d she, in a hard and dry, but not unkind voice.
In fact, the rigidity of her aspect, the hardness of her voice, and the
singular blackness of her costume, seemed to be too monotonously uniform
and resolute not to indicate something willful or unhealthy in the
woman's condition, as if the whole had been rather superinduced than
naturally developed.

"Aunt Martha, I have brought you some things that I hope you will find
comforting and agreeable."

The young woman glanced around the desolately regular and forbidding
room, and sighed. The other took the basket and stepped to a closet, but
paused as she opened it, and turning to Amy, said, in the same dry,
hopeless manner,

"This bounty is too good for a sinner; and yet it would be the
unpardonable sin for so great a sinner to end her own life willfully."

The solemn woman put the contents of the basket into the closet; but it
seemed as if, in that gloom, the sugar must have already lost its
sweetness and the tea its flavor.

Amy still glanced round the room, and her eyes filled with tears.

"Dear Aunt Martha, when may I tell?" she asked, with piteous earnestness.

"Amy, would you thwart God? He is too merciful already. I almost fear
that to tolerate your sympathy and kindness is a sore offense in me.
Think what a worm I am! How utterly foul and rank with sin!"

She spoke with clasped hands lying before her in her lap, in the
same hard tone as if the words were cut in ebony; with the same fixed
lips--the same pale, unsmiling severity of face; above which the abundant
hair, streaked with early gray, was almost entirely lost in the black
handkerchief.

"But surely God is good!" said Amy, tenderly and sadly. "If we sin, He
only asks us to repent and be forgiven."

"But we must pay the penalty, Amy," said the other. "There is a price set
upon every sin; and mine is so vast, so enormous--"

She paused a moment, as if overwhelmed by the contemplation of it; then,
in the same tone, she continued: "You, Amy, can not even conceive how
dreadful it is. You know what it is, but not how bad it is."

She was silent again, and her soul appeared to wrap itself in denser
gloom. The air of the room seemed to Amy stifling. The next moment she
felt as if she were pierced with sharp spears of ice. She sprang up:

"I shall smother!" said she; and opened the window.

"Aunt Martha, I begin to feel that this is really wicked! If you only
knew Lawrence Newt--"

The older woman raise