bout all the time with such a dreadful face, and she
won't tell me. Oh, Aunt Sylvia, is it because you don't want me to
marry Horace?"

Sylvia spoke, hardly moving her thin lips. "I have nothing whatever
against your marriage," she said. "I did think at first that you were
better off as you were, but now I don't feel so."

"But you act so." Rose stumbled to her feet and ran sobbing out of
the room.

Henry turned to his wife, who sat like a statue. "Sylvia, you ought
to be ashamed of yourself," he said, in a bewildered tone. "Here you
are taking all the pleasure out of that poor child's little
love-affair, going about as you do."

"There are other things besides love-affairs," said Sylvia, in a
strange, monotonous tone, almost as if she were deaf and dumb, and
had no knowledge of inflections. "There are affairs between the soul
and its Maker that are more important than love betwixt men and
women."

Sylvia did not look at Henry. She still gazed straight ahead, with
that expression of awful self-review. The thought crossed Henry's
mind that she was more like some terrible doll with a mechanical
speech than a living woman. He went up to her and took her hands.
They were lying stiffly on her lap, in the midst of soft white
cambric and lace--some bridal lingerie which she was making for Rose.
"Look here, Sylvia," said Henry, "you don't mean that you are
fretting about--what you told me?"

"No," said Sylvia, in her strange voice.

"Then what--?"

Sylvia shook off his hands and rose to her feet. Her scissors dropped
with a thud. She kept the fluffy white mass over her arm. Henry
picked up the scissors. "Here are your scissors," said he.

Sylvia paid no attention. She was looking at him with stern, angry
eyes.

"What I have to bear I have to bear," said she. "It is nothing
whatever to you. It is nothing whatever to any of you. I want to be
let alone. If you don't like to see my face, don't look at it. None
of you have any call to look at it. I am doing what I think is right,
and I want to be let alone."

She went out of the room, leaving Henry standing with her scissors in
his hand.

After supper that night he could not bear to remain with Sylvia,
sewing steadily upon Rose's wedding finery, and still wearing that
terrible look on her face. Rose and Horace were in the parlor. Henry
went down to Sidney Meeks's for comfort.

"Something is on my wife's mind," he told Sidney, when the two men
were alone in the pl