THE regal woman who stepped from the car to the station-platform at Yerbury, one balmy day in early June, to be greeted by Fred and Sylvie Lawrence with the warmest of welcomes, was indescribably different from the pale, cold, haughty statue that had gone away. There was an elasticity in her step, a self-reliance in her air, and the peculiar confidence discipline wisely used inevitably imparts. Yet there had been no romantic or highly-wrought change in her. She had not taken up teaching from any heroic motive or the possible benefit to any one, but simply to protect herself from what she considered the weakness of her own soul, to get away from a danger she could not fight. Oh, how she had hated French verbs and exercises! If hers had been a susceptible musical temperament, she would have gone quite crazy with the blunders and sentimentalisms of young girls. After a month of it, she would have welcomed any relief, even the face-to-face conflict with Darcy. But she could not well run away from here, and her physical health was perfect: so there was nothing but to go straight on, and find that circumstances had to govern, that she could not shut herself up in sullen majesty, or fling off the daily duties for some wiser and more patient hands to pick up, and restore to beauty and harmony. She had a friend, the best and truest that a young woman could have, perhaps; a woman so admirably adapted to the training of girls, that it was no marvel she succeeded. Out of the ruins of her life she had built up another, wise, sweet, and strong. As Irene began to comprehend what Mrs. Trenholme had suffered and achieved, for the first time she paid an honest reverence to the nobility of character. And now she despised her own petty, shallow thoughts and beliefs. Her lofty despising of the world and the vain and selfish people therein had been only a kind of scornful regret for the treasures wrested from her, the glitter of fashion, the gauds of society. Fred had made a braver stand than she. He had not sought to poise himself on the easy, graceful rounds of past promises, and to dream futile weakening dreams, nor shut himself up in morbid isolation. After all, how little the great world really cared! It was the few friends, the small circle, the near influences, that were of importance. And when she found that here in cultured, delightful Beverly, she was sought out as an entertaining guest, that she had not lost caste because the great bubble of fortune had shivered into fragments, that dressing and shopping and flirting were not the highest of human enjoyments, she came to a very rational frame of mind, and to a certain extent enjoyed her life. But nature had not made her a teacher of children, and never does such women, until, informed by that highest of all love, they teach their own.