and the memory
stung her with something of the old pain of the happening, how he
would not take the cakes when she was a child, how he would not take
her money to buy shoes. She shrank even then, remembering the flash
with which he had turned upon her.

"I did not say enough, I was so afraid of saying too much, and that
is why he has not come," she told herself, and sadly troubled her
gentle heart thereby.

The tears came into her eyes and rolled slowly down her fair cheeks
as she sat there in the dusk. She did not yet feel towards Jerome as
he towards her. She had been too young and childish when she had
known him for love to have taken fast root in her heart; and she was
not one to love fully until she felt her footing firm, and her place
secure in a lover's affections. Still, who can tell what may be in
the heart of the gentlest and most transparent little girl, who
follows obediently at her mother's apron-strings? In those old days
when Abigail had put her little daughter to bed, heard her say her
prayers for forgiveness of her sins of innocence, and blessings upon
those whom she loved best, then kissed the fair baby face sunken in
its white pillow, she never dreamed what happened after she had gone
down-stairs. Every night, for a long time after she had first spoken
to Jerome, did the small Lucina, her heart faintly stirred into
ignorant sweetness with the first bloom of young romance, slip out of
her bed after her mother had gone, kneel down upon her childish
knees, and ask another blessing for Jerome Edwards.

"Please, God, bless that boy, and give him shoes and gingerbread,
because he won't take them from me," Lucina used to pray, then climb
into bed again with a little wild scramble of hurry.

Sometimes, when she was a little girl, though her mother never knew
it, Lucina used to be thinking about Jerome, and building artless
air-castles when she bent her grave childish brow over her task of
needle-work. Sometimes, on the heights of these castles reared by her
innocent imagination, she and Jerome put arms around each other's
necks and embraced and kissed, and her mother sat close by and did
not know.

She also did not know that often, when she had curled Lucina's hair
with special care on the Sabbath day, and dressed her in her best
frock, that her little daughter, demurely docile under her maternal
hands, was eagerly wondering if Jerome would not think her pretty in
her finery.

Of course, when Lucina