year that it was hardly
worth considering. Then the village will awake; the two little girls who
live down below the saw-mill will come up together, confiding on the way
a secret or two, for which the past twenty-four hours would seem to
have afforded slender material. Then old John Thomas will come limping
across from his small house back of the church, to see if there is a
letter for "her,"--she being his wife, and in occasional communication
with their daughter in the city. Then the good-looking, roughly clad
young farmer who takes care of the fine place with the pillared portico
on the hill will saunter down to see if "the folks have sent any word
about coming up for the summer." Then Miss Granger, who lives almost
next door, will throw a shawl over her head and run in to see who has
letters and, incidentally, if she has any herself; and then one or two
wagons will draw up in front of the little store, and the men will come
in for their daily papers.

As Lucyet came around to the daily papers she flushed and looked
impatiently out of the door down the street. Not that the thought of the
daily paper had not been all the time in the background of her mind,
but having allowed her fancy to wander towards the attitude of the
village and its prospective disturbance, she returned to the imminence
of the daily paper again with a thrill of emotion. It was not one of the
metropolitan journals which, as a body, the village subscribed for, nor
was it one of the more widely known of those issued in smaller cities;
it was an unpretentious sheet, neither very ably edited nor extensively
circulated,--the chief spokesman of the nearest county town. But with
all its limitations, its readers represented to Lucyet the great harsh,
unknowing, and yet irresistibly attractive public.

It was not the first time that she had thus watched for it with mute
excitement. Such episodes, though infrequent, had marked her otherwise
uneventful existence at irregular intervals for more than a year. It
would be more correct to say that they had altered its entire course;
that such episodes had given to her life a double character,--one side
of calmness, secrecy, indifference, and the other of delight,
absorption, thrilled with a breathless excitement and uncertainty. But
this time there was a greater than ordinary interest. The verses that
she had sent last were more ambitious in conception; they had
description in them, and mental analysis, and sev