Esther Powel at eighteen, and in her young, fresh beauty--this was the offering she would immolate on the altar of her limitations. CHAPTER II. INSTEAD of resorting to the woods, her old friend, Esther made her way down to the plum thicket. The honey bees were humming to the heart of the blossoms. Throwing herself full length upon the ground, she lay in a white drift of them. An hour or more was given to heartrending sobs of utter grief and abandonment of everything in the whole world. The pathos of her starved, unsympathetic existence, living in isolation among people as heavy as wet clay. All the sentiment, thought, passion, of her being had no outlet--none of the cravings of her youth had been satisfied. Between her and Glenn Andrews the silence had been unbroken for almost a year. As she lay there looking up, with her arms folded under her head, her heart almost bursting with a sense of her own helplessness, she pictured herself accepting the knowledge that she would never see him again. All the unhealthy fancies born of loneliness and sorrow possessed her. The day was gray. The steel rim of the sky seemed to fit the woods. She watched it with a stifling sensation. It looked as if it would soon bend the trees double and close in, shutting down upon the narrow space in which she lived. She remembered to have seen her grandfather turn an old, worn pan of granite down upon his early tomato slips. He did this to keep out the light, until they could get strength enough to stand the hardier growth--he did it to force them. The consistence of nature’s laws she did not understand. She only knew that to-day for her was very lonely, narrow and dark, and to-morrow would be another to-day when it came. She went back to the house with a dull expression of hopelessness in her eyes. CHAPTER III. SO the days passed--the cold, wretched days. Esther was sewing diligently, making both sleeves for one arm, blundering on everything she undertook, until it exhausted her teacher’s patience. For some time she was less a help than a hindrance--yet she was sewing. One evening she dropped her work and went out to meet her cousin John. She often met him when he came home. This time she was unusually anxious. He had been to mill. “Well, you are back; we’ve missed you,” she said. Mixed with her love for him was a big proportion of pity. He had such a hard, stupid kind of life and had never been appreciated. “Hello, youngster!” he greeted her, with his stout, strident voice. “What’ll you give me for a letter--a two-pounder?” “It depends on where it’s from.” “Paris, France.” “No? Really?” Holding a package just above her head, he read: “Mademoiselle Esther Powel, Etats Unis d’Amerique. He’s sending back all your old letters. This looks as if it might hold a dozen or two.” “They are not mine,” she cried, as, laughing, she leaped and snatched it from his hand.