hadn’t been that Miss Brown——she that lived round the corner there; the town’s well quit of her now, poor thing!——went to saying the same stuff to Faith, and telling her all that other folks said. And Faith went home in a passion,——some of your timid kind nothing ever abashes, and nobody gets to the windward of them,——and, being perfectly furious, fell to accusing Dan of having brought her to this, so that Dan actually believed he had, and was cut to the quick with contrition, and told her that all the reparation he could make he was waiting and wishing to make, and then there came floods of tears. 

Some women seem to have set out with the idea that life’s a desert for them to cross, and they’ve laid in a supply of water-bags accordingly, but it’s the meanest weapon! And then, again, there’s men that are iron, and not to be bent under calamities, that these tears can twist round your little finger. Well, I suppose Faith concluded ’t was no use to go hungry because her bread wasn’t buttered on both sides, but she always acted as if she’d condescended ninety degrees in marrying Dan, and Dan always seemed to feel that he’d done her a great injury; and there it was.

I kept in the house for a time; mother was worse,——and I thought the less Dan saw of me the better; I kind of hoped he’d forget, and find his happiness where it ought to be. But the first time I saw him, when Faith had been his wife all the spring, there was the look in his eyes that told of the ache in his heart. Faith wasn’t very happy herself, of course, though she was careless; and she gave him trouble,——keeping company with the young men just as before; and she got into a way of flying straight to me, if Dan ventured to reprove her ever so lightly; and stormy nights, when he was gone, and in his long trips, she always locked up her doors and came over and got into my bed; and she was one of those that never listened to reason, and it was none so easy for me, you may suppose.

Things had gone on now for some three years, and I’d about lived in my books,——I’d tried to teach Faith some, but she wouldn’t go any further than newspaper stories,——when one day Dan took her and me to sail, and we were to have had a clam-chowder on the Point, if the squall hadn’t come. As it was, we’d got to put up with chicken-broth, and it couldn’t have been better, considering who made it. It was getting on toward the cool of the May evening, the sunset was round on the other side of the house, but all the east looked as if the sky had been stirred up with currant-juice, till it grew purple and dark, and then the two lighthouses flared out and showed us the lip of froth lapping the 

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