After a long time, Rebecca’s hand lifted her; she stood up and their eyes met. Rebecca’s were clear and bright. She smiled at Mahala and then she said a strange thing: “Oh, the blessing, the beautiful blessing of tears! Mine all dried up long ago when I was young and pretty like you. But when you say your prayers to-night, remember to thank God for the surcease of tears.” Mahala stood very still. She resolved that when she went home, for the first time she would probe Jemima’s memory to the depths. These were the thoughts and the words of a cultured woman. She remembered at that minute that she never had heard any one say who Rebecca Sampson was, or where she came from, or why she had no relatives. For herself she decided in that minute that there were two things that she knew. Rebecca had been a girl of radiant beauty; she had been cultured and was accustomed to proper forms of speech and carefully selected, meaningful words, and it seemed to Mahala, as they went down the road together, that from things she could recall, sharply accentuated by what she had been told occurred after her passing into the church the night of Commencement, that she might be able to point a finger very straightly toward the source that had wrecked the life of so fair a woman as Rebecca Sampson. When Mahala reached home she was hungry and tired. With inborn fastidiousness she bathed and changed her clothing. She sat beside her mother’s bed and told her of the day. She tried to paint the desperate old house and stable as they were, but she found herself saying that the beams and the partitions were of substantial wood, that the foundations were solid. When she came to the orchard, she realized that she was talking more of the bluebirds that twittered through the branches than she was of the cavities in which they were nesting. She was more concerned with the hair-like grass carpeting its floor than she was with the borers burrowing in its branches. She realized, too, that she was talking more of the many kinds of dear home flowers that marched in procession, hugging closely to the old house, than she was of the building itself. She deliberately embedded in her mother’s brain the thought that here was a refuge, that here was a home that might be made into a sanctuary for them; that she might end her days among the bluebirds in the shelter of the pink boughs of the old orchard. For the first time since disaster had laid violent hands upon her, Elizabeth Spellman remembered that she was not an old woman. She was scarcely middle aged. She had been much younger than the husband upon whom she had leaned so confidently. The thought that there was something in the world that was really theirs, to which they had a right, was the first heartening thing that had happened. The hope that she might once again preside in a home of her own, provided by Mahlon, beautified by even a few of her former possessions, was such a tonic as nothing else in the