lows heaped up level, and the birches bent
down with their hair hidden, and the broad arms of the fir-trees loaded,
like sombre cotton-pickers going home heavily laden. Then to see the
brassy streak widen in the west, and the cold moon hang astonished upon
the dead tops of some distant pine-trees, was to enjoy a most beautiful
picture, with only the cost of a little fatigue.

When I got home, I found among my letters one from Mr. Ames. He could
not leave the country without pleading once more for my esteem, he
wrote. He had not intended to marry until he could think more calmly of
the past; but Lucy's mother had married again very suddenly into a
family where her daughter found it not pleasant to follow her. She was
poor, without very near relatives now, and friends, on both sides, had
urged the marriage. He had told her the state of his feelings, and
offered, if she could overlook the want of love, to be everything else
to her. She should never repent the step, and he prayed me, when I
thought of him, to think as leniently as possible. Alas! now I must not
think at all.

How I fought that thought,--how I worked by day, and studied deep into
the night, filling every hour full to the brim with activity, seems now
a feverish dream to me. Such dead thoughts will not be buried out of
sight, but lie cold and stiff, until the falling foliage of seasons of
labor and experience eddies round them, and moss and herbs venture to
grow over their decay, and birds come slowly and curiously to sing a
little there. In time, the mound is beautiful with the richness of the
growth, but the lord of the manor shudders as he walks that way. For
him, it is always haunted.

Thus with me. I knew that the sorrow was doing me good, that it had been
needed long, and I tried to profit by it, as the time came when I could
think calmly of it all. I thought I had ceased to love him; but the news
of her death (for she died in two years) taught me better. I heard of
him from others,--that he had been most tender and indulgent to a
selfish, heartless woman, who trifled with his best feelings, and almost
broke his heart before she went. I heard that he had one child, a poor
little blind baby, for whom the mother had neither love nor care, and
that he still continued abroad. But from himself I never heard a word.
No doubt he had forgotten me, as I had always thought he would.

More than two years passed, and spring-time was upon us, when I heard
that h