Her eyes grew sad and the lines of her face drooped as she sat beside her window. And after a while she took out the little box with its treasure of letters and withered flower. She did not read the letters, of which there was now nearly a box full, but turned them over caressingly in her hands and now and then pressed one to her lips. Rhoda was bridesmaid when Horace and Marcia were married in the early spring. “It’s your third time, isn’t it, dear,” said Marcia as her friend draped about her shoulders the folds of her bridal veil. “I do hope it will be you yourself, next time!” “So do I, Marcia!” said Rhoda frankly, looking up with a smile. “There isn’t a girl anywhere who’d more willingly be a bride than I, if--if--if!” “Rhoda, you’re the dearest, bravest girl!” cried Marcia, squeezing her hand. “If I was in your place I’d be crying my eyes out instead of laughing like that!” “Then I wouldn’t have you for my bridesmaid if you couldn’t give your eyes a rest that long,” rejoined Rhoda gaily. Spring and summer came and went, and for Rhoda Ware the weeks passed with uneventful flow. Through their house there trickled a thin stream of slaves fleeing northward, sometimes half a dozen or more within a week and sometimes not more than one or two. The trouble and cost of recovering their runaway negroes, even when they were infrequently able to get possession of them again, had caused the southern slaveholders to give over their efforts. In these last years of the decade it was unusual for a fugitive to be pursued and therefore the traffic of the Underground was carried on with little risk. Rhoda busied herself with these duties, the ordering of her father’s household, her anti-slavery work and her reading. Gradually the thought grew up in her breast that she would like to study medicine. She talked the matter over with her father and he offered, if she wished, to send her to one of the medical colleges that within a few years had been opened for women. But she would not leave him alone and so, under his guidance, she spent her leisure time reading in his medical library, discussing his cases with him, and often going with him upon his visits. Dr. Ware received an occasional brief letter from John Brown in which his scheme was referred to with cautious phrasing as a speculation in sheep. Toward midsummer he wrote that he was getting his shepherds together and expected to collect a band of sheep in the Virginia mountains, where he thought there would be good pasturage, about the middle of October. “He is bound to come into collision with the federal government very soon,” said Dr. Ware to his daughter as they talked this letter over together. “Of course he knows that will be the end of his enterprise and of him too.” “He won’t care,” answered Rhoda, “what becomes of him if he can make just one thrust at slavery.”