awfully; but it is almost time to get a
letter from him."

"Does your father approve of him?" asked Miss Dane, with great
propriety. "You are very young yet, and you must not think of such a
thing carelessly. I should be so much grieved if you threw away your
happiness."

"Oh! we are not really engaged," said Nelly, who felt a little
chilled. "I suppose we are, too: only nobody knows yet. Yes, father
knows him as well as I do, and he is very fond of him. Of course I
should not keep it from father; but he guessed at it himself. Only
it's such a long cruise, Cousin Horatia,--three years, I
suppose,--away off in China and Japan."

"I have known longer voyages than that," said Miss Dane, with a quiver
in her voice; and she rose suddenly, and walked away, this grave,
reserved woman, who seemed so contented and so comfortable. But, when
she came back, she asked Nelly a great deal about her lover, and
learned more of the girl's life than she ever had before. And they
talked together in the pleasantest way about this pleasant subject,
which was so close to Nelly's heart, until Melissa brought the candles
at ten o'clock, that being the hour of Miss Dane's bed-time.

But that night Miss Dane did not go to bed at ten: she sat by the
window in her room, thinking. The moon rose late; and after a little
while she blew out her candles, which were burning low. I suppose that
the years which had come and gone since the young sailor went away on
that last voyage of his had each added to her affection for him. She
was a person who clung the more fondly to youth as she left it the
farther behind.

This is such a natural thing: the great sorrows of our youth sometimes
become the amusements of our later years; we can only remember them
with a smile. We find that our lives look fairer to us, and we forget
what used to trouble us so much when we look back. Miss Dane certainly
had come nearer to truly loving the sailor than she had any one else;
and the more she had thought of it, the more it became the romance of
her life. She no longer asked herself, as she often had done in middle
life, whether, if he had lived and had come home, she would have loved
and married him. She had minded less and less, year by year, knowing
that her friends and neighbors thought her faithful to the love of her
youth. Poor, gay, handsome Joe Carrick! how fond he had been of her,
and how he had looked at her that day he sailed away out of Salem
Harbor on the