A flush of gratified feeling passed over Mrs. Katy’s face;—­for one flower laid on the shrine which we keep in our hearts for the dead is worth more than any gift to our living selves.

We will not now pursue our party further, lest you, Reader, get more theological tea than you can drink.  We will not recount the numerous nice points raised by Mr. Simeon Brown and adjusted by the Doctor,—­and how Simeon invariably declared, that that was the way in which he disposed of them himself, and how he had thought it out ten years ago.

We will not relate, either, too minutely, how Mary changed color and grew pale and red in quick succession, when Mr. Simeon Brown incidentally remarked, that the “Monsoon” was going to set sail that very afternoon, for her three-years’ voyage.  Nobody noticed it in the busy amenities,—­the sudden welling and ebbing of that one poor little heart-fountain.

So we go,—­so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk!  We drop 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