ook out at the quiet street,
where, in a rusty wagon, an old man was just picking up his reins and
preparing to jog away from the post-office door, and a side glance at
Silas's broad back over by the farther window, Lucyet read over her own
lines. How different they looked from the copy in her own distinct,
formal little handwriting! They had gained something,--but they had
lost something too. They seemed unabashed, almost declamatory, in their
sentiment. They had acquired a new and positive importance; it was as if
the assertions they made had all at once become truths, had ceased to be
tentative. She read them over again. No, they did not tell it all, all
that she meant to say; but they brought back the day, and she was glad
she had written them,--glad with an agitated, inexpressible gladness.
She would like to know what people said of them; for a moment it seemed
to her that she would not mind if they knew that she wrote them.

"Well," said Silas, laying down his paper and standing up, "there isn't
a blamed thing in that paper!"

Lucyet looked up at him startled. Had she heard aright? Then the color
slowly receded from her face and left it pale. Silas was quite
unconscious of having made an unusual statement.

"Well, Lucyet," he went on, "going to the Christian Endeavor to-night?"

"I don't know," she stammered. "No," she added suddenly, "I am not." All
endeavor was a mockery to her stunned soul.

"I dunno as I will either," he observed carelessly as he lounged out.

It was nothing to her whether he went or not, though once it might have
been. She sat still for some minutes after he had gone, looking blankly
at the paper. The page which a few minutes ago had seemed fairly to glow
with interest had become mere columns of print concerning trivial
things; for an instant she saw it with Silas's eyes. John Thomas came
limping for his mail. He had been detained on the way, he explained, and
was late. She handed him his paper through the window, dully,
indifferently. She was suffering a measure of that disappointment which
comes with what we have grown to believe attainment, and is so much more
bitter than that of failure. But the revolt against this unnatural state
of mind came before long. The elasticity of her own enthusiasm
reasserted itself. It could not be that there was nothing in her poem.
She read the lines over again. Two or three were not quite what they
ought to be, somehow; but the rest of them the world w