l we cried ourselves
to sleep. When we woke in the morning, she was pacing it still.

* * * * *

Well, weeks wore into months, and the months became many years. More
than that we never knew. Some inquiry revealed the fact, after a while,
that a slight accident had occurred upon the Erie Railroad to the train
which she should have taken. There was some disabling, but no deaths,
the conductor had supposed. The car had fallen into the water. She might
not have been missed when the half-drowned passengers were all drawn
out.

So mother added a little crape to her widow's weeds, the key of the
closed room lay henceforth in her drawer, and all things went on as
before. To her children my mother was never gloomy,--it was not her way.
No shadow of household affliction was placed like a skeleton confronting
our uncomprehending joy. Of what those weeks and months and years were
to her,--a widow, and quite uncomforted in their dark places by any
human love,--she gave no sign. We thought her a shade paler, perhaps. We
found her often alone with her little Bible. Sometimes, on the Sabbath,
we missed her, and knew that she had gone into that closed room. But she
was just as tender with us in our little faults and sorrows, as merry
with us in our plays, as eager in our gayest plans, as she had always
been. As she had always been,--our mother.

And so the years slipped by, to her and to us. Winthrop went into
business in Boston; he never took to his books, and mother was too wise
to _push_ him through college; but I think she was disappointed. He was
her only boy, and she would have chosen for him the profession of his
father and grandfather. Clara and I graduated in our white dresses and
blue ribbons, like other girls, and came home to mother, crochet-work,
and Tennyson. And then something happened, as the veriest little
things--which, unnoticed and uncomprehended, hold the destinies of lives
in their control--will happen.

I mean that our old and long-tried cook, Bathsheba, who had been an
heirloom in the family, suddenly fell in love with the older sexton, who
had rung the passing-bell for every soul who died in the village for
forty years, and took it into her head to marry him, and desert our
kitchen for his little brown house under the hill.

So it came about that we hunted the township for a handmaiden; and it
also came about that our inquiring steps led us to the poor-house. A
stout, not ov