All that she wailed in her despair, all that she confessed in her abasement, was true, and hard as life could be--but she belonged to nature.

If nature had not failed her, had God failed her?
It was there--the lonely land of tree and fern and flower and brook, full of wild birds and beasts, where the mossy rocks could speak and the solitude had ears, where she had always felt herself unutterably a part of creation.

Thus a wavering spark of hope quivered through the blackness of her soul and gathered light.
The gloom of the sky, the shifting clouds of dull shade, split asunder to show a glimpse of a radiant star, piercingly white, cold, pure, a steadfast eye of the universe, beyond all understanding and illimitable with its meaning of the past and the present and the future.

Ellen watched it until the drifting clouds once more hid it from her strained sight.
What had that star to do with hell?
She might be crushed and destroyed by life, but was there not something beyond?
Just to be born, just to suffer, just to die--could that be all?
Despair did not loose its hold on Ellen, the strife and pang of her breast did not subside.

But with the long hours and the strange closing in of the forest around her and the fleeting glimpse of that wonderful star, with a subtle divination of the meaning of her beating heart and throbbing mind, and, lastly, with a voice thundering at her conscience that a man's faith in a woman must not be greater, nobler, than her faith in God and eternity--with these she checked the dark flight of her soul toward destruction..