hair-cloth sofa and hold her hand, she would have arisen as if
propelled by stiff springs of modest virtue. She did not fairly know
that she was not made love to after the most honorable and orthodox
fashion without a word of endearment or a caress; for she had been
trained to regard love as one of the most secret of the laws of
nature, to be concealed, with shamefaced air, even from herself; but
she did know that Richard had never asked her to marry him, and for
that she was impatient without any self-reserve; she was even
confidential with her sister, Charlotte's mother.

"I don't want to say anything outside," she once said, "but I do
think it would be a good deal better for him if we was settled down.
He ain't half taken care of since his mother died."

"He's got money enough," returned Mrs. Barnard.

"That can't buy everything."

"Well, I don't pity him; I pity you," said Mrs. Barnard.

"I guess I shall get along a while longer, as far as that goes,"
Sylvia had replied to her sister, with some pride. "I ain't worried
on my account."

"Women don't worry much on their own accounts, but they've got
accounts," returned Mrs. Barnard, with more contempt for her sister
than she had ever shown for herself. "You're gettin' older, Sylvy."

"I know it," Sylvia had replied, with a quick shrinking, as if from a
blow.

The passing years, as they passed for her, stung her like swarming
bees, with bitter humiliation; but never for herself, only for
Richard. Nobody knew how painfully she counted the years, how she
would fain have held time back with her thin hands, how futilely and
pitifully she set her loving heart against it, and not for herself
and her own vanity, but for the sake of her lover. She had come, in
the singleness of her heart, to regard herself in the light of a
species of coin to be expended wholly for the happiness and interest
of one man. Any depreciation in its value was of account only as it
affected him.

Sylvia Crane, sitting in the meeting-house of a Sunday, used to watch
the young girls coming in, as radiant and flawless as new flowers, in
their Sunday bests, with a sort of admiring envy, which could do them
no harm, but which tore her own heart.

When she should have been contrasting the wickedness of her soul with
the grace of the Divine Model, she was contrasting her fading face
with the youthful bloom of the young girls. "He'd ought to marry one
of them," she thought; "he'd ought to, by g