certainly not to-day--she reflected.

There were plenty of small duties waiting for her that morning, but in
woman's parlance she "couldn't settle to anything"; there was an
excitement in her mood that demanded the freedom of fresh air. She
went up to her bedroom and stood for a moment at her window before
yielding to the impulse that beckoned her out into the sunshine; and,
drawing Stephen's letter from her dress, she read it once more, to
make sure she had missed no precious hint as to the time of his
sailing. He wrote:

May I come back? You must know all I mean that to imply--to come
back, my best beloved, to you--to order my life in accordance to
your pleasure--to marry you the day I set foot in Harmouth--or
to wait impatiently till you are pleased to give yourself to me.
I trust your love too entirely to fear that you will needlessly
prolong the time. You are too fair-minded to let mere
conventions weigh with you as against my happiness. Between you
and me there must be no shams, and yet I would not shock or
hurry you for the world.

On second thoughts, I shall not wait for your permission to
return--that is not the best way to gain one's desires! No, I
shall come before you can stop me, and while you are saying to
yourself, "Perhaps he is on the ocean," I may be turning in at
your gate.

What did she mean to do? she asked herself, with a smile that was its
own answer.

She went into her closet, and, fetching her crape hat from the shelf,
began pinning it on before the glass. Its somber ugliness accorded ill
with the brightness of her hair, and somehow her hair seemed to turn
mourning into a mockery.

She couldn't help recalling an incident that had happened two years
before, when she had seen herself in that same glass transformed into
sudden prettiness by Polly's skillful fingers, and how her pleasure in
her appearance had been turned into humiliation by Simeon's petty
tyranny, when she asked him to pay for her hat. And then she was
ashamed of her own thoughts--distressed that she had let the paltry
reminiscence force itself into her mind; for great happiness should
put us in charity with all. Never again would she allow an unkind
remembrance to lodge in her thoughts.

She shut the door of her room and hurried out into the street--there
was so much indoors to remind her of what she most wished to forget.
When Stephen came for her they would go away