There
were indeed many there, in the scenes of her home and childhood, whose
lives she might ease and glorify by letting in the starlight while
they slept; but her motive, she discerned, was not wholly pure. There
was a trace in it, almost a little stain, of personal gratification--
she could not analyse it quite--that dimmed the picture in her
thought. The brilliance of her companion made it stand out clearly.
Nearer home was a less heroic object, a more difficult case, some one
less likely to reward her efforts with results. And she turned instead
to this.
'You're right,' smiled the other, following her thought; 'and you
couldn't begin with a better bit of work than that. Your old mother
has cut herself off so long from giving sympathy to her kind that now
she cannot accept it from others without feeling suspicion and
distrust. Ease and soften her outlook if you can. Pour through her
gloom the sympathy of stars. And remember,' she added, as Mother rose
softly out of the trees and hovered a moment overhead, 'that if you
need the Sweep or the Lamplighter, or the Gardener to burn away her
dead leaves, you have only to summon them. Think hard, and they'll be
instantly beside you.'
Upon an eddy of glowing wind Mother drifted across the fields to the
corner of the village where her mother occupied a large single room in
solitude upon the top floor, a solitude self-imposed and rigorously
enforced.
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