Winter set in with furious storms and heavy snows, but, strange to say, Aunt ’Viny grew better; she could sit up; at length could move about; and at last, one night when she sat by the fire knitting, suddenly looked up at ’Tenty and said,—­

“You haven’t seen Miss Parker lately, have you, Content?”

’Tenty shivered a little.

“No, I have not, Aunt ’Viny.”

“Well, it appears as though you should go and see her; she’s a weakly woman, but she can set her back up dreadful against the Lord’s doings, and I don’t know but what such kind of people need comfortin’ more ’n others.  It’s a world full o’ gales, this is, and everybody hasn’t learnt the grass’s lesson, to bend when the wind blows.”

“The Lord sends the wind, Aunt ’Viny.”

“The Lord sends everything, only folks don’t allow it; they’d ruther lay it to the door of man, so’s to feel free to worry.  But the worst thing He ever does send to people is their own way, ’Tenty; and you’ll know it before you die.”

’Tenty turned away to her work, hardly convinced by Miss ’Viny’s wisdom, and inwardly thinking she should like to try her own way for all that.  However, ’Tenty suffered far less than she might have done, for indignation helped her; the feeling that Ned Parker had deliberately amused himself with her, while she was in mortal earnest, had lowered him not a little from his height.  Then Aunt ’Viny’s care diverted her sad thoughts from herself, by sending her upon daily errands to the poor and the sick, so that ’Tenty’s pleasant face and voice became the hope of the hour to more than one poverty-stricken or dying woman; and so her own grief, measured by theirs, shrank and withdrew itself day by day, and became something she could now and then forget.  And more than all, her naturally sweet temperament and healthy organization helped her to recover.

Myriads have died of a broken heart, no doubt, but it was physiologically broken; grief torments into sleeplessness, sleeplessness destroys the appetite, then strength goes, the circulation fails, and any latent evil lurking in the constitution springs on the helpless and willing victim and completes its work.  This is a shockingly unromantic and material view to take of the matter, and brings to nought poems by the hundred and novels by the thousand; but is it not, after all, more true to God and human nature to believe in this view than to think He made men or women to be the sport of passion and circumstance, even to their destruction?

‘Tenty Scran’ was too healthy to break her heart,—­and too unselfish; so she gradually recovered her bright bloom, and went to her work, and took care of Aunt ’Viny, as energetically and gayly as ever.  Hannah-Ann Hall married a lawyer from Meriden, and moved away, quite consoled for Ned, within three years; but ’Tenty favored no lovers, though one or two approached her.  There are some—­women who are like the aloe,—­their life admits