out a common piece of news,--"Mr. So-and-so is
dead,--Miss Such-a-one is married,--such a ship has sailed,"--and lo,
on our right hand or our left, some heart has sunk under the news
silently,--gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble
rising to tell its drowning pang. And this--God help us!--is what we
call living!

CHAPTER V.

THE LETTER.

Mary returned to the quietude of her room. The red of twilight had
faded, and the silver moon, round and fair, was rising behind the thick
boughs of the apple-trees. She sat down in the window, thoughtful and
sad, and listened to the crickets, whose ignorant jollity often sounds
as mournfully to us mortals as ours may to superior beings. There the
little hoarse, black wretches were scraping and creaking, as if life
and death were invented solely for their pleasure, and the world were
created only to give them a good time in it. Now and then a little wind
shivered among the boughs, and brought down a shower of white petals
which shimmered in the slant beams of the moonlight; and now a ray
touched some tall head of grass, and forthwith it blossomed into
silver, and stirred itself with a quiet joy, like a new-born saint just
awaking in paradise. And ever and anon came on the still air the soft
eternal pulsations of the distant sea, sound mournfulest, most
mysterious, of all the harpings of Nature. It was the sea,--the deep,
eternal sea,--the treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea; and
_he_ was perhaps at this moment being borne away on it,--away,
away,--to what sorrows, to what temptations, to what dangers, she knew
not. She looked along the old, familiar, beaten path by which he came,
by which he went, and thought, "What if he never should come back?"
There was a little path through the orchard out to a small elevation in
the pasture-lot behind, whence the sea was distinctly visible, and Mary
had often used her low-silled window as a door when she wanted to pass
out thither; so now she stepped out, and, gathering her skirts back
from the dewy grass, walked thoughtfully along the path and gained the
hill. Newport harbor lay stretched out in the distance, with the rising
moon casting a long, wavering track of silver upon it; and vessels,
like silver-winged moths, were turning and shifting slowly to and fro
upon it, and one stately ship in full sail passing fairly out under her
white canvas, graceful as some grand, snowy bird. Mary's beating heart
told her th