They might have been graceful shoulders.  The hand which had scarred her face had rounded and bent them,—­her own mother’s hand.

Of a bottle always on the shelf; of brutal scowls where smiles should be; of days when she wandered dinnerless and supperless in the streets through loathing of her home; of nights when she sat out in the snow-drifts through terror of her home; of a broken jug one day, a blow, a fall, then numbness, and the silence of the grave,—­she had her distant memories; of waking on a sunny afternoon, in bed, with a little cracked glass upon the opposite wall; of creeping out and up to it in her night-dress; of the ghastly twisted thing that looked back at her.  Through the open window she heard the children laughing and leaping in the sweet summer air.  She crawled into bed and shut her eyes.  She remembered stealing out at last, after many days, to the grocery round the corner for a pound of coffee.  “Humpback! humpback!” cried the children,—­the very children who could leap and laugh.

One day she and little Del Ivory made mud-houses after school.

“I’m going to have a house of my own, when I’m grown up,” said pretty Del; “I shall have a red carpet and some curtains; my husband will buy me a piano.”

“So will mine, I guess,” said Sene, simply.

“Yours!" Del shook back her curls; “who do you suppose would ever marry you?”

One night there was a knocking at the door, and a hideous, sodden thing borne in upon a plank.  The crowded street, tired of tipping out little children, had tipped her mother staggering through the broken fence.  At the funeral she heard some one say, “How glad Sene must be!”

Since that, life had meant three things,—­her father, the mills, and Richard Cross.

“You’re a bit put out that the young fellow didn’t stay to supper,—­eh, Senath?” the old man said, laying down his boot.

“Put out!  Why should I be?  His time is his own.  It’s likely to be the Union that took him out,—­such a fine day for the Union!  I’m sure I never expected him to go to walk with me every Saturday afternoon.  I’m not a fool to tie him up to the notions of a crippled girl.  Supper is ready, father.”

But her voice rasped bitterly.  Life’s pleasures were so new and late and important to her, poor thing!  It went hard to miss the least of them.  Very happy people will not understand exactly how hard.

Old Martyn took off his leather apron with a troubled face, and, as he passed his daughter, gently laid his tremulous, stained hand upon her head.  He felt her least uneasiness, it would seem, as a chameleon feels a cloud upon the sun.

She turned her face softly and kissed him.  But she did not smile.

She had planned a little for this holiday supper; saving three mellow-cheeked Louise Bonnes—­expensive pears just then—­to add to their bread and molasses.  She brought them out from the closet, and watched her father eat them.