ruth, tenderly attached. He missed her
more keenly in the places where she had lived and moved than in a
neighborhood without the memory of her presence. The pang with which he
parted from his home was weakened by the greater pang which had preceded
it.

It was a harder trial to Asenath. She shrank from the encounter with new
faces, and the necessity of creating new associations. There was a quiet
satisfaction in the ordered, monotonous round of her life, which might
be the same elsewhere, but here alone was the nook which held all the
morning sunshine she had ever known. Here still lingered the halo of the
sweet departed summer,--here still grew the familiar wild-flowers which
THE FIRST Richard Hilton had gathered. This was the Paradise in which
the Adam of her heart had dwelt, before his fall. Her resignation and
submission entitled her to keep those pure and perfect memories, though
she was scarcely conscious of their true charm. She did not dare to
express to herself, in words, that one everlasting joy of woman's heart,
through all trials and sorrows--"I have loved, I have been beloved."

On the last "First-day" before their departure, she walked down the
meadows to the lonely brake between the hills. It was the early spring,
and the black buds of the ash had just begun to swell. The maples were
dusted with crimson bloom, and the downy catkins of the swamp-willow
dropped upon the stream and floated past her, as once the autumn leaves.
In the edges of the thickets peeped forth the blue, scentless violet,
the fairy cups of the anemone, and the pink-veined bells of the
miskodeed. The tall blooms through which the lovers walked still slept
in the chilly earth; but the sky above her was mild and blue, and
the remembrance of the day came back to her with a delicate, pungent
sweetness, like the perfume of the trailing arbutus in the air around
her. In a sheltered, sunny nook, she found a single erythronium, lured
forth in advance of its proper season, and gathered it as a relic of the
spot, which she might keep without blame. As she stooped to pluck it,
her own face looked up at her out of a little pool filled by the spring
rains. Seen against the reflected sky, it shone with a soft radiance,
and the earnest eyes met hers, as if it were her young self, evoked from
the past, to bid her farewell. "Farewell!" she whispered, taking leave
at once, as she believed, of youth and the memory of love.

During those years she had m