It would not have been strictly true to call her beautiful.

For years,--since her earliest womanhood,--those slender hands had taken the bread which repaid the toil of heart and brain from the coarse palms which offered it in the world's rude market.

It was not for herself alone that she had bartered away the life of her youth, that she had breathed the hot air of schoolrooms, that she had forced her intelligence to posture before her will, as the exigencies of her place required,--waking to mental labor,--sleeping to dream of problems,--rolling up the stone of education for an endless twelvemonth's term, to find it at the bottom of the hill again when another year called her to its renewed duties, schooling her temper in unending inward and outward conflicts, until neither dulness nor obstinacy nor ingratitude nor insolence could reach her serene self-possession.

Not for herself alone.

Poorly as her prodigal labors were repaid in proportion to the waste of life they cost, her value was too well established to leave her without what, under other circumstances, would have been a more than sufficient compensation.