An Ambitious Man

While Joy battled with her sorrow during the days following Preston

Cheney's burial, she woke to the consciousness that her history was

known in Beryngford. The indescribable change in the manner of her

acquaintances, the curiosity in the eyes of some, the insolence or

familiarity of others, all told her that her fears were realised; and

then there came a letter from the church authorities requesting her

to resign her position as organist.

This letter came to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn

nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the

exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air. She had been

labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her

heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter

from the church committee cut her heart like a poniard stroke.

Sometimes we are able to bear a series of great disasters with

courage and equanimity, while we utterly collapse under some slight

misfortune. Joy had been a heroine in her great sorrows, but now in

the undeserved loss of her position as church organist, she felt

herself unable longer to cope with Fate.

"There's no place for me anywhere," she said to herself. Had she

known the truth, that the Baroness had represented her to the

committee as a fallen woman of the metropolis, who had left the city

for the city's good, the letter would not have seemed to her so

cruelly unjust and unjustifiable.

Bitter as had been her suffering at the loss of Arthur Stuart from

her life, she had found it possible to understand his hesitation to

make her his wife. With his fine sense of family pride, and his

reverence for the estate of matrimony, his belief in heredity, it

seemed quite natural to her that he should be shocked at the

knowledge of the conditions under which she was born; and the thought

that her disappearance from his life was helping him to solve a

painful problem, had at times, before this unexpected sight of him,

rendered her almost happy in her lonely exile. She had grown

strangely fond of Beryngford--of the old streets and homes which she

knew must have been familiar to her mother's eyes, of the new church

whose glorious voiced organ gave her so many hours of comfort and

relief of soul, of the tiny apartment where she and her heart

communed together. She was catlike in her love of places, and now

she must tear herself away from all these surroundings and seek some

new spot wherein to hide herself and her sorrows.