ny
times before. For what had she stayed? Had there been an unadmitted hope
that these old people must soon die and leave her with an independence
with which she could travel and live? She loved Miss Webster, and she
had gladly responded to her invitation to leave the New England village,
where she was dependent on the charity of relatives, and make her home
in the new country. Miss Webster needed a companion and housekeeper;
there would be no salary, but a comfortable home and clothes that she
could feel she had earned. She had come full of youth and spirit and
hope. Youth and hope and spirit had dribbled away, but she had stayed,
and stayed. To-day she wished she had married any clod in her native
village that had been good enough to address her. Never for one moment
had she known the joys of freedom, of love, of individuality.

Miss Webster entered abruptly.

"Abby," she exclaimed, "Hiram is ill." And she related the tale of his
unbending.

Miss Williams listened indifferently. She was very tired of Hiram. She
accepted with a perfunctory expression of gratitude the gold piece
allotted to her. "You are forty-two, you are old, you are nobody," was
knelling through her brain.

"What is the matter?" asked Miss Webster, sympathetically; "have you
been crying? Don't you feel well? You'd better dress, dear; they'll be
here soon."

She sat down suddenly on the bed and flung her arms about her companion,
the tears starting to her kindly eyes.

"We are old women," she said. "Life has not meant much to us. You are
younger in years, but you have lived in this dismal old house so long
that you have given it and us your youth. You have hardly as much of it
now as we have. Poor girl!"

The two women fondled each other, Abby appreciating that, although Miss
Webster might not be a woman of depths, she too had her regrets, her
yearnings for what had never been.

"What a strange order of things it is," continued the older woman, "that
we should have only one chance for youth in this life! It comes to so
many of us when circumstances will not permit us to enjoy it. I
drudged--drudged--drudged, when I was young. Now that I have leisure
and--and opportunity to meet people, at least, every chance of happiness
has gone from me. But you are comparatively young yet, really; hope on.
The grave will have me in a few years, but you can live and be well for
thirty yet. Ah! if I had those thirty years!"

"I would give them to you gladl