before her
father died, and the decayed publisher had never guessed of him nor
Sally confessed him; for the good, thoughtful daughter knew it would
but complicate the old man's perplexities and cares to no purpose. To
be sure, his joyful consent was certain; but so long as he lived, "the
thing was not to be thought of," she said, and it was not wise to plant
in his mind a wish with which her duty could not accord. So Sally's
lover was hushed up,--hidden in discretion as in a closet.

Simon Blount was his name, and he was a young farmer of five hundred
acres in first-rate cultivation, with barns, stables, and offices in
complete repair,--a well-stocked, well-watered place, with "all the
modern improvements," and convenient to the Hendrik branch of the New
York and Bunker Hill railroad.

The young man had inherited this very neat property from his father,--a
thriving, intelligent farmer of the best class, Mr. Wimple's oldest
friend, his playmate in boyhood, and his crony when he died. Simon's
mother and Sally's had likewise been schoolmates, and intimates to the
last, fondly attached to each other, and mutually confiding in each
other's love and truth in times of pain and trouble.

But Mr. Blount and Mrs. Wimple had been dead these ten years;--they
died in the same month. Simon and Sally were children when that
happened, and since then they had grown up together in the closest
family intimacy, interrupted only by Sally's winter schooling in New
York, and renewed every summer by her regular seasons at Hendrik.

To the young man and the ripening maiden, then, their love came as
naturally as violets and clover-blooms, and was as little likely to
take their parents or the familiar country-folk by surprise.

When Simon took trips to New York, he "stopped" at Mr. Wimple's, and
Sally's summer home in Hendrik was always "Aunt Phoebe's," as she had
been taught to call Simon's mother.

You will wonder, then, that Mr. Paul Wimple should have blushed and
struggled and died in the forlorn little "Athenaeum," and that Sally
should sit down in her loneliness and "that fright of a delaine" to
wait for customers that came not, when in their old friends' house were
comfortable mansions, and in their old friends' hearts tearful kisses
and welcome free as air. But you must remember that with sudden poverty
comes, often, shrinking pride, and a degree of suspicion, and high
scorn of those belittled pensioners who hang upon old ties; tha