im a long
time, then she had given it up. She would not acknowledge to herself
or any one else that she was not well or was troubled in spirit. Her
courage was quite equal to the demand upon it, yet always she was
aware of a peculiar sensitiveness to all happenings, whether
directly concerned with herself or not, which made life an agony to
her, and she knew that her physical strength was not what it had
been. Only that morning she had looked at her face in the glass, and
had seen how it was altered. The lovely color was gone from her
cheeks, there were little, faint, downward lines about her mouth,
and, more than that, out of her blue eyes looked the eternal,
unanswerable question of humanity, "Where is my happiness?"

It seemed to her when she first set out that she could not walk to
the factory. That sense of the full presence of the spring seemed to
overpower her. All the revelation of beauty and sweetness seemed a
refinement of torture worse to bear than the sight of death and
misery would have been. Every blooming apple-bough seemed to strike
her full on the heart.

"Only look at that bush of red flowers in that yard," Maria said
once, and Ellen looked and was stung by the sight as by the contact
of a red flaming torch of spring. "What ails you, dear; don't you
like those flowers?" Maria said, anxiously.

"Yes, of course I do; I think they are lovely," replied Ellen,
looking.

She looked after the carriage which contained the bridal party; she
thought how the bridegroom had almost lost his eyesight to save her,
and her old adoration of Cynthia seemed to rise to a flood-tide.
Then came the thought of Robert, how he must have ceased to love
her--how some day he would be starting off on a bridal trip of his
own. Maud Hemingway, with whom she had often coupled him in her
thoughts, seemed to start up before her, all dressed in bridal
white. It seemed to her that she could not bear it all. She
continued walking, but she did not feel the ground beneath her feet,
nor even Maria's little, clinging fingers of tenderness on her arm.
She became to her own understanding like an instrument which is
played upon with such results of harmonies and discords that all
sense of the mechanism is lost.

"Well, Ellen Brewster," said Sadie Peel, in her loud, strident
voice, "I guess you wouldn't have been walkin' along here quite so
fine this mornin' if it hadn't been for Mr. Risley. You'd ought to
send him a weddin'-present--a sp