

denly with its pecul

? It's a pore place, yoh'll think

d, as if she thought to find in its fierce

s, Miss Marg'et, like th' openin's to hell, w

o her,-a hungry devil down in those alleys and dens. Margret listened, waked reluctantly to the sense of a different pai

Marg

ace f

l, L

to jails 'n' work-houses, that 'd scorn to be cowardly or mean,-that shows God's kindness, through th' whiskey 'n' thievin', to th' orphint

t an easy thing to see a mother drink herself into the grave. And yet-was she to blame? Her Virginian blood was cool, high-bred; she had learned conservatism in her cradle. Her life in the West had not yet quickened her pulse. So she put aside whatever social mystery or wrong faced her in this girl, just as you or I would hav

es and virtues, or her room, where "th' air was so strong, 'n' the fruit 'n' ve

were talking all the way. In all his life Dr. Knowles had never heard from this silent girl words as open and eager as she gave to the huckster about paltry, common things,-partly, as I said, from a hope to forget herself, and partly from a vague curiosity to know the strange world which opened before her in this disjointed talk. There were no morbid shadows in this Lois's life, she saw. Her pa

g the road knew Lois, and she knew everybody, and there was a mutual liking and perpetual joking, not very refined, perhaps, but hearty and kind. It was a new side of life for Margret. She had no time for thoughts of self-sacrifice, or chivalry, ancient or modern, watching it. It was a very busy ride,-something to do at every farm-house: a basket of eggs to be taken in, or some egg-plants, maybe, which Lois laid side by side, Margret noticed,-the pearly white balls close to the heap of royal purple. No matter how small the basket was that she stopped for, it brought o

art 'll be right side up fur years to come," she would assert, shaking her head. "It 's got no more notion o' givin' up than me nor Barney,-not a bit." Margret had her doubts,-and so would you, if you had heard how it creaked under the load,-how they piled in great straw panniers of apples: black apples wit

f all geniuses, and died down into colourer for a photographer. He met them, that day, out by the stone quarry, and touched his hat as he returned Lois's "Good-morning," and took a couple of great pawpaws from her. She was a woman, you see, and he had some of the school-master's old-fas

n the tossing smoke up in the frosty air, in the very glowing faces of people hurrying from market with their noses nipped blue and their eyes watering with cold. Lois and her cart, fresh with country breath hanging about them, were not so out of place, after all. House-maids left the steps half-scrubbed, and helped her measure out the corn and be

the fouled fragments of her brain, even in the bitterest hour of her bare life,-a faith faith in God, faith in her fellow-man, faith in herself. No human soul refused to answer its summons. Down in the dark alleys, in the very vilest of the black and white wretches that crowded sometimes about her cart, there was an undefined sense of pride in protecting this wretch who

different heart from yesterday's. Somehow, the morbid fancies were gone: she was keenly alive; the coarse real life of this huckster fired her, touched her blood with a more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader. As she went down the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois's little cracked bell far off: it sounded lik