ir the old
vibrations.

It seemed sometimes as if their hard story must finally grow old, and
lose its bitter savor to Charlotte and Barney themselves. Sometimes
Charlotte's mother looked at her inquiringly and said to herself, "I
don't believe she ever thinks about it now." She told Cephas so, and
the old man nodded. "She's a fool if she does," he returned, gruffly.

Cephas had never told anybody how he had gone once to Barney Thayer's
door, and there stood long and delivered himself of a strange
harangue, wherein the penitence and desire for peace had been thinly
veiled by a half-wild and eccentric philosophy; but the gist of which
had been the humble craving for pardon of an old man, and his
beseeching that his daughter's lover, separated from her by his own
fault, should forget it and come back to her.

"I haven't got anything to say about it," Barney had replied, and the
old man had seemed to experience a sudden shock and rebound, as from
the unexpected face of a rock in his path.

However, he still hoped that Barney would relent and come. The next
Sunday evening he had himself laid the parlor fire all ready for
lighting, and hinted that Charlotte should change her dress. When
nobody came he looked more crestfallen than his daughter; she
suspected, although he never knew it.

Charlotte had never learned any trade, but she had a reputation for
great natural skill with her needle. Gradually, as she grew older,
she settled into the patient single-woman position as assister at
feasts, instead of participator. When a village girl of a younger
generation than herself was to be married, she was in great demand
for the preparation of the bridal outfit and the finest needle-work.
She would go day after day to the house of the bride-elect, and sew
from early morning until late night upon the elaborate quilts, the
dainty linen, and the fine new wedding-gowns.

She bore herself always with a steady cheerfulness; nobody dreamed
that this preparing others for the happiness which she herself had
lost was any trial to her. Nobody dreamed that every stitch which she
set in wedding-garments took painfully in a piece of her own heart,
and that not from envy. Her faithful needle, as she sewed, seemed to
keep her old wounds open like a harrow, but she never shrank. She saw
the sweet, foolish smiles and blushes of happy girls whose very wits
were half astray under the dazzle of love; she felt them half tremble
under her hands as