LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER I

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      Ariel Custer stood for a moment on the old white-pillared porch of her childhood’s home and watched the wagon drive out the gate and down the road toward town with the last pieces of her grandmother’s dear old furniture. They were being taken to Ezra Brownleigh’s to be stored for her until sometime in the dim and distant future when she should be able to wrest from the great unfriendly world a home and a spot to put them. Ezra Brownleigh had brought them in for her at the auction sale the week before.

      It was very early in the morning, and the sun was still making long, slanted rays of brightness over the old lawn between the oak trees and shrubs. A mockingbird was singing wildly sweet in the maple by the library window as if there were no such thing as sorrow and desolation in the bright world, fairly splitting his throat with praise; and in the intervals of his trills Ariel could hear the creaking of one wagon wheel as it lumbered over the ruts on the old Virginia road.

      Suddenly the tears blurred into her eyes, and her white throat stirred hysterically. It seemed as if she could not bear it. All that was left of the dear old home, every memento of her precious father and mother and frail little grandmother who had lingered longest with her on the earth, was packed into the rickety wagon and going down the road to storage. Ariel caught her breath and turned quickly inside the door. Not even the mockingbird must see her weeping. She was a Custer, and the Custers kept their pride and bore smiling what came to them. She must not be weak or fainthearted. Besides, was not God in His heaven? Was He not watching over her tenderly, even though for the time it seemed as if He had withdrawn His tender care? The faith of her grandmother was in her strongly. Somewhere ahead there was brightness, or if there was not, there was the brightness of eternity when her way of this pilgrimage was over. She had no thought of blaming God for the trials, or the darkness, or the hardships of the way she had to go to meet Him. That she was on her way Home was a settled fact in her mind that no philosophical reasoning could disturb. She might have to suffer through a century more or less, but the loyalty of her heart belonged to God, and she was one of those in whom faithfulness is written large. God couldn’t forsake. That was the keynote of her life. Whatever came was under His overruling hand and could never overwhelm because His grace was sufficient. Therefore she was safe wherever and however she might find herself.

      Ariel was one of those rare girls somehow left over from what the world whimsically calls with a smile and a sneer “the Victorian Age,” though it is to be doubted if even the Victorian Age saw many like her.

      She still had her hair, all of it, wonderful hair, long and heavy with a glint of copper and a ripple in it that caught the sunlight and turned it into spun gold. It crowned her lovely head in classic lines that no modernist can achieve and perhaps would be incapable even of admiring. She had eyes of the clear translucent blue of an aquamarine, and the delicacy of her features, and the fervent, vivid look of her, would make one wonder to see her in a crowd.

      Now, as she turned back to the empty, echoing house, sorrow clothed her as in a hallowing garment, and her face wore an ethereal look; that look perhaps that her young mother had seen in her baby face, and called her “Ariel.”

      She stood for a moment in the wide hall that ran from front to back of the house, with its glass doors into the garden at the back and a glimpse of fields and hills beyond; the hall where her mother’s feet had trod; where her own childish laughter had rung out; where her little grandmother had loved to sit in the deep old rocker in her rusty black silk and her fine sheer ruffles and cap, doing delicate embroidery while Ariel studied on a cushion outside the door and the kitten curled in a black and white ball at her feet. How the memories flocked!

      There through the wide arch was the old parlor where she had practiced her music at the old square piano, with mother-of-pearl flowers set in its polished rosewood above the keyboard.

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