happen!"

"To which of them?" asked Miss Cordova satirically. In spite of a good
deal of nonsense in her composition, there was an under-stratum of
shrewd wisdom, inherited, no doubt, from her New England mother, and
her admiration for her more brilliant friend did not blind her to
certain irregularities of disposition and many weak points in Pauline's
character, inseparable from her abnormal bringing up. "I wouldn't
excite myself so much if I were you," continued the other. "I've
learnt not to worry about men harming other men; it's when they come to
harming women I think it's time to worry about them. Look at me--I
don't know for certain whether Ned Stanbury's alive or not; I know
Schenk's alive, although he may not last long, but I never worry about
their meeting. But if Schenk came here to disturb me, or went to my
mother's to get the children from her, then I might take on."

"But, my dear, everything's different in my case!" exclaimed Miss
Clairville, fretfully pacing up and down the common room.

A village dressmaker, one of the numerous Tremblays, had, in a great
hurry, made her a black dress; her face showed sallow against it now,
and even her hands, always conspicuously well-kept and white, looked
yellow and old as they hung down at the side of her tall, straight
figure, or clasped and unclasped restlessly behind her. A key to much
of her present unhappy mood lay in her last exclamation; family pride,
another kind of pride in her personal knowledge of the world, in her
consciousness of gifts and physical attractions, the feeling that she
was in every way Miss Cordova's superior, all this rendered Pauline's
affairs, in her own eyes, of vastly greater importance and intrinsic
excellence and interest than those of her companion. A
Clairville--there could be no doubt of this--was a lady, a gentlewoman,
to use an incorruptible phrase, whereas, no matter how unsmirched the
simple annals of Sadie Cordova, the small farm, the still smaller shop
were behind the narrow beginnings of the painstaking and pious Yankee
shoemaker who retired in middle life to the country and died there.
Pauline's father and brother, both weakly degenerates, could
nevertheless boast of a lineage not inconsiderable for older lands, of
possessions identified with the same, such as portraits and books and
furniture, of connexions through marriage with the law and the militia,
and, above all, of having lived on their land for very many y