ten looked pale and as if she had been crying. Then Jack Williams
gave up his place at the Mill and left the village. He did not tell his
sweetheart. The morning after he left, Susan came to her work and found
the girls about her wearing a mysterious and interested air.

"What are you whispering about?" she asked. "What's the secret?"

"'Tain't no secret," was the answer. "Most everybody's heard it, and I
guess it ain't no secret to you. I guess he told you when he made up his
mind to go."

"Who?" she asked.

"Jack Williams. He's gone out to Chicago to work somewhere there. He kept
it pretty dark from us, but when he went off on the late train last
night, Joe Evans saw him, and he said he'd had the offer of a first-rate
job and was going to it. How you stare, Sue! Your eyes look as if they'd
pop out o' yer head."

She was staring and her skin had turned blue-white. She broke into a
short hysteric laugh and fell down. Then she was very sick and fainted
and had to be taken home trembling so that she could scarcely crawl as
she walked, with great tears dropping down her cold face. Janway's Mills
knew well enough after this that Jack Williams had deserted her, and had
no hesitation in suggesting a reason for his defection.

The months which followed were filled with the torments of a squalid
Inferno. Girls who had regarded her with envy, began to refuse to speak
to her or to be seen in her company. Jack Williams's companions were
either impudent or disdainful, the married women stared at her and
commented on her as she passed; there were no more picnics or excursions
for her; her feathers became draggled and hung broken in her hat. She had
no relatives in the village, having come from a country place. She was
thankful that she had not a family of aunts on the spot, because she knew
they would have despised her and talked her over more than the rest. She
lived in a bare little room which she rented from a poor couple, and she
used to sit alone in it, huddled up in a heap by the window, crying for
hours in the evening as she watched the other girls go by laughing and
joking with their sweethearts.

One night when there was a sociable in the little frame Methodist church
opposite, and she saw it lighted up and the people going in dressed in
their best clothes and excited at meeting each other, the girls giggling
at the sight of their favourite young men--just as she had giggled six
months before--her slow tears began to