t up until nightfall, by which time she
had bellowed herself hoarse. Suke could make nothing out of it, and no
doubt dropped to sleep, theorizing on the perversity of remote
contingencies, and wondering why it was that she had spent all the
long hours of that breezy summer day in the lot, and the companion of
her outings in the house.

The late afternoon found Mell in dainty attire, seated on the front
porch, gazing wistfully in the direction of the Bigge House. He had
not found her in the meadow in the morning, perhaps, he would seek for
her in the little house on the hill, in the evening. It could not be
that he had avoided paying her any attention that could be noticed by
others; she had sometimes thought so, but then it could not be. She
dismissed the idea; it was too uncomplimentary to herself, and too
defamatory towards him.

But the slow hours dragged on; he came not. Mell sat alone. At ten
o'clock she crept sadly into bed--into bed, but not into the profound
slumber of youth and a mind at ease. Far into the night, her unquiet
thoughts were yet heaving to and fro; advancing as restless billows of
the sea, retreating as vaporous cloud-mists in the sky. Her snow-white
bed--a feathered nest--erst so well suited to light-hearted repose,
had changed its flexible lines of comfort into rigid lines of care.

Dropping to sleep at last, Mell dreamed she had made the world all
over, from pole to pole, after a new model and on a modern plan, and
having fitted it up expressly for her own needs, found it ever so much
pleasanter, and a great improvement on the old.

It was upon the same old world, however, she opened her eyes the next
morning, and into one of its most worrying days, holding, indeed, more
than its share of disappointment and worry.

But when the third day was drawing to its weary close, and her
longing heart longed still unsatisfied, existence had become a burden
almost insupportable to poor Mell. For the third time she donned her
prettiest dress. He _must_ come to-day. Out again upon the little
porch, with a book in her hand, and trying to read, Mell was oppressed
with a sense of extreme isolation, a wasting famine of the heart, a
parching thirst of the eye. In her despairing loneliness, incapable of
any other occupation, she scanned eagerly every passer by; brooded
deeply on many passing thoughts. This lonely waiting, in a small waste
corner of the great wide universe, for a girl of Mell's ambitious turn