We could not speak. My uncle tried to read his newspaper; my aunt's hands shook in their pretense of sewing; I threw myself on the floor at the foot of Annie's lounge and hid my face in its cushions.

But George Ware's brave voice went steadily on. Annie's sweet glad tones, weak and low, but still sweeter than any other tones I ever heard, chimed in and out like fairy bells from upper air. More than an hour passed. I do not know one word that we said.

Then George rose, saying: "I must not tire you, little Annie, so I am going now."

"Will you come, again to-morrow?" she asked as simply as a little child.

"Yes, dear, if you are not the worse for this," he replied, and kissed her forehead and walked very quickly away without looking back. I followed him instantly into the hall, for I had seen that in his face which had made me fear that, strong man as he was, he would fall. I found him sitting on the lowest step of the staircase, just outside the door.

"My God, Helen," he gasped, "it isn't only this last year she has forgotten. She has gone back five years."

"Oh no, dear George," I said; "you are mistaken. She remembers everything up to a year ago. You know she remembered about your going to India."

"That is nothing," he said impatiently. "You can't any of you, see what I mean, I suppose. But I tell you she has forgotten five years of me. She is to me just as she was when she was fourteen. Do you think I don't know the face and voice and touch of each day of my darling's life? oh, my God! my God!" and he sank down on the stair again in a silence which was worse than groans. I left him there and went back to Annie.

"How old Cousin George looks," she was saying, as I entered the room; "I didn't remember that he was so old. Why, he looks as old as you do, sweet papa. But then," reflectively, "after all, he is pretty old. He is fifteen years older than I am—and I am nineteen: thirty-four! that is old, is it not papa?" said she, half petulantly. "Why don't you speak, any of you?"

"You are getting too tired, my darling," said her father, "and now I shall carry you up-stairs."

After Annie was asleep, my Aunt Ann and I sat for hours in the library, going over and over and over, with weary hopelessness, all her words and looks, and trying to comfort each other. I think each knew the utter despair of the other's heart.

From this time George came and went with all his old familiarity: not a day passed without his seeing Annie, and planning something for her amusement or pleasure. Not a day passed without her showing in many ways that he made a large part of her life, was really a central interest in it. Even to us who knew the sad truth, and who looked on with intentness and anxiety hardly less than those with which we had watched her sick-bed weeks before—even to us it seemed many times as if all must be right. No stranger but would believe them lovers; not a servant in the house dreamed but that Miss Annie was still looking forward to her wedding. They had all been forbidden to allude to it, but they supposed it was only on account of her weakness and excitability.

But every day the shadow deepened on George Ware's face. I could see, though he would not admit it, that the same despair which filled my soul was settling down upon his. Dr. Fearing, too, who came and spent long evenings with us, and cautiously watched Annie's every tone and look, grew more and more uneasy. Dr. ——, one of the most distinguished physicians of the insane, in the country, was invited to spend a few days in the house. He was presented to Annie as an old friend of her father's, and won at once her whole confidence and regard. For four days he studied her case, and frankly owned himself baffled, and unable to suggest any measure except the patient waiting which was killing us all.

To tell this frail and excitable girl, who had more than once fainted at a sudden noise, that this man whom she regarded only as her loving cousin had been her promised husband—and that having been within two weeks of her wedding-day, she had now utterly forgotten it, and all connected with it—this would be too fearful a risk. It might deprive her forever of her reason.

Otherwise, she seemed in every respect, even in the smallest particular, herself. She recollected her music, her studies, her friends. She was anxious to resume her old life at all points. Every day she made allusions to old plans or incidents. She had forgotten absolutely nothing excepting the loverhood of her lover. Every day she grew stronger, and became more and more beautiful, There was a slight under-current of arch mischievousness and half petulance which she had never had before, and which, added to her sweet sympathetic atmosphere, made her indescribably charming. As she grew stronger she frolicked with every human being and every living thing. When the spring first opened and she could be out of doors, she seemed more like a divine mixture of Ariel and Puck than like a mortal maiden.

I found her one day lying at full length on the threshold of the greenhouse. Twenty great azaleas were in full bloom on the shelves—white, pink, crimson. She had gathered handfuls of the fallen blossoms, and was making her gray kitten, which was as intelligent and as well trained as a dog, jump into the air to catch them as she tossed them up. I sat down on the grass outside and watched her silently.

"Oh, you sober old Helen," she said, "you'll be an owl for a thousand years after you die! Why can't you caper a little? You don't know how nice it is."

Just then George came slowly walking down the garden path, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent forward, and his eyes fixed on the ground.

He did not see us. Annie exclaimed,—

"There's Cousin George, too! Look at him! Wouldn't you think he had just heard he was to be executed at twelve to-day! I don't see what ails everybody."

"George, George," she called, "come here. For how many years are you sentenced, dear, and how could you have been so silly as to be found out?" And then she burst into a peal of the most delicious laughter at his bewildered look.

"I don't know, darling, for how many years I am sentenced. We none of us know," he said, in a tone which was sadder than he meant it should be, and sobered her loving heart instantly. She sprang to her feet, and threw both her arms around his right arm, a pretty trick she had kept from her babyhood, and said,—

"Oh you dear, good darling, does anything really trouble you? How heartless I am. But you don't know how it feels to have been so awfully ill, and then to get well again. It makes one feel all body and no soul; but I have soul enough to love you all dearly, you know I have; and I won't have you troubled; tell me what it is this minute;" and she looked at him with tears in her eyes.

One wonders often if there be any limit to human endurance. If there be, who can say he has reached it? Each year we find that the thing which we thought had taken our last strength, has left us with strength enough to bear a harder thing. It seemed so with such scenes as this, in those sunny spring days when Annie Ware first went out into life again. Each day I said, "There can never be another moment quite so hard to meet as this!" and the next day there came a moment which made me forget the one which had gone before.

It was an ill fortune which just at this time made it imperatively necessary for George to go to the West for three months. He had no choice. His mother's whole property was at stake. No one but he could save it; it was not certain that he could. His last words to me were,—

"I trust more in you, Helen, than in any other human being. Keep my name constantly in her thought; write me everything which you would tell me if I were here."

It had become necessary now to tell the sad story of the result of Annie's illness to all those friends who would be likely to speak to her of her marriage. The whole town knew what shadow rested on our hearts; and yet, as week after week went by, and the gay, sweet, winning, beautiful girl moved about among people again in her old way, people began to say more and more that it was, after all, very foolish for Annie Ware's friends to be so distressed about her; stranger things had happened; she was evidently a perfectly well woman; and as for the marriage, they had never liked the match—George Ware was too old and too grave for her; and, besides, he was her second cousin.

Oh, the torture of the "ante-mortems" of beloved ones, at which we are all forced to assist!

Yet it could not be wondered at, that in this case the whole heart of the community was alive with interest and speculation.

Annie Ware's sweet face had been known and loved in every house in our village. Her father was the richest, most influential man in the county, and the most benevolent. Many a man and woman had kissed Henry Ware's baby in her little wagon, for the sake of Henry Ware's good deeds to them or theirs. And while Mrs. Ware had always repelled persons by her haughty reticence, Annie, from the first day she could speak until now, had won all hearts by her sunny, open, sympathizing nature. No wonder that now, when they saw her again fresh, glad, beautiful, and looking stronger and in better health than she had ever done, they said that we were wrong, that Annie and Nature were right, and that all would be well!

This spring there came to our town a family of wealth and position who had for many years lived in Europe, and who had now returned to make America their home. They had taken a furnished house for a year, to make trial of our air, and also, perhaps, of the society, although rumor, with the usual jealousy, said that the Neals did not desire any intimacy with their neighbors. The grounds of the house which they had hired joined my uncle's, and my Aunt Ann, usually averse to making new acquaintances, had called upon them at once, and had welcomed them most warmly to her house. The family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Neal and two sons, Arthur and Edward. They were people of culture, and of wide experience; but they were not of fine organization nor of the highest breeding; and it will ever remain a mystery to me that there should have seemed to be, from the outset, an especial bond of intimacy between them and my uncle and aunt. I think it was partly the sense of relief with which they welcomed a new interest—a little break in the monotony of anxiety which had been for so many months corroding their very lives.

Almost before I knew that the Neals were accepted as familiar friends, I was startled one morning, while we were at breakfast, by the appearance of Annie on her pony, looking in at our dining-room window. She had a pretty way of riding up noiselessly on the green grass, and making her pony, which was tame as a Newfoundland dog, mount the stone steps, and tap with his nose on the panes of the long glass door till we opened it.

I never saw her so angelically beautiful as she was this morning. Her cheeks were flushed and her dark blue eyes sparkled like gems in the sun. Presently she said, hesitating a little,—

"Edward Neal is at the gate; may I bring him in? I told him he might come, but he said it was too like burglary;" and she cantered off again without waiting to hear my mother's permission.

All that morning Annie Ware and Edward Neal sat with me on our piazza. I looked and listened and watched like one in a dream, or under a spell. I foresaw, I foreknew what was to come; with the subtle insight of love, I saw all.

Never had I seen Annie so stirred into joyousness by George's presence as she seemed to be by this boy's. The two together overflowed in a sparkling current of gayety, which was irresistible. They seemed two divine children sent out on a mission to set the world at play. What Edward Neal's more sensuous and material nature lacked, was supplied by the finer, subtler quality of Annie's. From that first day I could never disguise from myself that they seemed, so far as mere physical life goes, the absolute counterparts of each other.

I need not dwell on this part of my story. When young hearts are drawing together, summer days speed on very swiftly. George Ware, alas! was kept at the West week after week, until it came to be month after month. My uncle and aunt seemed deliberately to shut their eyes to the drift of events. I think they were so thankful to watch Annie's bounding health and happiness, to hear glad voices and merry laughs echoing all day in their house, that they could not allow themselves to ask whether a new kernel of bitterness, of danger, lay at the core of all this fair seeming. As for the children, they did not know that they were loving each other as man and woman. Edward Neal was only twenty-one, Annie but nineteen, and both were singularly young and innocent of soul.

And so it came to be once more the early autumn; the maple leaves were beginning to be red, and my chrysanthemums had again set their tiny round disks of buds. Edward, and Annie had said no word of love to each other, but the whole town looked on them as lovers, and people began to reply impatiently and incredulously to our assurances that no engagement existed.

Early in October George came home, very unexpectedly, taking even his mother by surprise. He told me afterwards that he came at last as one warned of God. A presentiment of evil, against which he had struggled for weeks, finally so overwhelmed him that he set off for home without half an hour's delay. I found him, on the night after his arrival, sitting in his old place in the big arm-chair at the head of Annie's lounge; she still clung to some of her old invalid ways, and spent many evenings curled up like a half-shut pink rose on the green damask cushions. He looked worn and thin, but glad and eager, and was giving a lively account of his Western experiences when the library door opened, and coming in unannounced, with the freedom of one at home, Edward Neal entered.

"O Edward, here is Cousin George," exclaimed Annie, while a wave of rosy color spread over her face, and half rising, she took George's hand in hers as she leaned towards Edward.

"Oh, I'm so glad to see you, Mr. Ware," said Edward, with that indefinable tone of gentle respect which marks a very young man's recognition of one much older, whom he has been led to admire. "Annie has been talking to me about you all summer. I feel as if I knew you almost as well as she does. I'm heartily glad to see you."

A man of finer grain than Edward Neal would have known the whole truth in that first second, by the blank stern look which spread like a cloud over George Ware's face; but the open-hearted fellow only thought that he had perhaps seemed too familiar and went on,—

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Ware. It must appear strange to you that I took the liberty of being so glad; but you don't know how kindly I have been allowed to feel that your friends here would permit me to call all their friends mine," and he glanced lovingly and confidently at my aunt and uncle, who answered by such smiles as they rarely gave. Oh, no wonder they loved this genial, frank sunny boy, who had brought such light into their life.

In a moment George was his courteous self again, and began to express his pleasure at meeting Mr. Neal, but Annie interrupted him.

"Oh, now don't be tiresome; of course you are to be just as good friends with Edward as you are with me: sit down, Edward. He is telling us the most delicious stories. He is the dearest Cousin George in the world," she added, stroking his hand which she still kept in hers.

It gave Edward no more surprise to see her do this than it would have done to see her sit in her father's lap. Even I felt with a sudden pang that George Ware seemed at that moment to belong to another generation than Edward and Annie.

Edward seated himself on a low cricket at the foot of the lounge, and, looking up in George's face, said most winningly,—

"Please go on, Mr. Ware." Then he turned one full, sweet look of greeting and welcome upon Annie, who beamed back upon him with such a diffused smile as only the rarest faces have. Annie's smile was one of her greatest charms. It changed her whole face; the lips made but a small part of it; no mortal ever saw it without smiling in answer.

It was beyond George Ware's power long to endure this. Probably his instinct felt in both Edward's atmosphere and Annie's more than we did. He rose very soon and said to me, "If you are going home to-night, Helen, will you let me walk up with you? I have business in that part of the town; but I must go now. Perhaps that will hurry you too much?" he added, with a tone which was almost imploring.

I was only too glad to go. Our leave-taking was very short. A shade of indefinable trouble clouded every face but Edward's and Annie's.

George did not speak until we had left the house. Then he stopped short, took both my hands in his, with a grasp that both hurt and frightened me, and exclaimed,—

"How dared you keep this from me! How dared you!"

"O George," I said, "there was nothing to tell."

"Nothing to tell!" and his voice grew hoarse and loud. "Nothing to tell! Do you mean to say that you don't know, have not known that Annie loves that boy, that puppy?"

I trembled from head to foot. I could not speak. He went on:—

"And I trusted you so; O Helen, I can never forgive you."

I murmured, miserably, for I felt myself in that moment really guilty,—

"What makes you think she loves him?"

"You cannot deceive me, Helen," he replied. "Do not torture me and yourself by trying. Tell me now, how long this 'Edward' has been sitting by her lounge. Tell me all."

Then I told him all. It was not much. He had seen more that evening, and so had I, than had ever existed before. His presence had been the one element which had suddenly defined that which before had been hardly recognized.

He was very quiet after the first moment of bitterness, and asked me to forgive his impatient words. When he left me he said,—

"I cannot see clearly what I ought to do. Annie's happiness is my only aim. If this boy can create it, and I cannot—but he cannot: she was as utterly mine as it is possible for a woman to be. You none of you knew how utterly! Oh, my God, what shall I do!" and he walked away feebly and slowly like an old man of seventy.

The next day Aunt Ann sent for me to come to her. I found her in great distress. George had returned to the house after leaving me, and had had almost a stormy interview with my uncle. He insisted upon asking Annie at once to be his wife; making no reference to the past, but appearing at once as her suitor. My uncle could not forbid it, for he recognized George's right, and he sympathized in his suffering. But his terror was insupportable at the thought of having Annie agitated, and of the possible results which might follow. He implored George to wait at least a few weeks.

"What! and see that young lover at my wife's feet every night!" said George, fiercely. "No! I will risk all, lose all, if need be. I have been held back long enough," and he had gone directly from my uncle's room to Annie herself.

In a short time Annie had come to her mother in a perfect passion of weeping, and told her that Cousin George had asked her to be his wife; and that she had never dreamed of such a thing; and she thought he was very unkind to be so angry with her; how could she have supposed he cared for her in that way, when he had been like her elder brother all his life.

"Why, he seems almost as old as papa," said poor Annie, sobbing and crying, "and he ought to have known that I should not kiss him and put my arms around him if—if"—she could not explain; but she knew!

Annie had gone to her own room, ill. My aunt and I sat together in the library silently crying; we were wretched. "Oh, if George would only have waited," said Aunt Ann.

"I think it would have made no difference, aunty," said I.

"No, I am afraid not," replied she, and each knew that the other was thinking of Edward Neal.

George Ware left town the next day. He sent me a short note. He could not see any one, he said, and begged me to give a farewell kiss for him to "the sweet mother of my Annie. For mine she is, and will be in heaven, though she will be the wife of Edward Neal on earth."

When I next saw our Annie she was Edward Neal's promised bride. A severe fit of illness, the result of all these excitements, confined me to my room for three weeks after George's departure; and I knew only from Aunt Ann's lips the events which had followed upon it.

George Ware's presence on that first evening had brought revelation to Edward Neal as well as to all the other members of that circle. That very night he had told his parents that Annie would be his wife.

The next night, while poor George was swiftly borne away, Edward was sitting in my uncle's library, listening with a blanched cheek to the story of Annie's old engagement. My uncle's sense of honor would not let him withhold anything from the man seeking her for his wife. The pain soon passed by, when he was told that she had that very day refused her cousin, and betrayed almost resentment at his offer. Edward Neal had not a sufficiently subtle nature, nor acquaintance enough with psychological phenomena to be disturbed by any fears for the future. He dismissed it all as an inexplicable result of the disease, but a fixed fact, and a great and blessed fortune for him. My uncle, however, was less easily assured. He insisted upon delay, and upon consulting the same physicians who had studied Annie's case before. They all agreed that she was now a perfectly healthy and strong woman, and that to persist in any farther recognition of the old bond, after she had so intelligently and emphatically repudiated all thought of such a relation to her cousin, was absurd. Dr. Fearing alone was in doubt, He said little; but he shook his head and clasped his hands tight, and implored that at least the marriage should be deferred for a year.

Annie herself, however, refused to consent to this: of course no satisfactory reason could be alleged for any such delay; and she said as frankly as a little child, "Edward and I have loved each other almost from the very first; there is nothing for either of us to do in life but to make each other happy; and we shall not leave papa and mamma: so why should we wait?"

They were not married, however, until spring. The whole town stood by in speechless joy and delight when those two beautiful young beings came out from the village church man and wife. It was a scene never to be forgotten. The peculiar atmosphere of almost playful joyousness which they created whenever they appeared together was something which could not be described, but which diffused itself like sunlight.

We all tried resolutely to dismiss memory and misgiving from our hearts. They seemed disloyalty and sin. George Ware was in India. George Ware's mother was dead. The cottage among the pines was sold to strangers, and the glistening brown paths under the trees were neglected and unused.

Edward and Annie led the same gay child-like lives after their marriage that they had led before: they looked even younger and gayer and sunnier. When they dashed cantering through the river meadows, she with rosy cheeks and pale brown curls flying in the wind, and he with close crisp black hair, and the rich, dark, glowing skin of a Spaniard, the farming men turned and rested on their tools, and gazed till they were out of sight. Sometimes I asked myself wonderingly, "Are they ever still, and tender, and silent?" "Is this perpetual overflow the whole of love?" But it seemed treason to doubt in the presence of such merry gladness as shone in Annie's face, and in her husband's too. It was simply the incarnate triumph and joy of young life.

The summer went by; the chrysanthemums bloomed out white and full in my garden; the frosts came, and then the winter, and then Annie told me one day that before winter came again she would be a mother. She was a little sobered as she saw the intense look on my face.

"Why, darling, aren't you glad? I thought you would be almost as glad as I am myself?" Annie sometimes misunderstood me now.

"Glad! O Annie," was all I could say.

From that day I had but one thought, Annie's baby. Together we wrought all dainty marvels for its ward-robe; together we planned all possible events in its life: from the outset I felt as much motherhood to the precious little unseen one as Annie did. She used to say to me, often,—

"Darling, it will be half my baby, and half yours."

Annie was absolutely and gloriously well through the whole of those mysterious first months of maternity which are to so many women exhausting and painful. Every nerve of her body seemed strung and attuned to normal and perfect harmony. She was more beautiful than ever, stronger than ever, and so glad that she smiled perpetually without knowing it. For the first time since the old days, dear Dr. Fearing's face lost the anxious look with which his eyes always rested upon her. He was more at ease about her now.

Before light one Sunday morning in December, a messenger rang furiously at our bell. We had been looking for such tidings and were not alarmed. It was a fearful storm; wind and sleet and rain and darkness had attended the coming of Annie's little "Sunday child" into its human life.

"A boy—and Miss Annie's all right," old Caesar said, with a voice almost as hoarse as the storm outside; and he was gone before we could ask a question farther.

In less than an hour I stood on the threshold of Annie's room. But I did not see her until noon. Then, as I crept softly into the dimly-lighted chamber, the whole scene so recalled her illness of two years before that my heart stood still with sudden horror, in spite of all my joy. Now, as then, I knelt silently at her bedside, and saw the sweet face lying white and still on the pillow.

She turned, and seeing me, smiled faintly, but did not speak.

At her first glance, a speechless terror seized me. This was my Annie! The woman who for two years had been smiling with my Annie's face had not been she! The room grew dark. I do not know what supernatural power came to my aid that I did not faint and fall.

Annie drew back the bed-clothes with a slow, feeble motion of her right hand, and pointed to the tiny little head nestled in her bosom. She smiled again, looked at me gently and steadily for a second, and then shut her eyes. Presently I saw that she was asleep; I stole into the next room and sat down with my face buried in my hands.

In a moment a light step aroused me. Aunt Ann stood before me, her pale face all aglow with delight.

"O Helen my darling! She is so well. Thank God! thank God!" and she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.

I felt like one turned to stone. Was I mad, or were they?

What had I seen in that one steady look of Annie's eyes? Was she really well? I felt as if she had already died!

Agonizingly I waited to see Dr. Fearing's face. He came in before tea, saw Annie for a few minutes, and came down-stairs rubbing his hands and singing in a low tone.

"I never saw anything like that child's beautiful elasticity in my life," he said. "We shall have her dancing down-stairs in a month."

The cloud was utterly lifted from all hearts except mine. My aunt and uncle looked at each other with swimming eyes. Edward tried to laugh and look gay, but broke down utterly, and took refuge in the library, where I found him lying on the floor, with his face buried in Annie's lounge.

I went home stupefied, bewildered. I could not sleep. A terror-stricken instinct told me that all was not right. But how should I know more than physician, mother, husband?

For ten days I saw my Annie every day for an hour. Her sweet, strange, gentle, steady look into my eyes when we first met always paralyzed me with fear, and yet I could not have told why. There was a fathomless serenity in her face which seemed to me super-human. She said very little. The doctor had forbidden her to talk. She slept the greater part of the time, but never allowed the baby to be moved from her arms while she was awake.

There was a divine ecstasy in her expression as she looked down into the little face; it never seemed like human motherhood.

One day Edward came to me and said,—

"Do you think Annie is so well as they say? I suppose they must know; but she looks to me as if she had died already, and it were only her glorified angel-body that lies in that bed?"

I could not speak to him. I knew then that he had seen the same thing that I had seen: if his strong, rather obtuse material nature had recognized it, what could so blind her mother and father and the doctor? I burst into tears and left him.

At the end of a week I saw a cloud on Dr. Fearing's face. As he left Annie's room one morning, he stopped me and said abruptly,—

"What does Annie talk about?"

"She hardly speaks at all," I said.

"Ah," he said. "Well, I have ordered her not to talk. But does she ask any questions?" he continued.

"No," I said; "not of me. She has not asked one."

I saw then that the same vague fear which was filling my heart was taking shape in his.

From that moment, he watched her hourly, with an anxiety which soon betrayed itself to my aunt.

"William, why does not Annie get stronger?" she said suddenly to him one day.

"I do not know why," he answered, with a solemn sadness and emphasis in his tone which was, as I think, he intended it to be, a partial revelation to her, and a warning. Aunt Ann staggered to a chair and looked at him without a word. He answered her look by one equally agonized and silent, and left the room.

The baby was now two weeks old. Annie was no stronger than on the day of his birth. She lay day and night in a tranquil state, smiling with inexpressible sweetness when she was spoken to, rarely speaking of her own accord, doing with gentle docility all she was told to do, but looking more and more like a transfigured saint. All the arch, joyous, playful look was gone; there was no added age in the look which had taken its place; neither any sorrow; but something ineffably solemn, rapt, removed from earth. Sometimes, when Edward came to her bedside, a great wave of pitying tenderness would sweep over her face, giving it such a heavenly look that he would fall on his knees.

"O Helen," he said once, after such a moment as this, "I shall go mad if Annie does not get well. I do not dare to kiss even her hand. I feel as if she never had been mine."

At last the day and the hour and the moment came which I had known would come. Annie spoke to me in a very gentle voice, and said,—

"Helen, darling, you know I am going to die?"

"Yes dear, I think so," I said, in as quiet a voice as hers.

"You know it is better that I should, darling?" she said with a trembling voice.

"Yes, dear, I know it," I replied.

She drew a long sigh of relief. "I am so glad, darling; I thought you knew it, but I could not be sure. I think no one else understands. I hope dear mamma will never suspect. You will not let her, if you can help it, the dear doctor will not tell her; he knows, though. Darling, I want you to have my baby. I think Edward will be willing. He is so young, he will be happy again before long; he will not miss him. You know we have always said it was partly your baby. Look at his eyes now, Helen," she said, turning the little face towards me, and into a full light.

I started. I had never till that moment seen in them a subtle resemblance to the eyes of George Ware. We had said that the baby had his mother's eyes—so he had; but there had always been a likeness between Annie's eyes and George's though hers were light-blue, and his of a blue so dark that it was often believed to be black. All the Wares had a very peculiar luminousness of the eye; it was so marked a family trait that it had passed into almost proverbial mention, in connection with the distinguished beauty of the family. "The Ware eye" was always recognizable, no matter what color it had taken from the admixture of other blood.

At that moment I saw, and I knew that Annie had seen, that the baby's eyes were not so much like her own as like the deeper, sadder, darker eyes of her cousin—brave, hopeless, dear George, who was toiling under the sun of India, making a fortune for he knew not whom.

We neither of us spoke; presently the little unconscious eyes closed in sweet sleep, and Annie went on, holding him close to her heart.

"You see, dear, poor mamma will not be able to bear seeing him after I die. Common mothers would love him for my sake. But mamma is not like other women. She will come very soon where I am, poor mamma; and then you will have to take papa home to your house, and papa will have comfort in little Henry. But he must be your baby, Helen. I shall speak to Edward about it soon."

She was not strong enough to talk long. She shed no tears, however, and looked as calm as if she were telling me of pleasant plans for a coming earthly summer. I also was perfectly calm, and felt strangely free from sorrow. Her absolute spirituality bore me up. It was as if I spoke with her in heaven, thousands of centuries after all human perplexities had passed away.

After this day she grew rapidly weaker. She had no pain. There was not a single physical symptom in her case which the science of medicine could name or meet. There was literally nothing to be done for her. Neither tonic nor stimulant produced the least effect. She was noiselessly sinking out of life, as very old people sometimes die, without a single jar, or shock, or struggle. Her beautiful serenity and entire freedom from suffering blinded Aunt Ann's eyes to the fact that she was dying. This was a great mercy, and we were all careful not by a word or look to rouse her to the truth. To all her mother's inquiries Annie invariably replied, "Better, dear mamma, better, only very weak," and Aunt Ann believed, until the very last, that the spring would make her well again.

Edward Neal's face during these weeks was like the face of a man lost in a trackless desert, seeking vainly for some sign of road to save his life. Sickness and death were as foreign to the young, vital, irrepressible currents of his life, as if he had been a bird or an antelope. But it was not now with him the mere bewildered grief of a sensuous animal nature, such as I should have anticipated that his grief would be. He dimly felt the truth, and was constantly terrified by it. He came into Annie's presence more and more reverently each day. He gazed speechlessly into her eyes, which rested on him always with angelic compassion and tenderness, but with no more look of human wifely thought than if he and she were kneeling side by side before God's white throne. Sometimes he dared not touch even so much as the hand on which his own wedding-ring rested. Sometimes he would kneel by the bedside and bury his face and weep like a little child. Then he would throw himself on his horse and gallop away and not come home until twilight, when he was always found on Annie's lounge in the library. One night when I went to him there he said, in a tone so solemn that the voice did not sound like his,—

"Helen, there is something I do not understand about Annie. Do people always seem so when they are going to die? I do not dare to ask her if she loves me. I feel just as much awe of her as if she had been in heaven. It seems sometimes as if I must be going mad, for I do not feel in the least as if she had ever been my wife."

"She never has, poor boy," I thought, but I only stroked his hair and said nothing; wondering in my heart at the certainty with which in all natures love knows how to define, conquer, reclaim his own.

The day before Annie died she asked for her jewel-case, and spent several hours in looking over its contents and telling me to whom they should be given. I observed that she seemed to be searching uneasily for something she could not find.

"What is it, dear?" I said. She hesitated for a secondhand then replied,—

"Only a little ring I had when I was a girl."

"When you were a girl, my darling!" I exclaimed. She smiled gently and said,—

"I feel like an old woman now. Oh, here it is," she added, and held it out to me to open for her the tiny padlock-shaped locket which hung from it. It had become so tightly fastened together that it was with great difficulty I could open it. When I did so, I saw lying in the hollow a little ring of black hair, and I remembered that Annie had worn the ring when she was twelve years old.

She asked me to cut a few of the silky hairs from the baby's head, and then one little curl from her own, and laying them with the other, she shut the locket and asked for a piece of paper and pencil. She wrote one word with great difficulty, folded the ring in the paper, wrote another word on the outside, and laid it in a corner of the jewel-case. Then she sank back on the pillows, and slipping her left hand under her cheek said she was very tired, and almost instantly fell into a gentle sleep. She did not wake until twilight. I was to sleep on the lounge in her room that night, and when she woke I was preparing it.

"Darling," she said, "could you sleep as well in my big chair, which can be tipped back?"

"Certainly, sweet," I said; "but why?"

"Because that can be drawn up so much nearer me; it will be like sleeping together."

At nine o'clock the nurse brought the baby in and laid him in Annie's bosom, sound asleep. Annie would not let him lie anywhere else, and was so grieved at any remonstrance, that the doctor said she must be indulged in the desire. When she was awake and was not speaking to us, her eyes never left the baby's face.

She turned over, with her face to the chair in which I lay, and reached out her left hand towards me. I took it in mine, and so, with our hands clasped above the little sleeping baby, we said "good-night" to each other.

"I feel much better to-night than I have for some days, dear Helen," she said; "I should not wonder if we all three slept until morning."

Very soon I saw that she was asleep. I watched her face for a long time; it was perfectly colorless and very thin, and yet there was not a look of illness on it. The ineffable serenity, the holy peace, made it look like the face of one who had been transfigured, translated; who had not known and who never could know any death. I cannot account for the sweet calm which I felt through all these weeks. I shed no tears; I did not seem even to sorrow. I accepted all, as Annie herself accepted it, without wonder, without murmur. During the long hours of this last night I lived over every hour of her precious, beautiful life, as I had known and shared it, until the whole seemed to me one fragrant and perfect flower, ready to be gathered and worn in the bosom of angels. At last I fell asleep.

I was wakened by a low murmur from the baby, who stirred uneasily. Annie's hand was still locked in mine; as I sought to disengage it cautiously, I felt, with a sudden horror, that the fingers were lifeless. I sprang to my feet and bent over her; she did not breathe. Out of that sweet sleep her body had passed into another which would know no waking, and her soul had awakened free. Slowly I withdrew the little sleeping baby from her arms and carried it to the nurse. Then I went to Dr. Fearing's room; he had slept in the house for a week; I found him dressed, but asleep on a lounge. He had lain in this way, he told me, for four nights, expecting that each would be the last. When I touched him on the shoulder he opened his eyes, without surprise or alarm, and said,—

"Did she wake?"

"No," I replied, and that was all.

The day was just breaking: as the dark gray and red tints cleared and rolled away, and left a pale yellow sky, the morning star, which I could see from Annie's bedside, faded and melted in the pure ether. Even while I was looking at it it vanished, and I thought that, like it, Annie's bright soul, disappearing from my sight, had blended in Eternal Day.

* * * * *

This was four years ago. My Aunt Ann died, as Annie had said she would, in a very few months afterward. My uncle came, a broken and trembling man, to live with us, and Edward Neal gladly gave his little son into my hands, as Annie had desired. He went abroad immediately, finding it utterly impossible to bear the sight of the scenes of his lost happiness. He came back in two years, bringing a bright young wife with him, a sunny-haired English girl, who, he said, was so marvelously like Annie. She is like the Annie whom he knew!

Every day their baby boy is brought to our house to see his brother; but I think two children of one name never before looked so unlike.

My little Henry is the centre of his grandfather's life and of mine. He is a pensive child, and has never been strong; but his beauty and sweetness are such that we often tremble when we look in his face and remember Annie.

George Ware is still in India. Every ship brings brave sweet letters, and gifts for the baby. I sent him the little paper which I found in the corner of Annie's jewel-case, bearing his name. I knew that it was for him when I saw her feeble hands laying the baby's hair and hers together in the locket.

In November Annie's grave is snowy with white chrysanthemums. She loved them better than any other flowers, and I have made the little hillock almost into a thicket of them.

In George Ware's last letter he wrote:—

"When the baby is ten years old I shall come home. He will not need me till then; till then, he is better in your hands alone; after that I can help you."



The One-Legged Dancers.



Very early one morning in March, ten years ago, I was sitting alone on one of the crumbling ledges of the Coliseum: larks were singing above my head; wall-flowers were waving at my feet; a procession of chanting monks was walking slowly around the great cross in the arena below. I was on the highest tier, and their voices reached me only as an indistinct wail, like the notes of a distant Aeolian harp; but the joyous sun and sky and songs, were darkened and dulled by their presence. A strange sadness oppressed me, and I sank into a deep reverie. I do not know how long I had been sitting there, when I was suddenly roused by a cry of pain, or terror, and the noise of falling stones. I sprang to my feet and, looking over, saw a young and beautiful woman lying fearfully near the edge of one of the most insecure of the projecting ledges on the tier below me—the very one from which I had myself nearly fallen, only a few days before, in stretching over after some asphodels which were beyond my reach.

I ran down as fast as possible, but when I reached the spot she had fainted, and was utterly unconscious. She was alone; I could see no other human being in the Coliseum. The chanting monks had gone; even the beggars had not yet come. I tried in vain to rouse her. She had fallen so that the hot sun was beating full on her face. I dared not leave her there, for her first unconscious movement might be such that she would fall over the edge. But I saw that she must have shade and water, or die. Every instant she grew whiter and her lips looked more rigid. I shouted aloud, and only the echoes answered me, as if in mockery. A little lark suddenly flew out from a tuft of yellow wall-flower close by, and burst into a swift carol of delight as he soared away. At last, with great efforts, I succeeded in dragging her, by her feet—for I dared not venture out so far as the spot on which her head lay—to a safer place, and into the partial shade of a low bush. As I did this, one of her delicate hands was scratched and torn on the rough stones, and drops of blood came to the surface. In the other hand were crushed a few spikes of asphodel, the very flowers, no doubt, which had lured me so near the same dangerous brink. It seemed impossible to go away and leave her, but it was cruel to delay. My feet felt like lead as I ran along those dark galleries and down the stone flights of giddy stairs. Just in the entrance stood one of those pertinacious sellers of old coins and bits of marble. I threw down a piece of silver on his little stand, seized a small tin basin in which he had his choicest coins, emptied them on the ground, and saying, in my poor Italian, "Lady—ill—water," I had filled the basin at the old stone fountain near by, and was half way up the first flight of stairs again, before he knew what had happened.

When I reached the place where I had left the beautiful stranger she was not there. Unutterable horror seized me. Had I, after all, left her too near that crumbling edge? I groaned aloud and turned to run down. A feeble voice stopped me—a whisper rather than a voice, for there was hardly strength to speak,—

"Who is there?"

"Oh, thank God," I exclaimed, "you are not dead!" and I sprang to the next of the cross corridors, from which the sound had come.

She was there, sitting up, leaning against the wall. She looked almost more terrified than relieved when she saw me. I bathed her face and hands in the water, and told her how I had found her insensible, and had drawn her away from the outer edge before I had gone for the water. She did not speak for some moments, but looked at me earnestly and steadily, with tears standing in her large blue eyes.

Then she said, "I did not know that any one but myself ever came to the Coliseum so early. I thought I should die here alone; and Robert was not willing I should come."

"I owe you my life," she added, bursting into hysterical crying.

Then in a few moments she half laughed, as if at some droll thought, and said, "But how could you drag me? You are not nearly so big as I am. The angels must have helped you;" and holding up the poor crushed asphodels, she went on: "As soon as I came to myself, I saw the asphodels in my hand, and I said, 'Asphodel for burial;' and tried to throw them away, so that if Robert came he would not find me dead with them in my hand, for only yesterday he said to me, 'Please never pick an asphodel—I can't bear to see you touch one.'"

Slowly I soothed her and she recovered her color and strength. The owner of the basin, followed by a half-dozen chattering vetturini, had climbed up to us, but we had peremptorily sent them all away. It was evident that she was not seriously hurt. The terror, rather than the fall, had caused her fainting. It was probably a sudden dizziness which had come as she drew back and turned after picking the flowers. Had she fallen in the act of picking them she must have been dashed to the ground below. At the end of an hour she was so nearly well, that she walked slowly down the long stairs, leaning on my arm, and taking frequent rests by the way. I was about to beckon to one of the vetturini, when she said, "Oh no! my own carriage is near here, up by the gate of the Palace of the Caesars. I rambled on, without thinking at first of coming to the Coliseum: it will do me good to walk back; every moment of the air makes me feel better."

So we went slowly on, up the solemn hill, arm in arm like friends, sitting down now and then on old fallen columns to rest, and looking back at the silent, majestic ruins, which were brightened almost into a look of life under the vivid sun. My companion spoke little; the reaction after her fearful shock had set in; but every few moments her beautiful eyes would fill with tears as she looked in my face and pressed my arm. I left her at her apartment on the Via Felice; my own was a mile farther on, in the Piazza del Popolo, and I would not let her drive so far.

"It grieves me not to go with you to your door," she said, as she bade me good-bye, "but I shall come and see you to-morrow and bring my husband."

"No, you must not," I replied. "To-morrow you will be wise enough—or, if you are not wise enough, you will be kind enough to me because I ask it—to lie in bed all day, and I shall come very early in the morning to see how you are."

She turned suddenly on the carriage-steps, and, leaning both her hands on my knees, exclaimed, in a voice full of emotion.

"Will you let me kiss you? Not even my mother gave me what you have given. For you have given me back life, when it was too infinitely precious to lose. Surely you will not think me presuming?" and her cheek flushed a little.

"Presuming! my dear child, I loved you the first moment I saw you lying there on the stones; and I am almost old enough to be your mother, too," I replied, and I kissed her sweet face warmly.

This was the beginning of my acquaintance and friendship with Dora Maynard.

At eleven o'clock the next morning I went to see her. I was shown into a room, whose whole air was so unlike that of a Roman apartment, that I could scarcely believe I had not been transported to English or American soil. In spite of its elegance, the room was as home-like and cozy as if it nestled in the Berkshire hills or stood on Worcestershire meadows. The windows were heavily curtained, and the furniture covered with gay chintz of a white ground, with moss-rose buds thickly scattered over it between broad stripes of rose-pink. The same chintz was fluted all around the cornice of the room, making the walls look less high and stately; the doorways, also, were curtained with it. Great wreaths and nodding masses of pampas grass were above the doors; a white heron and a rose-colored spoonbill stood together on a large bracket in one corner, and a huge gray owl was perched on what looked like a simple old apple-tree bough, over an inlaid writing-table which stood at an odd slant near one of the windows. Books were everywhere—in low swinging shelves, suspended by large green cords with heavy tassels; on low bracket shelves, in unexpected places, with deep green fringes or flutings of the chintz; in piles on Moorish stools or old Venice chests. Every corner looked as if somebody made it a special haunt and had just gone out. On a round mosaic table stood an exqusite black-and-gilt Etruscan patera filled with white anemones; on another table near by stood a silver one filled with the same flowers, pink and yellow. Each was circled round the edge with fringing masses of maiden-hair fern. Every lounge and chair had a low, broad foot-stool before it, ruffled with the chintz; and in one corner of the room were a square pink and white and green Moorish rug, with ten or a dozen chintz-covered pillows, piled up in a sort of chair-shaped bed upon it, and a fantastic ebony box standing near, the lid thrown back, and battledoors and shuttlecocks, and many other gay-colored games, tossed in confusion. The walls were literally full of exquisite pictures; no very large or rare ones, all good for every-day living; some fine old etchings, exquisite water-colors, a swarthy Campagna herds-boy with a peacock feather and a scarlet ribbon in his black hat, and for a companion-picture, the herds-boy of the mountains, fair, rosy, standing out on a opaline snow-peak, with a glistening Edelweiss in his hand; opposite these a large picture of Haag's, a camel in the desert, the Arab wife and baby in a fluttering mass of basket and fringe and shawl and scarf, on his back; the Arab father walking a few steps in advance, playing on musical pipes, his tasseled robe blowing back in the wind; on one side of this a Venice front, and on another a crag of Norway pines; here and there, small leaves of photographs from original drawings by the old masters, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, and Luini; and everywhere, in all possible and impossible places, flowers and vines. I never saw walls so decorated. Yellow wall-flowers waved above the picture of the Norway pines; great scarlet thistles branched out each side of the Venetian palace; cool maiden-hair ferns seemed to be growing all around the glowing crimson and yellow picture of the Arabs in the Desert. Afterward I learned the secret of this beautiful effect; large, flat, wide-mouthed bottles, filled with water, were hung on the backs of the picture frames, and in these the vines and flowers were growing; only a worshipper of flowers would have devised this simple method of at once enshrining them, and adorning the pictures.

In one of the windows stood a superbly-carved gilt table, oblong, and with curiously-twisted legs which bent inward and met a small central shelf half-way between the top and the floor, then spread out again into four strange claw-like vases, which bore each two golden lilies standing upright. On this stood the most singular piece of wood-carving I ever saw. It was of very light wood, almost yellow in tint; it looked like rough vine trellises with vines clambering over them; its base was surrounded by a thick bed of purple anemones; the smaller shelf below was also filled with purple anemones, and each of the golden lilies held all the purple anemones it could—not a shade of any other color but the purple and gold—and rising above them the odd vine trellises in the pale yellow wood. As I stood looking at this in mute wonder and delight, but sorely perplexed to make out the design of the carving, I heard a step behind me. I turned and saw, not my new friend, as I had expected, but her husband. I thought, in that first instant, I had never seen a manlier face and form, and I think so to-day. Robert Maynard was not tall; he was not handsome; but he had a lithe figure, square-shouldered, straight, strong, vitalized to the last fibre with the swift currents of absolutely healthy blood, and the still swifter currents of a passionate and pure manhood. His eyes were blue, his hair and full beard of the bright-brown yellow which we call, rightly or wrongly, Saxon. He came very quickly toward me with both hands outstretched and began to speak. "My dear madam," he said, but his voice broke, and with a sudden, uncontrollable impulse, he turned his back full upon me for a second, and passed his right hand over his eyes. The next instant he recovered himself and went on.

"I do not believe you will wonder that I can't speak, and I do not believe you will ever wonder that I do not thank you—I never shall," and he raised both my hands to his lips.

"Dora is in bed as you bade her to be," he continued. "She is well, but very weak. She wants to see you immediately, and she has forbidden me to come back to her room without you. I think, perhaps," he added hesitatingly, "she is not quite calm enough to talk long. Forgive me for saying it. I know you love her already."

"Indeed I do," replied I, "as if I had known her all my life. I will not stay long;" and I followed him through a small dining-room, also gay with flowers and vines, to a little room which had one side almost wholly of glass and opened on a loggia full of orange-trees and oleanders, geraniums and roses. I will not describe Dora Maynard's bed-room. It was the dainty room of a dainty woman, but spiritualized and individualized and made wonderful, just as her sitting-room was, by a creative touch and a magnetic presence such as few women possess. I believe that she could not be for twenty-four hours in the barrenest and ugliest room possible, without contriving to diffuse a certain enchantment through all its emptiness.

She looked far more beautiful this morning than she had looked the day before. I never forgot the picture of her face as I saw it then, lying on the white pillow and turned toward the door, with the eager expression which her waiting for me had given it. Neither of us spoke for some seconds, and when we did speak we took refuge in commonplaces. Our hearts were too full—mine with a sudden and hardly explicable overflow of affection toward this beautiful being whom I had saved from dying; hers with a like affection for me, heightened a thousand fold by the intense love of love and of living that filled her whole soul and made her gratitude to me partake almost of the nature of adoration. I think it was years before she could see me without recalling the whole scene so vividly that tears would fill her eyes. Often she would suddenly seize both my hands in hers, kiss them and say, "Oh! but for these dear, strong, brave little hands, where should I be!" And whenever we parted for a length of time she was overshadowed by presentiment. "I know it is superstitious and silly," she would say, "but I cannot shake off the feeling that I am safer in the same town with you. I believe if any harm were to threaten me you would be near."

But the story I am to tell now is not the story of Dora Maynard's life after I knew her, nor of our friendship and love for each other, rare and beautiful as they were. It is the story of her girlhood, and of the strange wood-carving which stood on the gilded table in the bed of purple anemones.

One morning in April, as I climbed the long stone stairs which led to her apartment, I met Anita, the flower-woman who carried flowers to her every day. Anita looked troubled.

"What is the matter, my Anita?" said I; "is the Signora ill?"

"Ah no, thank the Blessed Virgin!" said Anita; "the dearest, most beautiful of Signoras is well, but I am obliged to tell her to-day that there are no more anemones. Biagio went yesterday to the farthest corner of the Villa Doria, to a dark shady spot beyond the Dove-Cote, which the strangers know not, hoping to find some; but the heavy rains had beaten them all down—there is no longer one left. And the Signora had tears in her eyes when I told her; and she did not care for all the other beautiful flowers; she said none of them could go on the gold table; never yet has the Signora put any flowers on the gold table except the purple anemones," and real tears stood in old Anita's eyes.

"Why, Anita," said I, "I am sure some other flowers would look very pretty there. I do not believe the Signora will be unhappy about it."

Anita shook her head and half smiled with a look of pitying compassion.

"But, Signora, you do not know; that dearest and most beautiful of Signoras has visions from the angels about her flowers. Holy Virgin! if she would but come and hang flowers around the Bambino in our church! None of the Holy Sisters can so weave them as she does; she makes Festa forever in the house for the Signor; and I think, Signora," crossing herself and looking sharply at me, "perhaps the gold table is the shrine of her religion: does the Signora know?"

I could not help laughing. "Oh no, Anita," I said; "we do not have shrines in our religion."

Anita's face clouded. "Iddio mio!" she said, "but the Virgin will keep the dearest Signora Maynardi. Biagio and I have vowed to keep a candle always burning for her in Ara Coeli! The dearest, most beautiful of Signoras;" and Anita walked disconsolately on, down the stairs.

I found Dora kneeling before the "gold table," arranging great masses of maiden-hair fern around the wood carving and in the shelf below. As I saw the rapt and ecstatic expression of her face, I understood why Anita had believed the gold table to be a shrine.

"They do not suit it like the anemones," said she, sadly; "and I can have no more anemones this year."

"So poor Anita told me just now on the stairs," replied I. "She was almost crying, she was so sorry she could not get them for you. But I am sure, dear, the ferns are beautiful on it. I think the pale green looks even better than the purple with the gold and the pale yellow wood."

"I like the purple best," said Dora; "besides, we always had purple at home," and her eyes filled with tears. Then, turning suddenly to me, she said, "Why have you never asked me what this is? I know you must have wondered: it looks so strange—this poor little clumsy bit of American pine, on my gilt table shrined with flowers!"

"Yes, I have wondered, I acknowledge, for I could not make out the design," I replied; "but I thought it might have some story connected with it, which you would tell me if you wished I should know. I did not think it clumsy; I think it is fantastic, and has a certain sort of weird life-likeness about it."

"Do you really think it has any life-like look about it?" and Dora's face flushed with pleasure. "I think so, but I supposed nobody else could see anything in it. No one of my acquaintance has ever alluded to it," continued she, half laughing, half crying, "but I see them trying to scrutinize it slyly when they are not observed. As for poor old Anita, I believe she thinks it is our Fetish. She walks round it on tiptoe with her hands clasped on her apron."

"But now," she continued, "I will show you the same design in something else;" and she led the way through her own bedroom to Robert's, which was beyond. On the threshold she paused, and kissing me, said: "If you can stay with me to-day, I will tell you the whole story, dear; but I want you to look at this chintz first." Then she walked to the window, and drawing out one of the curtains to its full width, held it up for me to see. It was a green and white chintz, evidently of cheap quality. At first I did not distinguish any meaning in the pattern; presently I saw that the figures were all of vines and vine-leaves, linked in a fantastic fashion together, like those in the wood-carving on the gold table.

"Oh, yes," I said, "I see; it is exactly like the carving, only it looks different, being on a flat surface."

Dora did not speak; she was gazing absently at the chintz she held in her hand. Her face looked as if her soul were miles and years away. Presently I saw a tear roll down her cheek. I touched her hand. She started, and smiling sweetly, said: "Oh! forgive me. Don't think I am crying for any sorrow; it is for joy. I am so happy, and my life has been so wonderful. Now would you really have patience to listen to a long story?" she said, beseechingly; "a long story all about me—and—Robert? I have been wanting to tell you ever since I knew you. I think you ought to know all about us."

For my answer, I sank into a large chair, drew her down into my lap, and said: "Begin, you dearest child. Nothing could give me such pleasure. Begin at the beginning."

She slipped from my lap to a low footstool at my feet, and resting both her arms on my knees in a graceful way she had, looked up into my face, and began by a sentence which made me start.

"I used to work in a factory." My start was so undisguised, so uncontrollable, that Dora drew back and her cheeks turned red.

"Perhaps I ought to have told you before."

"Oh, my dear, beautiful, marvellous child!" I exclaimed; "you cannot so misjudge me. I was startled only because you had always seemed to me so much like one born to all possible luxury. I supposed you had been nurtured on beauty."

"So I have been," she replied, earnestly, smiling through tears; "nevertheless, three years ago I was working in a factory in America."

I did not interrupt her again; hour after hour passed by; not until twilight was deepening into dusk did the story come to end. I shall try to give it in Dora's own words—their simplicity adds so much to it; but I cannot give the heightened effect with which they fell upon my ears as I looked down into her sweet child-woman's face.

"I do not remember much about mamma. It is strange, too, that I do not, because I was thirteen when she died; but I always loved papa best, and stayed all the time I could in his study. Mamma was very pretty; the prettiest woman I ever saw; but I don't know how it was, all her prettiness did not seem to make papa care about her. He was a clergyman—an Episcopal clergyman—and his father and his father's father had been too; so you see for three whole generations it had been all books and study in the family; but mamma's father was a farmer, and mamma was stronger than papa; she liked to live in the country and be out of doors, which he hated. I think I know now just how it all was; but it used to puzzle me till I grew up. When I was sixteen, my Aunt Abby, papa's sister, told me that mamma was said to be the most beautiful girl in the whole State, and that papa fell so in love with her when he was just out of college, that he came very near dying because his father did not wish them to be married. Poor papa! it was just so always with him; he had such a poor feeble body that any trouble or worry made him ill. I can see now that it was because he and all his family had been such scholars, and lived in the house, and sat still all their lives; their bodies were not good for anything: and I am thankful enough that my body is like mamma's; but I don't know what good it would do me, either, if dear papa hadn't taught me all his ways of seeing things and feeling things. Mamma never seemed to care much about anything, except when Dick or Abby were sick, and she always used to go to sleep in church while papa was saying the most beautiful things; sometimes it used to make me almost hate her. I hated everybody that didn't listen to him. But Aunt Abby said once that very few people could understand him, and that was the reason we never stayed long in one place. People got tired of hearing him preach. This made me so angry I did not speak to Aunt Abby for two years, except when I was obliged to. But I see now that she was right. As I read over papa's sermons I see that they would seem very strange to common men and women. He saw much more in every little thing than people generally do. I used to tell him sometimes he 'saw double,' and he would sigh and say that the world was blind, and did not see half; he never could take any minute by itself; there was the past to cripple it and the future to shadow it. Poor, poor papa! I really think I have learned in a very strange way to understand his capacity for sadness. I understand it by my own capacity for joy. I often smile to think how I used to accuse him of seeing double, for it is the very thing which Robert says to me again and again when a sight or a sound gives me such intense pleasure that I can hardly bear it. And I see that while I have nearly the same sensitiveness to all impressions from things or from people which he had, my body compels the impressions to be joyous. This is what I owe mamma. If papa could have been well and strong, he would have sung joy such as no poet has ever sung since suns began to shine.

"But most that he wrote was sad; and I am afraid most that he taught the people was sad too, or, at any rate, not hopeful as it ought to be in this beautiful, blessed world, which 'God so loved' and loves. So perhaps it was better for people that papa never preached in any one parish more than three or four years. Probably God took care to send next a man who would make everybody take courage again. However, it was very hard for mamma, and very hard for us; although for us there was excitement and fun in getting into new houses and getting acquainted with new people; but the worst thing was that we had very little money, and it used it up so to move from place to place, and buy new things. I knew all about this before I was ten years old as well as if I had been forty; and by the time I was twelve, I was a perfect little miser of both clothes and money—I had such a horror of the terrible days, which sometimes came, when we sorely wanted both.

"Early in the spring after I was thirteen—my birthday was in December—we went to live in a little place called Maynard's Mills. It was a suburban village near the largest manufacturing town in the State. The other two homes which I could remember had been very small country villages, where none of the people were rich, and only a few attended the Episcopal church. In Maynard's Mills there were many rich people, and almost everybody went to our church. The whole place was owned by Mr. Maynard, Robert's father. He had gone out there to live near his mills, and the place was so beautiful that family after family of the rich mill-owners had moved out there. At first they used to go into town to church; but it was a long drive, cold in winter and hot in summer, and so Mr. Maynard built a beautiful chapel near his house and sent for papa to come and preach in it. Mr. Maynard had been his classmate in college and loved him very much, just because they were 'so different,' papa said, and I think it must have been so, for Mr. Maynard is the merriest man I ever saw. He laughs as soon as he sees you, whether there is anything to laugh at or not, and he makes you feel just like laughing yourself, simply by asking you how you do. I never saw papa so happy as he was the day Mr. Maynard's letter came asking him to go there.

"It was a very kind letter, and the salary, of which Mr. Maynard spoke almost apologetically, saying that it would be increased in a few years as the village grew, was more than twice as large as papa had ever received, and there was a nice parsonage besides.

"We moved in April. I always associate our moving with blue hepaticas, for I carried a great basketful of them, which I had taken up roots and all, in the woods, the morning we set out; and what should I find under papa's study window but a great thicket of wild ferns and cornel bushes growing—just the place for my hepaticas, and I set them out before I went into the house. The house was very small, but it was so pretty that papa and I were perfectly happy in it. Poor mamma did not like the closets and the kitchen. The house we had left was a huge, old-fashioned house, with four square rooms on a floor; one of these was the kitchen, and mamma missed it very much. But she lived only a few days after we moved in. I never knew of what disease she died. She was ill but a few hours and suffered great pain. They said she had injured herself in some way in lifting the furniture. It was all so sudden and so terrible, and we were surrounded by such confusion and so many strange faces, that I do not remember anything about it distinctly. I remember the funeral, and the great masses of white and purple flowers all over the table on which the coffin stood, and I remember how strangely papa's face looked.

"And then Aunt Abby came to live with us, and we settled down into such a new, different life, that it seemed to me as if it had been in some other world that I had known mamma. My sister Abby was two years old, and my darling brother Nat was ten, when mamma died. It is very hard to talk about dear Nat, I love him so. He is so precious, and his sorrow is so sacred, that I am hardly willing to let strangers pity him, ever so tenderly. When he was a baby he sprang out of mamma's lap, one day, as she was reaching up to take something from the mantel piece. He fell on the andiron-head and injured his spine so that he could never walk. He is twenty years old now; his head and chest and arms are about as large as those of a boy of sixteen, but all the rest of his poor body is shrunken and withered; he has never stood upright, and he cannot turn himself in his chair or bed. But his head and face are beautiful. It is not only I who think so. Artists have seen him sitting at the window, or being drawn about in his little wagon, and have begged permission to paint his face, for the face of a saint or of a hero, in their pictures. It is the face of both saint and hero; and after all that must be always so, I think; for how could a man be one without being the other? I know some very brave men have been very bad men, but I do not call them heroes. Nat is the only hero I ever knew; if I were a poet I would write a poem about him. It should be called 'THE CROWNLESS KING.' Oh, how he does reign over suffering, and loss, and humiliation, and what a sweet kingdom spreads out around him wherever he is! He does everybody good, and everybody loves him. Poor papa used to say sometimes, 'My son is a far better preacher than I; see, I sit at his feet to learn;' and it was true. Even when he was a little fellow Nat used to keep up papa's courage. Many a time, when papa looked dark and sad, Nat would call to him, 'Dear papa, will you carry me up and down a little while by the window? I want the sky.' Then, while they were walking, Nat would say such sweet things about the beauty of the sky, and the delight it gave him to see it, that the tears would come into papa's eyes, and he would say, 'Who would think that we could ever forget for a moment this sky which is above us?' and he would go away to his study comforted.

"As I said, when mamma died, Nat was ten and I was thirteen. From that time I took all the care of him. Aunt Abby, was not strong, and she did not love children. She was just, and she meant to be always kind to us; but that sort of kindness is quite different from loving-kindness. Poor Nat never could bear to have her do anything for him, and so it very soon came about that I took all the care of him. It was not hard, for he was never ill; he suffered constant pain but in spite of it he was always cheerful, always said he felt well, and never had any of the small ailments and diseases which healthy children are apt to have. 'I shouldn't know what to do without the ache, Dot,' he said to me one day when he was only twelve years old. 'I've got so used to it, I should miss it as much as I should miss you said it helps me to be good. I don't think I should dare have it go away.' A few years later he wrote some lovely little verses called 'The Angel of Pain,' which I will show you. Our life after mamma died was very happy and peaceful. It makes me grieve for her, even now, to think how little she was missed. We had all loved her. She was always pleasant and good, and took the best possible care of us and of everything; but she was not one of those persons whose presence makes itself necessary to people. It seems hardly right to say such a thing, but I really think papa seemed more cheerful without her, after the first. I think that while she lived he was always groping and reaching after something in her which did not exist. The hourly sight of her reminded him hourly of his ideal of what a wife might be, and he was forever hoping that she might come a little nearer to it—enter a little more into his world of thought and feeling. This is how it has looked to me since I have been married, and can understand just how terrible it must be to have the person whom you love best, disappoint you in any way.

"Nat was in all my classes in school. Although he was three years younger he was much cleverer than I, and had had nothing to do, poor dear, all his life, but lie in his chair and read. I used to draw him to and from school in a little wagon; the boys lifted it up and down the steps so carefully it did not jar him; and papa had a special desk built for him, so high that part of the wagon could roll under it, and the lid could rest just wherever Nat needed it for writing or studying. When we went home, there was always a sort of procession with us; a good many of the children had to go in the same direction, but many went simply to walk by Nat's wagon and talk with him. Whenever there was a picnic or a nutting frolic, we always took him; the boys took turns in drawing him; nobody would hear a word of his staying at home; he used to sit in his wagon and look on while the rest played, and sometimes he would be left all alone for a while, but his face was always the happiest one there. At school the boys used to tell him everything, and leave things to his decision. Almost every day, somebody would call out, at recess or intermission, 'Well, I'll leave it to Nat'—or 'I'll tell Nat.' One day somebody shouted, 'Take it before the king—let's call him King Nat.' But it almost made Nat cry. He exclaimed, 'Oh, boys, please don't ever say that again;' and they never did. He had a great deal more influence over them than any teacher. He could make them do anything. Sometimes the teachers themselves used to come to him privately and tell him of things they did not like, which the boys were getting into the way of doing, and ask him to try to stop them. If Nat had not been a saint, as I said before, all this would have spoiled him; but he never thought of its being any special power in him. He used to think it was only because the boys were so kind-hearted that they could not bear to refuse any request which a poor cripple made.

"When I think how happy those days were and how fast the darkest days of our lives were drawing near, it makes me shrink from happiness almost as much as from grief. It seems only grief's forerunner. On the evening of my sixteenth birthday, we were all having a very merry time in papa's study, popping corn over the open fire. We had wheeled Nat near the fire, and tied the corn-popper on a broom-handle, so that he could shake the popper himself; and I never saw him laugh so heartily at anything. Papa laughed too, quite loud, which was a thing that did not happen many times a year. It was the last time we heard the full sound of dear papa's voice. Late that night he was called out to see a poor man, one of the factory operatives, who was dying. It was a terrible snow-storm, and papa had been so heated over the fire and in playing with us that he took a severe cold. The next morning he could not speak aloud. The doctor said it was an acute bronchitis and would pass off; but it did not, and in a very few weeks it was clear that he was dying of consumption. Probably the cold only developed a disease which had been long there.

"I can't tell you about the last months of papa's life. I think I shall never be able to speak of them. We saw much worse days afterward, but none that seemed to me so hard to bear; even when I thought Nat and I would have to go to the almshouse it was not so hard. The love which most children divide between father and mother I concentrated on my father. I loved him with an adoration akin to that which a woman feels for her husband, and with the utmost of filial love added. Nat loved him almost as much. The most touching thing I ever saw was to see Nat from his wagon, or wheeled chair, reaching out to take care of papa in the bed. Nobody else could give him his medicine so well; nobody could prepare his meals for him, after he was too weak to use a knife and fork, so well as Nat. How he could do all this with only one hand—for he could not bend himself in his chair enough to use the hand farthest from the bed—nobody could understand; but he did, and the very last mouthful of wine papa swallowed he took, the morning he died, from poor Nat's brave little hand, which did not shake nor falter, though the tears were rolling down his cheeks.

"Papa lived nearly a year; but the last nine months he was in bed, and he never spoke a loud word after that birthday night when we had been so happy in the study. He died in November, on a dreary stormy day. I never shall forget it. He had seemed easier that morning, and insisted on our all going out to breakfast together and leaving him alone, the doors being open between the study and the dining-room. We had hardly seated ourselves at the table when his bell rang. Aunt Abby reached him first. It could not have been a minute, but he did not know her. For the first and only time in my life I forgot Nat, and was out of the room when I heard him sob. Dear Nat! not even then would he think of himself. I turned back. 'Oh, don't stop to take me, Dot,' he said. 'Run!' But I could not; and when I reached the door, pushing his chair before me, all was over. However, the doctor said that, even if we had been there at the first, papa could not have bid us good-by; that the death was from instantaneous suffocation, and that he probably had no consciousness of it himself. Papa's life had been insured for five thousand dollars and he had saved, during the three years we had lived at Maynard's Mills, about one thousand more. This was all the money we had in the world.

"Mr. Maynard had been very kind throughout papa's illness. He had persuaded the church to continue the salary; every day he had sent flowers, and grapes, and wine, and game, and everything he could think of that papa could eat; and, what was kindest of all, he had come almost every day to talk with him and cheer him up. But he did not mean to let his kindness stop here. The day after the funeral he came to see us, to propose to adopt me. I forgot to say that Aunt Abby was to be married soon and would take little Abby with her; so they were provided for, and the only question was about Nat and me.

"Fortunately, dear Nat was in the dining-room and did not see Mr. Maynard when he came. I have told you what a merry man Mr. Maynard is, and how kind he is, but he is also a very obstinate and high-tempered man. He had never loved Nat; I do not know why; I think he was the only human being who ever failed to love him. He pitied him, of course; but he was so repelled by his deformity that he could not love him. As soon as Mr. Maynard said, 'Now, my dear child, you must come to my house and make it your home always,' I saw that he intended to separate me from Nat.

"I replied, 'I cannot leave Nat, Mr. Maynard. I thank you very much; you are very good; but it would break my heart to leave him, and I am sure papa would never forgive me if I should do it.'

"He made a gesture of impatience. He had foreseen this, and come prepared for it; but he saw that I promised to prove even more impracticable than he had feared.

"'You have sacrificed your whole life already to that miserable unfortunate boy,' he said, 'and I always told your father he ought not to permit it.'

"At this I grew angry, and I replied:—

"'Mr. Maynard, Nat does more for us all, every hour of his life, than we ever could do for him: dear papa used to say so too.'

"No doubt papa had said this very thing to Mr. Maynard often, for tears came into his eyes and he went on:—

"'I know, I know—he is a wonderful boy, and we might all learn a lesson of patience from him; but I can't have the whole of your life sacrificed to him. I will provide for him amply; he shall have every comfort which money can command.'

"'But where?' said I.

"'In an institution I know of, under the charge of a friend of mine.'

"'A hospital!' exclaimed I; and the very thought of my poor Nat, who had been the centre of a loving home-circle, of a merry school playground, ever since he could remember—the very thought of his finding himself alone among diseased people, and tended by hired attendants, so overcame me that I burst into floods of tears.

"Mr. Maynard, who hated the presence of tears and suffering, as mirthful people always do, rose at once and said kindly, 'Poor child, you are not strong enough to talk it over yet; but as your aunt must go away so soon, I thought it better to have it all settled at once.'

"'It is settled, Mr. Maynard,' said I, in a voice that half frightened me. 'I shall never leave Nat—never, so long as I live.'

"'Then you'll do him the greatest unkindness you can—that's all,' replied Mr. Maynard angrily, and walked out of the room. I locked myself up in my own room and thought the whole matter over. How I could earn my own living and Nat's, I did not know. We should have about four hundred dollars a year. I had learned enough in my childhood of poverty to know that we need not starve while we had that; but simply not starving is a great way off from really living; and I felt convinced that it would be impossible for me to keep up courage or hope unless I could contrive, in some way, to earn money enough to surround our home with at least a semblance of the old atmosphere. We must have books; we must have a flower sometimes; we must have sun and air.

"At last an inspiration came to me. Down stairs, in the saddened empty study, sat little Miss Penstock, the village dressmaker, sewing on our gloomy black dresses. She lived all alone in a very small house near Mr. Maynard's mill. I remembered that I had heard her say how lonely she found it living by herself since her married sister, who used to live with her, had gone to the West. Since then, Miss Penstock had sometimes consented to go for a few days at a time to sew in the houses of her favorite employers, just to keep from forgetting how to speak,' the poor little woman said. But she disliked very much to do this. She was a gentlewoman; and though she accepted with simple dignity the necessity of earning her bread, it was bitterly disagreeable to her to sit as a hired sewer in other people's houses. She liked to come to our house better than to any other. We also were poor. My Aunt Abby was a woman of great simplicity, and a quiet, stately humility, like Miss Penstock's own; and they enjoyed sitting side by side whole days, sewing in silence. Miss Penstock had always spoken with a certain sort of tender reverence to Nat, and I remembered that he liked to be in the room where she sewed. All these thoughts passed through my mind in a moment. I sprang to my feet and exclaimed, 'That is it—that is it!' and I ran hastily down to the study. Miss Penstock was alone there. She looked up in surprise at my breathlessness and my red eyes. I knelt down by her side and took the work out of her hands.

"'Dear Miss Penstock,' said I, 'would you rent part of your house?'

"She looked up reflectively, took off her spectacles with her left hand, and tapped her knees slowly with them, as she always did when puzzling over a scanty pattern.

"'I don't know, Dora, but I might; I've thought of it; it's awful lonely for me as 'tis. But it's such a risk taking in strangers; is it any friends of yours you're thinking of?'

"'Nat and me,' said I, concisely. Miss Penstock's spectacles dropped from her fingers, and she uttered an ejaculation I never heard from her lips on any other occasion. 'Good Heavens!'

"'Yes,' said I, beginning to cry, 'Nat and me! I've got to take care of Nat, and if you would only let us live with you I think I could manage beautifully.' Then I told her the whole story of Mr. Maynard's proposal. While we were talking Aunt Abby came in. The problem was no new one to her. Papa and she had talked it over many a time in the course of the past sad year. It seemed that he had had to the last a strong hope that Mr. Maynard would provide for us both. Poor papa! as he drew near the next world, all the conventionalities and obligations of this seemed so small to him, he did not shrink from the thought of dependence upon others as he would have done in health.

"'But I always told him,' said Aunt Abby, 'that Mr. Maynard wasn't going to do anything for Nat beyond what money'd do. He'd give him a thousand a year, or two, if need be, but he'd never set eyes on him if he could help it.'

"'Aunt Abby,' exclaimed I, 'please don't say another word about Mr. Maynard's helping Nat. I'd die before Nat should touch a cent of his money.'

"'There is no use talking that way,' said Aunt Abby, whose tenderest mercies were often cruelly worded. 'Mr. Maynard's a good, generous man, and I'm sure he's been the saving of us all. But that's no reason he should set up to take you away from Nat now; and I know well enough Nat can't live without you; but I don't see how it's to be managed. And Aunt Abby sighed. Then I told her my plans; they grew clearer and clearer to me as I unfolded them; the two gentle-faced spinster women looked at me with surprise. Miss Penstock wiped her eyes over and over.

"'If I could only be sure I wasn't going against your best interests to let you come,' said she.

"'Oh, Miss Penstock,' exclaimed I, 'don't think so—don't dare to say no for that reason; for I tell you, I shall go away to some other town with Nat if you don't take us; there is no other house here that would do; think how much better it would be for Nat to stay among friends.'

"'It's lucky I am their guardian,' said Aunt Abby, with an unconscious defiance in her tone. 'There can't anybody hinder their doing anything I am willing to have them do. My brother wanted to have Mr. Maynard, too; but I told him no; I'd either be whole guardian or none.'

"'I think good Aunt Abby had had a dim foreboding that Mr. Maynard's kindness might take a shape which it would be hard to submit to. Great as her gratitude was, her family pride resented dictation, and resented also the implied slight to poor Nat. As I look back now, I can see that, except for this reaction of feeling, she never would have consented so easily to my undertaking all I undertook, in going to housekeeping alone with that helpless child, on four hundred dollars a year. Before night it was all settled, and Miss Penstock went home two hours before her time, 'so stirred up, somehow,' as she said, 'to think of those blessed children's coming to live in my house, I couldn't see to thread a needle.' After tea Mr. Maynard came again: Aunt Abby saw him alone. When she came up-stairs she had been crying, but her lips were closed more rigidly than I ever saw them. Aunt Abby could be as determined as Mr. Maynard. All she said to me of the interview was, 'I don't know now as he'll really give in that he can't have things as he wants to. For all his laughing and for all his goodness, I don't believe he is any too comfortable to live with. I shouldn't wonder if he never spoke to one of us again.'

"But Mr. Maynard was too well-bred a man for any such pettiness as that. His resentment showed itself merely in a greater courtesy than ever, combined with a careful absence of all inquiries as to our plans. It hurt me very much, for I knew how it would have hurt dear papa. But I knew, too, that I was right and Mr. Maynard was wrong, and that comforted me.

"Four weeks from the day papa was buried, the pretty parsonage was locked up, cold, dark, empty. Aunt Abby had gone with little Abby to her new home, and Nat and I were settled at Miss Penstock's. The night before we moved, Mr. Maynard left a note at the door for me. It contained five hundred dollars and these words:—

"'Miss Dora will not refuse to accept this from one who hoped to be her father.'

"But I could not take it. I sent it back to him with a note like this:—

"'DEAR MR. MAYNARD:—I shall never forget that you were willing to be my father, and I shall always be grateful to you; but I cannot take money from one who is displeased with me for doing what I think right. I promise you, however, for papa's sake and for Nat's, that if I ever need help I will ask it of you, and not of any one else.'

* * * * *

"The next time I saw Mr. Maynard he put both his hands on my shoulders and said: 'You are a brave girl; I wish I could forgive you; but remember your promise.' And that was the last word Mr. Maynard spoke to me for three years.

"Our new home was so much pleasanter than we supposed it could be, that at first, in spite of our grief, both Nat and I were almost gay. It was like a sort of picnic, or playing at housekeeping. The rooms were sunny and cozy. Rich people in splendid houses do not dream how pleasant poor people's little rooms can be, if the sun shines in and there are a few pretty things. We kept all the books which could ever be of use to Nat, and a picture of the Sistine Madonna which Mr. Maynard had given us on the last Christmas Day, and papa's and mamma's portraits. The books, and these, made our little sitting-room look like home. We had only two rooms on the first floor; one of these was a tiny one, but it held our little cooking-stove and a cupboard, with our few dishes; the other we called 'sitting-room;' it had to be dear Nat's bedroom also, because he could not be carried up and down stairs. But I made a chintz curtain, which shut off his bed from sight, and really made the room look prettier, for I put it across a corner and had a shelf put up above it, on which Nat's stuffed owl sat. My room was over Nat's, and a cord went up from his bed to a bell over mine, so that he could call me at any moment if he wanted anything in the night. Then we had one more little chamber, in which we kept the boxes of papa's sermons, and some trunks of old clothes, and things which nobody wanted to buy at the auction, and papa's big chair and writing-table. We would not sell those. I thought perhaps some day we should have a house of our own—I could not imagine how; but if we did we should be glad of that chair and table, and so Aunt Abby let us keep them, though they were of handsome wood, beautifully carved, and would have brought a good deal of money. For these four rooms we paid Miss Penstock three dollars a month; the rent would have been a dollar a week, but she said it was really worth a dollar a month to her to have people who would not trouble her nor hurt the house; and as Aunt Abby thought so too, I believed her.

"My plan was to have Nat keep on at school, and to take in sewing myself, or to work for Miss Penstock. For the first year all went so smoothly that I was content. I used to draw Nat to and from school twice a day, and that gave me air and exercise. Everybody was very kind in giving me sewing, and I earned four and five dollars a week. We did not have to buy any clothes, and so we laid up a little money. But the next year people did not give me so much sewing; they had given it to me the first year because they were sorry for us, but now they had forgotten. Very often I would sit idle a whole week, with no work. Then I used to read and study, but I could not enjoy anything, because I was so worried. I felt that trouble was coming. Early in the fall dear Nat was taken ill—the first illness of his life. It was a slow fever. He was ill for three months. I often wonder how I lived through those months. When he recovered he seemed better than ever. The doctor said he had passed a sort of crisis and would always be stronger for it. The doctor was very kind. Several nights he sat up with Nat and made me go to bed, and he would not let me pay him a cent, though he came every day for weeks. When I urged him to let us pay the bill he grew half angry, and said, 'Do you think I am going to take money from your father's daughter?' and then I felt more willing to take it for papa's sake. But the medicines had cost a great deal, and I had not earned anything; and so, at the end of the second year, we had been obliged to take quite a sum out of our little capital. I did not tell Nat, and I did not go to Mr. Maynard. I went on from day to day, in a sort of stupor, wondering what would happen next. I was seventeen years old, but I knew of nothing I could do except to sew; I did not know enough to teach. All this time I never once thought of the mills. I used to watch the men and women going in and out, and envy them, thinking how sure they were of their wages; and yet it never crossed my mind that I could do the same thing. I am afraid it was unconscious pride which prevented my thinking of it.

"But the day came. It was in the early spring. I had been to the grave-yard to set out some fresh hepaticas on papa's grave. His grave and mamma's were in an inclosure surrounded by a high, thick hedge of pines and cedars close to the public street As I knelt down, hidden behind the trees, I heard steps and voices. They paused opposite me. The persons were evidently looking over the fence. Then I distinguished the voice of our kind doctor.

"'Poor Kent!' he said, 'how it would distress him to see his children now! That Nat barely pulled through his fever; but he seems to have taken a new turn since then and is stronger than ever. But I am afraid they are very poor.'

"To my astonishment, the voice that replied was Mr. Maynard's.

"'Of course they are,' said he impatiently; 'but nobody will ever have a chance to help them till the last cent's gone. That Dora would work her fingers off in the mills rather than ask or receive help.'

"'But good heavens! Maynard, you'd never stand by and see Tom Kent's daughter in the mills?' exclaimed the doctor.

"I could not hear the reply, for they were walking away. But the words 'in the mills' rang in my ears. A new world seemed opening before me. I had no particle of false pride; all I wanted was to earn money honestly. I could not understand why I had never thought of this way. I knew that many of the factory operatives, who were industrious and economical, supported large families of children on their wages. 'It would be strange enough if I could not support Nat and myself,' thought I, and I almost ran home, I was so glad. I said nothing to Nat; I knew instinctively that it would grieve him.

"The next day after I left him at school I went to the largest mill and saw the overseer. He was a coarse, disagreeable man; but he had known my father and he treated me respectfully. He said they could not give me very good wages at first; but if I learned readily, and was skillful in tending the looms, I might in time make a very good living. The sums that he named seemed large, tried by my humble standard. Even at the beginning I should earn more than I had been able to for many months at my needle. After tea I told Nat. He lay very still for some moments; the tears rolled down his cheeks; then he reached up both hands and drew my face down to his, and said, 'Dear sister, it would be selfish to make it any harder for you than it must be at best. But oh, Dot, Dot! do you think you can dream what it is for me to have to lie here and be such a burden on you?'