dward was beginning to weary of his enforced attentions. One October
evening she told her the truth. She even compelled her rebellious heart
to take the cold, reasoning side of the question; and she told her child
that her disabled frame was a disqualification for ever becoming a
farmer's wife. She spoke hardly, because her inner agony and sympathy
was such, she dared not trust herself to express the feelings that were
rending her. But Nest turned away from cold reason; she revolted from
her mother; she revolted from the world. She bound her sorrow tight up
in her breast, to corrode and fester there.

Night after night, her mother heard her cries and moans--more pitiful,
by far, than those wrung from her by bodily pain a year before; and,
night after night, if her mother spoke to soothe, she proudly denied the
existence of any pain but what was physical, and consequent upon her
accident.

"If she would but open her sore heart to me--to me, her mother," Eleanor
wailed forth in prayer to God, "I would be content. Once it was enough
to have my Nest all my own. Then came love, and I knew it would never be
as before; and then I thought the grief I felt, when Edward spoke to me,
was as sharp a sorrow as could be; but this present grief, Oh Lord, my
God, is worst of all; and Thou only, Thou canst help!"

When Nest grew as strong as she was ever likely to be on earth, she was
anxious to have as much labor as she could bear. She would not allow her
mother to spare her any thing. Hard work--bodily fatigue--she seemed to
crave. She was glad when she was stunned by exhaustion into a dull
insensibility of feeling. She was almost fierce when her mother, in
those first months of convalescence, performed the household tasks which
had formerly been hers; but she shrank from going out of doors. Her
mother thought that she was unwilling to expose her changed appearance
to the neighbors' remarks; but Nest was not afraid of that: she was
afraid of their pity, as being one deserted and cast off. If Eleanor
gave way before her daughter's imperiousness, and sat by while Nest
"tore" about her work with the vehemence of a bitter heart, Eleanor
could have cried, but she durst not; tears, or any mark of
commiseration, irritated the crippled girl so much, she even drew away
from caresses. Every thing was to go on as it had been before she had
known Edward; and so it did, outwardly; but they trod carefully, as if
the ground on which they moved was