All his boyish life she had nurtured the other self in his soul,--the self that might have learned to give and be glad in the giving.

And when she went, he closed his Emerson and opened his Trigonometry, and put money in his purse.[1] There came a time when Ellen Culpepper was to him as a dream.

But she lived in her mother's eyes, and through all the years that followed the mother watched the little girl grow to maturity and into middle life with the other girls of her age.

And even when the little headstone on the Hill slanted in sad neglect, Mrs.Culpepper's old eyes still saw Ellen growing old with her playmates.

And she never saw John Barclay that she did not think of Ellen--and and what she would have made of him.
And what would she have made of him?
Maybe a poet, maybe a dreamer of dreams--surely not the hard, grinding, rich man that he became in this world.
FOOTNOTE: [1] To the Publisher.--"In returning the Mss.