nomalous one,--a grown
woman, with much of the dependence of a child. She must have all the
jars and tasks and frets of family life, without the relief of
housewifely invention and authority. God and her own heart will teach
her in time what she owes to you. Never fear for that. But bear long
with her. Do not exact too much. The life you give her did not come at
her asking. Consider this well; and do not press the debt beyond its
due.

"I don't see that there is ever going to be any end to anything!"
gasped Sharley at night between Moppet's buttons.

This set her to thinking. What if one made an end?

She went out one cold, gray afternoon in the thick of a snow-storm and
wandered up and down the railroad. It was easy walking upon the
sleepers, the place was lonely, and she had come out to be alone. She
liked the beat of the storm in her face for a while, the sharp turns of
the wind, and the soft touch of the snow that was drifting in little
heaps about her feet. Then she remembered of how small use it was to
like anything in the world now, and her face grew as wild as the storm.

Fancy yourself hemmed in with your direst grief by a drifting sleet in
such a voiceless, viewless place as that corpse-like track,--the
endless, painless track, stretching away in the white mystery, at peace,
like all dead things.

What Sharley should have done was to go home as straight as she could
go, put on dry stockings, and get her supper. What she did was to
linger, as all people linger, in the luxury of their first
wretchedness,--till the uncanny twilight fell and shrouded her in. Then
a thought struck her.

A freight-train was just coming in, slowly but heavily. Sharley, as she
stepped aside to let it pass, fixed her eyes upon it for a moment, then,
with a little hesitation, stopped to pick up a bit of iron that lay at
her feet,--a round, firm rod-end,--and placed it diagonally upon the
rail. The cars rumbled by and over it. Sharley bent to see. It was
crushed to a shapeless twist. Her face whitened. She sat down and
shivered a little. But she did not go home. The Evening Accommodation
was due now in about ten minutes.

Girls, if you think I am telling a bit of sensational fiction, I wish
you would let me know.

"It would be quick and easy," thought Sharley. The man of whom she had
read in the Journal last night,--they said he must have found it all
over in an instant. An instant was a very short time! And forty
years,--and