course, and cost Nettie no
special thought. After the children went to bed, she sat all by herself,
with her thread and scissors on the table, working on steadily and quietly
at the little garment she was making. Her needle flew swift and nimbly;
the sleeve of her dress rustled as she moved her arm; her soft breath went
and came: but for that regular monotonous movement, and those faint steady
sounds of life, it might have been a picture of domestic tranquillity and
quiet, and not a living woman with aches in her heart. It did not matter
what she was thinking. She was facing life and fortune--indomitable,
not to be discouraged. In the silence of the house she sat late over
her needlework, anxious to have some special task finished. She heard
the mistress of the cottage locking up, but took no notice of that
performance, and went on at her work, forgetting time. It got to be
very silent in the house and without; not a sound in the rooms where
everybody was asleep; not a sound outside, except an occasional rustle
of the night wind through the bare willow-branches--deep night and not
a creature awake but herself, sitting in the heart of that intense and
throbbing silence. Somehow there was a kind of pleasure to Nettie in the
isolation which was so impossible to her at other hours. She sat rapt in
that laborious quiet as if her busy fingers were under some spell.

When suddenly she heard a startled motion up-stairs, as if some one
had got up hastily; then a rustling about the room overhead, which was
Susan's room. After a while, during which Nettie, restored by the sound
to all her growing cares, rose instantly to consideration of the question,
What had happened now? the door above was stealthily opened, and a
footstep came softly down the stair. Nettie put down her work and
listened breathlessly. Presently Susan's head peeped in at the parlour
door. After all, then, it was only some restlessness of Susan's. Nettie
took up her work, impatient, perhaps almost disappointed, with the dead
calm in which nothing ever happened. Susan came in stealthy, pale,
trembling with cold and fright. She came forward to the table in her
white night-dress like a faded ghost. "Fred has never come in," said
Susan, in a shivering whisper; "is it very late? He promised he would
only be gone an hour. Where _can_ he have gone? Nettie, Nettie, don't
sit so quiet and stare at me. I fell asleep, or I should have found it
out sooner; all the house is l