L

etitia's church, the last her father ever preached in, is a little stone St. Paul's, pine-shaded and ivy-grown, upon a hill-side. There are graves about it in the lawn, scattered, not huddled there, and no paths between them, only the soft grass touching the very stones. Above them in the untrimmed boughs swaying with every wind, the wild birds nest and sing, so that death where Dr. Primrose lies seems a pleasant dreaming.

"Our service," he used to say, "is the ancient poetry of reverence;" and every verse of it brings to Letitia memories of her father standing at the lecturn, while she was a child listening in the pews.

"I was very proud of him," she used to tell us. "His sermons were wonderful, I think. You will say that I could not judge them as a girl and daughter, but I have read them since. I have them all in a box up-stairs, and now and then I take one out and read it to myself, and all that while I can hear his voice. They are better than any I listen to nowadays; they are far more thoughtful, fuller of life and fire and the flower of eloquence. Our ministers are not so brimming any more."

She told us a story I had never heard, of his earnestness and how hard it was for him to find words fervent enough to express his meaning; how when a rich old merchant of Grassy Ford confessed to him a doubt that there was a God, dear Dr. Primrose turned upon him in the village street where they walked together and said, with the tears springing to his eyes:

"Gabriel Bond, not as a clergyman but as a man, I say to you, consider for a moment that apple-bloom you are treading on!" It was spring and a bough from the merchant's garden overhung the walk where they had paused. "Hold it in your hand, and look at it, and think, man, think! Use the same reason which tells you two and two make four—the same reason that made you rich, Gabriel—and tell me, if you can, there is no God! Why, sir—" and here Dr. Primrose's heart quite overcame him, and his voice broke. "Gabriel, you are not such a damned—"

And the merchant, Letitia said, for it was Bond himself who told her the story long after Dr. Primrose's voice was stilled—the merchant, astounded to find a clergyman so like another man struggling for stressful words for his emotion, picked up the bruised twig from beneath his feet and stuck it in her father's coat.

"Doctor," he said, quietly, "there's force, sir, in what you say," and left Dr. Primrose wondering on the walk. But the next Sunday he appeared at church, and every Sunday for many years thereafter, merely explaining to those who marvelled, that he had found a man.

It was not likely that the daughter of such a man would be much troubled with doubts of what he had taught so positively or what she had come to believe herself; if led astray it would be like her sex in general, through too much faith. While not obtrusive in her views of life in her younger years, Letitia, as she reached her prime, and through the habit of self-dependence and her daily duty of instructing undeveloped minds, grew more decisive in her manner, more impatient of opposition to what she held was truth, especially when it seemed to her the fruit of ignorance or that spirit of bantering argument so common to the humorously inclined. She liked humor to know its place, she said; it was the favorite subterfuge of persons championing a losing cause. In such discussions, finding her earnestness useless to convince, and scorning to belittle a theme dear to her with resort to jest or personalities, she would sit silenced, but with a flush upon her cheeks, and if the enemy had pressed too sharply on her orderly retreat, one would always know it by the tapping of her foot upon the floor.

She was no mean antagonist. For she read not only those volumes her father loved, but the books and journals of the day as well. Reading and theorizing of the greater world outside her little one, she was not troubled by those paradoxes which men meet there, which cause them to falter, doubt, and see two sides of questions where they had seen but one, till they fall back lazily, taking their ease on that neutral ground where Humor is the host, welcoming all and favoring none. We used to smile sometimes at Letitia's fervency; we had our little jests at its expense, but we knew it was her father in her, poet and preacher not dead but living still. In his youth and prime Dr. Primrose was ever the champion of needy causes, whose name is legion, so that his zeal found vent, and left him in his decline the mild old poet I remember. Would Letitia be as mild, I wondered?

"A few more needy causes," I used to say, "would soften that tireless spirit—say, stockings to darn and children to dress for school, and a husband to keep in order."

"Yet in lieu of these," Dove once replied, "she has her day's work and her church and books—"

"But are they enough for a woman, do you think?" I asked my wife. We were standing together by Robin's bedside, watching him as he slept. Dove said nothing, but laid her hand against his rose-red cheek.

Little by little we became aware of some subtle change in our Letitia. She took less interest in the mild adventures of our household world. She smiled more faintly at my jests, a serious matter, for I have at home, like other men, some reputation for a pretty wit upon occasion. It was a mild estrangement and recluseness. She sat more often in her room up-stairs. She was absent frequently on lonely walks, sometimes at evening, and brought home a face so rapt, and eyes with a look in them so far away from our humble circle about the reading-lamp, we deemed it wiser to ask no questions. For years it had been an old country custom of ours, when we sat late, to seek the pantry before retiring, but now when invited to join us in these childish spreads, "No, thank you," Letitia would reply, and in a tone so scrupulously courteous I used to feel like the man old Butters told about—a poor, inadvertent wight, he was, who had offered a sandwich to an angel. I forget now how the story runs, but the man grumbled at his rebuff, and so did I.

"I know, my dear," Dove reproved me, "but you ought not to do such things when you see she's thinking."

"Thinking!" I cried, cooling my temper in bread-and-milk. "Is it thinking, then?"

"I don't know what it is," Dove sighed. "She isn't Letitia any more, yet for the life of me I can't tell why. I never dream now of disturbing her when she looks that way, and I cannot even talk to her as I used to do."

"She isn't well," I said.

"She says she was never better."

"She may be troubled."

"She says she was never happier."

"Well, then," I decided, sagely, "it must be thinking, as you say."

We agreed to take no notice of what might be only moody crotchets after all; they would soon pass. We no longer pressed her to join our diversions about the lamp, but welcomed her in the old spirit when she came willingly or of her own accord. Yet even then it was not the same: there was some mute, mysterious barrier to the old, free, happy intercourse. Some word of Dove's or mine, mere foolery, perhaps, but meant in cheerfulness, would dance out gayly across the table where we sat at cards, but slink back home again, disgraced. What could this discord be? we asked ourselves—this strange impassiveness, this disapproval, as it seemed to us—negative, but no less obvious for that?

There was a heaviness in the air. We breathed more freely in Letitia's absence. We grew self-conscious in that mute, accusing presence, which I resented and my wife deplored. Dove even confessed to a feeling of guiltiness, yet could remember no offence.

"What have I done?" I asked my wife.

"What have I done?" asked she.

At meals, especially, we were ill at ease. The very viands, even those famous dishes of Dove's own loving handiwork, met with disfavor instead of praise. Letitia had abandoned meats; now she declined Dove's pies! Pastry was innutritious, she declared, meats not intended for man at all, and even of green things she ate so mincingly that my little housewife was in despair.

"What can I get for you, dear?" she would ask, anxiously. "What would you like?"

"My love," Letitia would reply, flushing with annoyance, "I am perfectly satisfied."

"But I'll get you anything, Letitia."

"I eat quite enough, my dear," was the usual answer—"quite enough," she would add, firmly, "for any one."

Then Dove would sink back ruefully, and I, pitying my wife—I, rebuked but unabashed and shameless in my gluttony, would pass my plate again.

"Give me," I would say, cheerfully, "a third piece of that excellent, that altogether heavenly cherry-pie, my dear."

It may sound like triumph, but was not—for Letitia Primrose would ignore me utterly. "Have you read," she would ask, sipping a little water from her glass, "New Eden, by Mrs. Lord?"

We still walked mornings to the school-house, still talked together as we walked, but not as formerly—not of the old subjects, which was less to be wondered at, nor yet of new ones with the old eloquence. I felt constrained. There was a new note in Letitia's comments on the way the world was going, though I could not define its pitch. She spoke, I thought, less frankly than of old, but much more carelessly. She seemed more listless in her attitude towards matters that had roused her, heart and soul, in other days. Me she ignored at pleasure; could it be possible, I wondered, that she was determined to renounce the whole round world as well?

It was I who had first resented this alienation, but it was Dove who could not be reconciled to a change so inscrutable and unkind. Time, I argued, was sufficient reason; age, I reminded her, cast strange shadows before its coming; our friend was growing old—perhaps like her father—before her time. But Dove was alarmed: Letitia was pale, she said; her face was wan—there was a drawn look in the lines of the mouth and eyes; even her walk had lost its buoyancy.

"True," I replied, "but even that is not unnatural, my dear. Besides, she eats nothing; she starves herself."

My wife rose suddenly.

"Bertram," she said, earnestly, "you must stop this folly. I have tried my best to tempt her out of it, but I have failed. It is you she is fondest of. It is you who must speak."

"I fear it will do no good," I answered, "but I will try." I have had use for courage in my lifetime, both as doctor and man, but I here confess to a trembling of the heart-strings, a childish faintness, a lily cowardice in these encounters, these trifling domestic sallies and ambuscades. Nor have I strategy; I know but one method of attack, and its sole merit is the little time it wastes.

"Letitia," I said, next morning, as we walked townward, "you are ill."

"Nonsense, Bertram," she replied.

"You are ill," I replied, firmly. "You are pale as a ghost. Your hands tremble. Your walk—"

"I was never stronger in my life," she interposed, and as if she had long expected this little crisis and was prepared for it. "Never, I think, have I felt so tranquil, so serene. My mind—"

"I am not speaking of your mind," I said. "I am talking of your body."

"Bertram," she said, excitedly, "that is just your error—not yours alone, but the whole world's error. This thinking always of earthly—"

"Now, Letitia," I protested, "I have been a doctor—"

"Illness," she continued, "is a state of mind. To think one is ill, is to be ill, of course, but to think one is well, is to be well, as I am—well, I mean, in a way I never dreamed of!—a way so sure, so beautiful, that I think sometimes I never knew health before."

"Letitia," I said, sharply, "what nonsense is this?"

"It is not nonsense," she retorted. "It is living truth. Oh, how can we be so blind! The body, Bertram—why, the body is nothing!"

"Nothing!" I cried.

"Nothing!" she answered, her face glowing. "The body is nothing; the mind is everything! It is God's great precious gift! With my mind I can control my body—my life—yes, my very destiny!—if I use God's gift of Will. It is divine."

"Letitia," I said, sternly, "those are fine words, and well enough in their time and place. I am not a physician of souls. I mend worn bodies, when I can. It is yours I am thinking of—the frail, white, half-starved flesh and blood where your soul is kept."

"Stop!" she cried. "You have no right to speak that way. You mean well, Bertram, but you are wrong. You are mistaken—terribly mistaken," she repeated, earnestly—"terribly mistaken. I am quite, quite able to care for myself. I only ask to be let alone."

She had grown hysterical. Tears were in her eyes.

"See," she said, in a calmer tone, wiping them away, "I have had perfect control till now. This is not weakness merely; it is worse: it is sin. But I shall show you. I shall show you a great truth, Bertram, if you will let me. Only have patience, that is all."

She smiled and paused in a little common near the school-house where none might hear us.

"I learned it only recently," she told me. "I cannot see how I never thought of it before: this great power mind has over matter—how just by the will which God has given us in His goodness, we may rise above these petty, earthly things which chain us down. We can rise here, Bertram—here on earth, I mean—and when we do, even though our feet be on Grassy Fordshire ground, we walk in a higher sphere. Ah, can't you see then that nothing can ever touch us?—nothing earthly, however bitter, can ever sadden us or spoil our lives! There will be no such thing as disappointment; no regret, no death—and earth will be Eden come again."

Her eyes were shining.

"Letitia," I said, "it is of another world that you are dreaming."

"No, it is all quite possible here," she said. "It is possible to you, if you only think so. It is possible for me, because I do."

"It seems," I said, "a monstrous selfishness."

"Selfishness!" she said, aghast.

"As long as you have human eyes," I said, "you will see things to make you weep, Letitia."

"But if I shut them—if I rise above these petty—"

"The sound of crying will reach your ears," I said. "How then shall you escape sadness and regret? What right have you to avoid the burdens your fellows bear?—to be in bliss, while they are suffering? It would be monstrous, Letitia Primrose. You would not be woman: You would be a fiend."

She shook her head.

"You don't understand," she said.

"At least," I answered, "I will send you something from the office."

She shut her lips.

"I shall not take it."

"It will make you stronger," I insisted.

"You can do nothing," she answered, coldly, "to make me stronger than I am."