ndow, watching him, as far as she could see
him, among the pines. The apple orchard, near the house, was in full
bloom, and the fragrance came in at every window. A vase of the blossoms
stood on Hetty's bureau: it was one of her few, tender reminiscences,
the love which she had had for apple blossoms ever since the night of
her marriage. She held a little cluster of them now in her hand, as she
leaned on the window-sill; they had been gathered for some days, and, as
a light wind stirred the air, all the petals fell, and slowly fluttered
down to the ground. Hetty looked wistfully at the bare stems. A distinct
purpose at that moment was forming in her mind; a purpose distinct
in its aim, but, as yet, very vague in its shape. She was saying to
herself: "If I were out of the way, Eben might marry Rachel. He needn't
say, he doesn't know a man fit to do it. He is fit to marry any woman
God ever made, and I believe he would be happier with such a wife as
that, and with children, than he can ever be with me."

Even now there was in Hetty no morbid jealousy, no resentment, no
suspicion that her husband had been disloyal to her even in thought.
There had simply been forced upon her, by the slow accumulations of
little things, the conviction that her husband would be happier with
another woman for his wife than with her. It is probably impossible to
portray in words all the processes of this remarkable woman's mind and
heart during these extraordinary passages of her life. They will seem,
judged by average standards, morbid and unhealthy: yet there was no
morbidness in them; unless we are to call morbid all the great and
glorious army of men and women who have laid down their own lives for
the sake of others. That same fine and rare quality of self-abnegation
which has inspired missionaries' lives and martyrs' deaths, inspired
Hetty now. The morbidness, if there were any, was in the first entering
into her mind of the belief that her husband's happiness could be
secured in any way so well as by her. But here let us be just to Hetty.
The view she took was the common-sense view, which probably would have
been taken by nine out of ten of all Dr. Eben's friends. Who could say
that it did not stand to reason, that a man would be happier with a
wife, young, beautiful, of angelic sweetness of nature, and the mother
of sons and daughters, than with an old, childless, and less attractive
woman. The strange thing was that any wife could take