old and prematurely disappointed, she had all
the inexperience of girlhood with the cares of maternity, and kept in
her family circle the freshness of an old maid's misogynistic
antipathies with a certain guilty and remorseful consciousness of
widowhood. She supported the meagre household to which her husband had
contributed only the extra mouths to feed with reproachful astonishment
and weary incapacity. She had long since grown tired of trying to make
both ends meet, of which she declared "the Lord had taken one." During
her two years' widowhood she had waited on Providence, who by a
pleasing local fiction had been made responsible for the disused and
cast-off furniture and clothing which, accompanied with scriptural
texts, found their way mysteriously into her few habitable rooms. The
providential manna was not always fresh; the ravens who fed her and her
little ones with flour from the Sugar Mills did not always select the
best quality. Small wonder that, sitting by her lonely hearthstone,--a
borrowed stove that supplemented the unfinished fireplace,--surrounded
by her mismatched furniture and clad in misfitting garments, she had
contracted a habit of sniffling during her dreary watches. In her
weaker moments she attributed it to grief; in her stronger intervals
she knew that it sprang from damp and draught.

In her apathy the sound of horses' hoofs at her unprotected door even
at that hour neither surprised nor alarmed her. She lifted her head as
the door opened and the pale face of Gideon Deane looked into the room.
She moved aside the cradle she was rocking, and, taking a saucepan and
tea-cup from a chair beside her, absently dusted it with her apron, and
pointing to the vacant seat said, "Take a chair," as quietly as if he
had stepped from the next room instead of the outer darkness.

"I'll put up my horse first," said Gideon gently.

"So do," responded the widow briefly.

Gideon led his horse across the inclosure, stumbling over the heaps of
rubbish, dried chips, and weather-beaten shavings with which it was
strewn, until he reached the unfinished barn, where he temporarily
bestowed his beast. Then taking a rusty axe, by the faint light of the
stars, he attacked one of the fallen trees with such energy that at the
end of ten minutes he reappeared at the door with an armful of cut
boughs and chips, which he quietly deposited behind the stove.
Observing that he was still standing as if looking for some