n a dizzy
cloud of falling whiteness. A wild and desolate evening, making the
pleasant little room, with its rosy fire, and carpet, and pretty
furniture, tenfold pleasanter by contrast. A bleak and terrible evening
for all wayfarers--bitterly cold, and darkening fast.

The seamstress sat while the dismal daylight faded drearily out, her
hands lying idly in her lap, her great, melancholy dark eyes fixed on
the fast-falling snow. The tokens of sickness and sorrow lingered more
marked than ever in that wasted form and colourless face, and the ruddy
glow of the fire-light flickered on her mourning dress. Weary and
lonely, she looked as the dying day.

Presently, above the shrieking of the stormy wind, came another
sound--the loud jingling of sleigh-bells. Dimly through the fluttering
whiteness of the snow-storm she saw the sleighs whirl up to the door,
and their occupants, in a tumult of laughter, hurrying rapidly into the
house. She could hear those merry laughs, those feminine tones, and the
pattering of gaitered feet up the stairs. She could hear the deeper
voices of the gentlemen, as they stamped and shook the snow off their
hats and great-coats in the hall. She listened and looked out again at
the wintry twilight.

"Oh!" she thought, with weary sadness, "what happy people there are in
the world! Women who love and are beloved, who have everything their
hearts desire--home, and friends, and youth, and hope, and happiness.
Women who scarcely know, even by hearsay, of such wretched castaways as
I."

She walked from the window to the fire, and, leaning against the mantel,
fixed her eyes on the flickering flame.

"My birthday," she said to herself, "this long, lonesome, desolate day.
Desolate as my lost life, as my dead heart. Only two-and twenty, and all
that makes life worth having, gone already."

Again she walked to the window. Far away, and pale and dim through the
drifting snow, she could see the low-lying sky.

"Not all!" was the better thought that came to her in her
bitterness--"not all, but oh! how far away the land of rest looks!"

She leaned against the window, as she had leaned against the mantel, and
took from her bosom the locket she always wore.

"This day twelvemonth he gave me this--his birthday gift. Oh, my
darling! My husband! where in all the wide world are you this stormy
night?"

There was a rap at the door. She thrust the locket again in her bosom,
choked back the hysterical passion of t