l of much of your own time, ample leisure to enjoy it.
You would give only your chances of actual marriage for perhaps five
years, for poor Allan cannot live longer than that at his present state
of retrogression, and some part of every day to seeing that Allan was
not neglected. If you bestow on him half of the interest and effort I
have known of your giving any one of a dozen little immigrant boys, his
mother has nothing to fear for him."

Mr. De Guenther stopped with a grave little bow, and he and his wife
waited for the reply.

The Liberry Teacher sat silent, her eyes on her slim hands, that were
roughened and reddened by constant hurried washings to get off the dirt
of the library books. It was true--a good deal of it, anyhow. And one
thing they had not said was true also: her sunniness and accuracy and
strength, her stock-in-trade, were wearing thin under the pressure of
too long hours and too hard work and too few personal interests. Her
youth was worn down. And--marriage? What chance of love and marriage had
she, a working-girl alone, too poor to see anything of the class of men
she would be willing to marry? She had not for years spent six hours
with a man of her own kind and age. She had not even been specially in
love, that she could remember, since she was grown up. She did not feel
much, now, as if she ever would be. All that she had to give up in
taking this offer was her freedom, such as it was--and those fluttering
perhapses that whisper such pleasant promises when you are young. But,
then, she wouldn't be young so _very_ much longer. Should she--she put
it to herself crudely--should she wait long, hard, closed-in years in
the faith that she would learn to be absolutely contented, or that some
man she could love would come to the cheap boarding-house, or the little
church she attended occasionally when she was not too tired, fall in
love with her work-dimmed looks at sight, and--marry her? It had not
happened all these years while her girlhood had been more attractive and
her personality more untired. There was scarcely a chance in a hundred
for her of a kind lover-husband and such dear picture-book children as
she had seen Eva Atkinson convoying. Well--her mind suddenly came up
against the remembrance, as against a sober fact, that in her passionate
wishings of yesterday she had not wished for a lover-husband, nor for
children. She had asked for a husband who would give her money, and
leisure to be res