e little things all
loved her, the instant she put her arms round them: and more than one
young husband, without meaning to be in the least disloyal to his wife,
thought to himself, when he saw his baby's face nestling down to Hetty
Gunn's brown curls,--

"I wonder if she'd have had me, if I'd asked her. But I don't believe
Hetty'll ever marry,--a girl that's had the offers she has."

And so it had come to pass that, at the time our story begins, Hetty was
thirty-five years old, and singularly alone in the world. The death of
her mother, which had occurred first, was a great shock to her, for it
had been a sudden and a painful death. But the loss of her mother was to
Hetty a trivial one, in comparison with the loss of her father. On the
day of her grandfather's death, she had seemed, child as she was, to
have received her father into her hands, as a sacred legacy of trust;
and he, on his part, seemed fully to reciprocate and accept without
comprehending the new relation. He unconsciously leaned upon Hetty more
and more from that hour until the hour when he died, bolstered up in bed
with his head on her shoulder, and gasping out, between difficult
breaths, his words of farewell,--strange farewell to be spoken to a
middle-aged woman, whose hair was already streaked with gray,--

"Poor little girl! I've got to leave you. You've been a good little
girl, Hetty, a good little girl."

Neighbors and friends crowded around Hetty, in the first moments of her
grief. But they all, even those nearest and most intimate, found
themselves bewildered and baffled, nay almost repelled, by Hetty's
manner. Her noble face was so grief-stricken that she looked years older
in a single day. But her voice and her smile were unaltered; and she
would not listen to any words of sympathy. She wished to hear no
allusions to her trouble, except such as were needfully made in the
arranging of practical points. Her eyes filled with tears frequently,
but no one saw a tear fall. At the funeral, her face wore much the same
look it had worn, twenty-three years before, at her grandfather's
funeral. There were some present who remembered that day well, and
remembered the look, and they said musingly,--

"There's something very queer about Hetty Gunn, after all. Don't you
remember how she acted, when she was a little thing, the day old Squire
Gunn was buried? Anybody'd have thought then a funeral was Fourth of
July, and she looks much the same way now."