The poor
deformed girl lay watching them, as they talked. Very pretty
Jenny looked, with her blue eyes and damp pink cheeks; and it was
a manly, grave love in Sam's face, when it turned to her. A
different love from any she had known: better, she thought. It
could not be helped; but it WAS better.
After they were gone, she lay a long time quiet, with her hand
over her eyes. Forgive her! she, too, was a woman. Ah, it may
be there are more wrongs that shall be righted yonder in the
To-Morrow than are set down in your theology!
And so it was, that, as she drew nearer to this To-Morrow, the
brain of the girl grew clearer,--struggling, one would think, to
shake off whatever weight had been put on it by blood or vice or
poverty, and become itself again. Perhaps, even in her cheerful,
patient life, there had been hours when she had known the wrongs
that had been done her, known how cruelly the world had thwarted
her; her very keen insight into whatever was beautiful or helpful
may have made her see her own mischance, the blank she had drawn
in life, more bitterly. She did not see it bitterly now. Death
is honest; all things grew clear to her, going down into the
valley of the shadow; so, wakening to the consciousness of
stifled powers and ungiven happiness, she saw that the fault was
not hers, nor His who had appointed her lot; He had helped her to
bear it,--bearing worse himself. She did not say once, "I might
have been," but day by day, more surely, "I shall be.
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