then she said, to be sure an’ give her love to Joel (her love! I guess he’d killed that afore they’d been wed a year, but you bet she done her best to keep the skeleton dusted), an’ she thanked us ever so grateful for our help, for she’d not lost one o’ her pretty ways, poor dear—an’ that was the end.
“Us help her? I guess ’twas the other way about; I’m sure I think of her often an’ often when I’ve any little thing to bear. However did she stand it? Why didn’t she run away? She’d ha’ thought it wrong to leave her lawful husband, I reckon; she was very pious, you know. Why didn’t she make away with herself? But, of course, she’d ha’ thought that wrong, too. An’ she could send him her love! Look here—her flesh was all broke, poor thing, and I guess her heart was, too, but her spirit—my word! that was as strong as strength. We used to think, you know, that she’d no pluck at all; but it come to me that day that, for sheer clear grit, there wasn’t one of us, man or woman, could hold a candle to that poor crushed thing.”
A sad story. Yes—only it ends, you see, better than happily; it ends in triumph! The helpless, dependent girl whose weakness at its beginning so marred her whole life, had gathered by the end of it a strength that left its witnesses amazed.
It was a very different kind of strength from that of these hills, certainly; and yet I am not so sure? Eva would have said, “The strength of the hills is His also.” Perhaps they are only two verses of the same poem. Shall we go down?
