Of all these friends in need, one was more helpful, more comforting, more sustaining than all the rest. Margaret Brent was like a granite cliff against which the waves beat mightily, but could not prevail. Had her nature sharp peaks, crevasses, and unsunned slopes? In times of storm one thought not of these, but of the rock's protection and the solid barrier against the fury of the tempest. The very bluntness of her shrewd comments on Elinor's conduct of life held a certain tonic. The people who help us most are those who make light of our achievements, and have faith in our possibilities. As Elinor compared Margaret with her sister Mary, she felt how unenlightened her former judgments had been. Mary Brent's virtues were for times of sunshine. Hospitality, tranquillity, pious observances, marked her placid progress through the world; but when the final test came, it laid bare under these qualities narrowness of mind and bigotry of soul and that hardness which sometimes underlies suavity. Her white eyelids, with their light lashes, never quivered as she pronounced Neville guilty and bade Elinor renounce him and his memory. Elinor would not? Then they were best apart, and she would not undertake to dissuade her cousin from her plan of taking up her abode at Cecil Point. When she bade Cecil good-bye, a brief spasm seemed to tear her heart; but it passed, leaving the face as unruffled as ever, and it was with a feeling of relief that Elinor turned from her to the wilderness. At first sight the cottage at St. Mary's had seemed impossible for one of Elinor Calvert's birth and upbringing; but outward things had no power to trouble her now, and she set to work with a certain sense of pleasurable independence to brighten the little house for Cecil's sake. Her chief helper was Bride, an old nurse of Cecil's who had come to the new land with her boy and who now proved herself as reliable in the kitchen as in the nursery. She was a picturesque figure enough in her short stuff gown with bright stockings and heavy shoes, a white kerchief folded above her checked apron, and a ruffled cap covering her gray hair. Her only wish was to serve her mistress, her only joy to prepare good things for Cecil to eat, her only terror fear of these strange blacks whom people seemed to take into their houses as if they were human beings like the white folk, instead of uncanny creatures of whom any deviltry might be expected. "Do ye think, Master Cecil, the black would come off if ye touched one?" she asked. "I know not; I never tried. Come here, Lysander! There, stand still while I rub you with this white cloth. See, Bride, the cloth is not black, no more than if you rubbed it on a black cow or any other beast."