Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/39

 not rest unrevealed, that another hand should give shape to the creations of his brain. The son for whose birth he prayed and looked should be but a finer tool through which his genius should animate the bronze and marble of his native land. He had reckoned, as so many of us do, without his host; for no son was born to him, only a small daughter, who blinked blindly in his face and put out her wee hands to grasp him on the day when her mother died, a month after her birth. Stuart Ruysdale was a man with an iron will. Fate had beaten him at every bout so far, but yield he would not. Son or daughter, his child should be a sculptor; and thus it was that the girl whom Philip Rondelet had met at the house of Mrs. Darius Harden was vowed from her birth a priestess of the plastic art. From her babyhood she had been given wax and clay to model; and, to the passionate delight of her father, the child showed an unusual aptitude for the profession to which he had dedicated her. Her education had been carried on entirely to this end; and at twenty, Margaret Ruysdale had certainly produced uncommonly good work for so young a sculptor. Her father's strong conceptions, growing more delicate in passing through the medium of her mind, were to the man like the children of some dear dead child, dearer to him than his own child had been, because of