en; in short, save at extremely rare intervals, Araminta had seen
no one unless in the watchful presence of her counsellor.

"And if you don't think that's work," observed Miss Hitty, piously,
"you just keep tied to one person for almost nineteen years, day and
night, never lettin' 'em out of your sight, and layin' the foundation
of their manners and morals and education, and see how you'll feel when
a blackmailing sprig of a play-doctor threatens to collect a hundred
dollars from you if you dast to nurse your own niece!"

Miss Evelina, silent as always, was moving restlessly about the
kitchen. Unaccustomed since her girlhood to activity of any
description, she found her new tasks hard. Muscles, long unused, ached
miserably from exertion. Yet Araminta had to be taken care of and her
room kept clean.

The daily visits of Doctor Ralph, who was almost painfully neat, had
made Miss Evelina ashamed of her house, though he had not appeared to
notice that anything was wrong. She avoided him when she could, but it
was not always possible, for directions had to be given and reports
made. Miss Evelina never looked at him directly. One look into his
eyes, so like his father's, had made her so faint that she would have
fallen, had not Doctor Ralph steadied her with his strong arm.

To her, he was Anthony Dexter in the days of his youth, though she
continually wondered to find it so. She remembered a story she had
read, a long time ago, of a young woman who lost her husband of a few
weeks in a singularly pathetic manner. In exploring a mountain, he
fell into a crevasse, and his body could not be recovered. Scientists
calculated that, at the rate the glacier was moving, his body might be
expected to appear at the foot of the mountain in about twenty-three
years; so, grimly, the young bride set herself to wait.

At the appointed time, the glacier gave up its dead, in perfect
preservation, owing to the intense cold. But the woman who had waited
for her husband thus was twenty-three years older; she had aged, and he
was still young. In some such way had Anthony Dexter come back to her;
eager, boyish, knowing none of life except its joy, while she, a
quarter of a century older, had borne incredible griefs, been wasted by
long vigils, and now stood, desolate, at the tomb of a love which was
not dead, but continually tore at its winding sheet and prayed for
release.

To Evelina, at times, the past twenty-five years seemed