Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/68

58 darkness and confinement, Reba's soul was born anew—a small flickering little thing at first, wavering between light and darkness for days after its first moment of self-realization, but a spark of life, small and weak as it was, that persisted in existence and cried out night and day for nurture and tender ministration.

Reba's mother and aunts observed nothing out of the ordinary in the girl as she helped them that day clear up after dinner. There was no trace visible of her experience as she walked back and forth, from refrigerator to stove, from stove to table, over the well-worn path which her feet had traveled for so many years, and afterward took her sewing and sat down in her mother's bedroom by the western window. Her fingers threaded the needle, knotted the thread, made the long, even rows of stitches as usual, but her thoughts were darting here and there—zigzag, like a frightened domesticated canary who had chanced to hop out of his cage into the mystifying space of out-of-doors.

She was assailed with doubts, tortured with misgivings, time and time again during the days that followed. In fact, her state of mind was like the tide, fluctuating between low, dark periods of doubt, and high, bright ones of conviction. But it was like an incoming tide, and every new wave of assurance came a little nearer to her old ideals, built upon the shore, and destroyed them at last, making of the old fortress, where she had found comfort and shelter for years, a shapeless mound of resistless sand at last, which she grieved and mourned over as something loved and lost.

She had no plan, no program of escape. She groped