He had made her the gift of his work--dedicated to her the triumphs of
his toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his widening
career and enter with him into the world's service. She crossed her
hands over it awhile, and then she left it.
The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the
immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.
After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the
echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music
only,--the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She
sat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear
began faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of his story.
One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watch
the youth of the hemp--a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. If
the north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulse
swayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all heads
were instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and east
wind sent it west.
And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we
sometimes call the field of human life in its perpetual summer.
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