and her lips were bitten blue, still she stood erect and her head
turned queenly as ever. The glance she threw to the man who called her
wife was enough to have pierced him. Turning to Mark, she said,--

"If you will come to-morrow,--or Monday, rather,--you can have
possession of the house and property. My own things can be easily
removed, and it will be a simple matter to make ready for new comers."

"I could keep them out of it a year, if I chose," said Mr. Clamp.

"But I do not choose," said she, with superb haughtiness.

"Wal, good mornin'," said Mr. Alford.

As they left the house, Mrs. Clamp sat down in the silent room.
Without, the wind whistled through the naked trees and whirled up
spiral columns of leaves; the river below was cased in ice; the
passers-by looked pinched with cold, and cast hurried glances over
their shoulders at the ill-fated house and the adjacent
burying-ground. Within, the commotion, the chill, the hurry, the
fright, were even more intense. What now remained to be done? Her son,
vanquished in love by a blacksmith's _protege_, had fled, and left her
to meet her fate alone. The will had been discovered, and, as if by a
special interposition of Providence, the victim of her son's passions
had been the instrument of vengeance. The lawyer who had worked upon
her fears had proved unable to protect her. The estate was out of her
hands; the property with which she had hoped to escape from the hated
town and join her son was seized; she was a ruined, disgraced woman.
She had faced the battery of curious eyes, as she walked with the
husband she despised to the Sunday services; but what screen had she
now that her pride was humbled? The fearful struggle in the mind of
the lonely woman in the chill and silent room, who shall describe it?
She denied admission to the servants and her husband, and through the
long evening still sat by the darkening window, far into the dim and
gusty night.

Squire Clamp went to bed moody, if not enraged; but when, on waking,
he found his wife still absent, he became alarmed. Early in the
morning he tracked her through a light snow, that had sifted down
during the night, to the river-bank, at the bend where the current
keeps the ice from closing over. An hour after, some neighbors,
hastily summoned, made a search at the dam. One of them, crossing the
flume by Mr. Hardwick's shop, broke the newly-formed ice and there
found the drifting body of Mrs. Clamp. Her right han