ght to speculate upon it, as she had done for many years, as a
form of harmless enjoyment. While every other house in the neighborhood
had gone from the consistently good to the prosperously bad in the
matter of refurnishing, John Porter had kept his precisely as his
grandfather had left it to him. Amelia had never once complained; she
had observed toward her husband an unfailing deference, due, she felt,
to his twenty years' seniority; perhaps, also, it stood in her own mind
as the only amends she could offer him for having married him without
love. It was her father who made the match; and Amelia had succumbed,
not through the obedience claimed by parents of an elder day, but from
hot jealousy and the pique inevitably born of it. Laurie Morse had kept
the singing-school that winter. He had loved Amelia; he had bound
himself to her by all the most holy vows sworn from aforetime, and then,
in some wanton exhibit of power--gone home with another girl. And for
Amelia's responsive throb of feminine anger, she had spent fifteen years
of sober country living with a man who had wrapped her about with the
quiet tenderness of a strong nature, but who was not of her own
generation either in mind or in habit; and Laurie had kept a
music-store in Saltash, seven miles away, and remained unmarried.

Now Amelia looked about the room, and mentally displaced the furniture,
as she had done so many times while she and her husband sat there
together. The settle could be taken to the attic. She had not the heart
to carry out one secret resolve indulged in moments of impatient
bitterness,--to split it up for firewood. But it could at least be
exiled. She would have a good cook-stove, and the great fireplace should
be walled up. The tin kitchen, sitting now beside the hearth in shining
quaintness, should also go into the attic. The old clock--But at that
instant the clash of bells shivered the frosty air, and Amelia threw her
vain imaginings aside like a garment, and sprang to her feet. She
clasped her hands in a spontaneous gesture of rapt attention; and when
the sound paused at her gate, with one or two sweet, lingering clingles,
"I knew it!" she said aloud. Yet she did not go to the window to look
into the moonlit night. Standing there in the middle of the room, she
awaited the knock which was not long in coming. It was imperative,
insistent. Amelia, who had a spirit responsive to the dramatic
exigencies of life, felt a little flush spring