I watched her struggles with my own power palsied by that same old curse, poverty. She did her best; her struggles were torture to me even when she smiled and met them with sweet faith in her own strength and God's goodness. She never once murmured, although I knew that many a night she had gone hungry to her desk, and rose from it, hungry still, at dawn. And oh, when hope began to die, I saw it all; saw it in the weary eyes; heard it in the step that lagging past my door, climbed to its task, its hopeless task, again. I saw it in the cheek where hunger,--the hunger of the common herd--had set its fangs upon the delicate bloom. To ask for bread meant to receive a stone, a stone like unto the stones cast at her, that one in old Jerusalem. Perhaps she hungered too; who dares judge, since Christ himself refused to condemn. She tried at shops at last, but no man wanted modest Quaker maids to measure off their goods. The shop-girl's smile was part and parcel of the bargain, and if the smile beguiled a serpent in man's clothing, why the girl must look to that. One night I sought her room, her tidy little nest--my poor solitary birdling--and found her at her work, her old task of writing. She had gone back to it. There were rings about the eyes where tears were forbidden visitors. I took the poor head in my arms. "Don't, Claudia," I cried. "The youth is all gone from your face." "That's right," she said. "It left my heart long ago, and face and heart should have a common correspondence." And then she laughed, as if to cheat my old ears with the sound of merriment. "I needed stamps," she said. "The question rested, stamps _vs._ supper. Like a true artist I made my choice for art. But see here. That manuscript when it is finished, means _no more hunger_. Something tells me it will succeed, and save me. So I have called it _Refuge_, and on it I have staked my last hope." She playfully tapped the tidy page, and laughed again. But her words had a solemn earnestness about them to which her pale pinched face lent something still of awe.