ched
untidiness. She would not have liked even to touch him. She had never
imagined him grown old: he had always been young to her. It was a
great mercy he had not known her; it would have been a most miserable
position for them both; and yet she thought, with sad surprise, that
she had not known she had changed so entirely. She thought of the
different ways their roads in life had gone; she pitied him; she cried
about him more than once; and she wished that she could know he was
dead. He might have been such a brave, good man, with his strong will
and resolute courage. God forgive him for the wickedness which his
strength had been made to serve! "God forgive him!" said Miss Horatia
to herself sadly over and over again. She wondered if she ought to
have let him go away, and so have lost sight of him; but she could not
do any thing else. She suffered terribly on his account; she had a
pity, such as God's pity must be, for even his wilful sins.

So her romance was all over with; yet the towns-people still whispered
it to strangers, and even Melissa and Nelly never knew how she had
lost her lover in so strange and sad a way in her latest years. Nobody
noticed much change; but Melissa saw that the whale's tooth had
disappeared from its place in Miss Horatia's room, and her old friends
said to each other that she began to show her age a great deal. She
seemed really like an old woman now; she was not the woman she had
been a year ago.

This is all of the story; but I so often wish when a story comes to an
end that I knew what became of the people afterward. Shall I tell you
that Miss Horatia clings more and more fondly to her young cousin
Nelly; and that Nelly will stay with her a great deal before she
marries, and sometimes afterward, when the lieutenant goes away to
sea? Shall I say that Miss Dane seems as well satisfied and
comfortable as ever, though she acknowledges she is not so young as
she used to be, and somehow misses something out of her life? It is
the contentment of winter rather than that of summer: the flowers are
out of bloom for her now, and under the snow. And Melissa, will not
she always be the same, with a quaintness and freshness and toughness
like a cedar-tree, to the end of her days? Let us hope they will live
on together and be untroubled this long time yet, the two good women;
and let us wish Nelly much pleasure, and a sweet soberness and
fearlessness as she grows older and finds life a harder thin