hat way if she were in love with
him, and there is no one else in town."

Abigail Merritt, acute and tender mother as she was, settled into the
belief that her daughter was merely given to those sweetly melancholy
and wondering reveries natural to a maiden soul upon the threshold of
discovery of life. "I used to do just so, busy as I always was,
before Eben came," she thought, with a little pang of impatient shame
for herself and her daughter that they must yield to such necessities
of their natures. Abigail Merritt had never been a rebel, indeed, but
there had been unruly possibilities within her. She remembered well
what she had told her mother when her vague dreams had ended and Eben
Merritt had come a-wooing. "I like him, and I suppose, because I like
him I've got to marry him, but it makes me mad, mother."

Looking now at this daughter of hers, with her exceeding beauty and
delicacy, which a touch would seem to profane and soil as much as
that of a flower or butterfly, she had an impulse to hide her away
and cover her always from the sight and handling of all except
maternal love. She took much comfort in the surety that there was as
yet no definite lover in Lucina's horizon. She did not reflect that
no human soul is too transparent to be clouded to the vision of
others, and its own, by the sacred intimacy with its own desires. Her
daughter, looking up at her with limpid blue eyes, replying to her
interrogation with sweet readiness, like a bird that would pipe to a
call, was as darkly unknown to her as one beyond the grave. She could
not even spell out clearly her hieroglyphics of life with the key in
her own nature.

The day after Lucina had met Jerome on the Dale road, and had failed
to set the matter right, she took her embroidery-work over to her
Aunt Camilla's. She had resolved upon a plan which was to her quite
desperate, involving, as it did, some duplicity of manoeuvre which
shocked her.

The afternoon was a warm one, and she easily induced, as she had
hoped, her Aunt Camilla to sit in the summer-house in the garden.
Everything was very little changed from that old summer afternoon of
years ago. If Miss Camilla had altered, it had been with such a fine
conservation of general effect, in spite of varying detail, that the
alteration was scarcely visible. She wore the same softly spreading
lilac gown, she wrote on her portfolio with the same gold pencil
presumably the same thoughts. If her softly drooping