but something far deeper. She was engaged
to marry young Tom Carter, who had nothing to marry on, it is true, but
who was sure to have, some time or other. Then the war broke out. Tom
enlisted at the first call. Up to that time Jane had loved him with a
quiet, friendly sort of affection, and had given her country a mild
emotion of the same sort. But the strife, the danger, the anxiety of
the time, set new currents of feeling in motion. Life became something
other than the three meals a day, the round of cooking, washing,
sewing, and church going. Personal gossip vanished from the village
conversation. Big things took the place of trifling ones,--sacred
sorrows of wives and mothers, pangs of fathers and husbands,
self-denials, sympathies, new desire to bear one another's burdens. Men
and women grew fast in those days of the nation's trouble and danger,
and Jane awoke from the vague dull dream she had hitherto called life
to new hopes, new fears, new purposes. Then after a year's anxiety, a
year when one never looked in the newspaper without dread and sickness
of suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without
so much as asking Miranda's leave, she packed her trunk and started for
the South. She was in time to hold Tom's hand through hours of pain; to
show him for once the heart of a prim New England girl when it is
ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about him so that he could
have a home to die in, and that was all;--all, but it served.

It carried her through weary months of nursing--nursing of other
soldiers for Tom's dear sake; it sent her home a better woman; and
though she had never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between,
and had grown into the counterfeit presentment of her sister and of all
other thin, spare, New England spinsters, it was something of a
counterfeit, and underneath was still the faint echo of that wild
heart-beat of her girlhood. Having learned the trick of beating and
loving and suffering, the poor faithful heart persisted, although it
lived on memories and carried on its sentimental operations mostly in
secret.

"You're soft, Jane," said Miranda once; "you allers was soft, and you
allers will be. If 't wa'n't for me keeping you stiffened up, I b'lieve
you'd leak out o' the house into the dooryard."

It was already past the appointed hour for Mr. Cobb and his coach to be
lumbering down the street.

"The stage ought to be here," said Miranda, glancing