ustful, love-starved little heart that John Hathaway stormed
and carried by assault. Her girl's life in a country school and her
uncle's very rigid and orthodox home had been devoid of emotion or
experience; still, her mother had early sown seeds in her mind and
spirit that even in the most arid soil were certain to flower into
beauty when the time for flowering came; and intellectually Susanna was
the clever daughter of clever parents. She was very immature, because,
after early childhood, her environment had not been favorable to her
development. At seventeen she began to dream of a future as bright
as the past had been dreary and uneventful. Visions of happiness, of
goodness, and of service haunted her, and sometimes, gleaming through
the mists of dawning womanhood, the figure, all luminous, of The Man!

When John Hathaway appeared on the horizon, she promptly clothed him in
all the beautiful garments of her dreams; they were a grotesque misfit,
but when we intimate that women have confused the dream and the reality
before, and may even do so again, we make the only possible excuse for
poor little Susanna Nelson.

John Hathaway was the very image of the outer world that lay beyond
Susanna's village. He was a fairly prosperous, genial, handsome young
merchant, who looked upon life as a place furnished by Providence in
which to have "a good time." His parents had frequently told him that
it was expedient for him to "settle down," and he supposed that he might
finally do so, if he should ever find a girl who would tempt him to
relinquish his liberty. (The line that divides liberty and license was
a little vague to John Hathaway!) It is curious that he should not
have chosen for his life-partner some thoughtless, rosy, romping young
person, whose highest conception of connubial happiness would have been
to drive twenty miles to the seashore on a Sunday, and having partaken
of all the season's delicacies, solid and liquid, to come home hilarious
by moonlight. That, however, is not the way the little love-imps do
their work in the world; or is it possible that they are not imps at all
who provoke and stimulate and arrange these strange marriages not imps,
but honest, chastening little character-builders? In any event, the
moment that John Hathaway first beheld Susanna Nelson was the moment
of his surrender; yet the wooing was as incomprehensible as that of a
fragile, dainty little hummingbird by a pompous, greedy, big-brea