With which despairing remark, Miss Hitty put on her shawl and calash and departed; while Content filled her teakettle and prepared for supper.

But while the kettle boiled, she sat down by the window, and thought about Miss Hitty’s news.  Her first feeling was one of surprise at herself, a sort of sad surprise, to feel how entirely the love that once threatened to wreck her life had died out of it.  Hard, indeed, it is to believe that love can ever die!  The young girl clings passionately even to her grief, and rejects as an insult the idea that such deep regret can become less in all a lifetime,—­that love, immortal, vital, all-pervading, can perish from its prime, and flutter away into dust like the dead leaves of a rose.  Yet is it not the less true.  Time, cold reason, bitter experience, all poison its life-springs; respect, esteem, admiration, all turn away from a point that offers no foothold for their clinging; and she who weeps to-day tears hot as life-blood ten years hereafter may look with cool distaste at the past passion she has calmly weighed and measured, and thank God that her wish failed and her hope was cut down.  Yet there is a certain price to pay for all such experience, to such a heart as sat in the quieted bosom of Content.  Had it been possible for her to love again, she would have felt the change in her nature far less; but with the stream, the fountain also had dried, and she was conscious that an aridness, unpleasant and unnatural, threatened to desolate her soul, and her conflict with this had been the hardest battle of all.  It is so hard to love voluntarily,—­to satisfy one’s self with minor affections,—­to know that life offers no more its grandest culmination, its divinest triumph,—­to accept a succession of wax-lights because the sun and the day can return no more,—­above all, to feel that the capacity of receiving that sunlight is fled,—­that, so far, one’s own power is eternally narrowed, like the loss of a right hand or the blinding of a right eye!  Patience endures it, but even patience weeps to think how the fair intent of the Maker is marred,—­to see the mutilated image, the brokenness of perfection!

Not that ’Tenty was conscious of all these ideas.  They simplified themselves to her simple nature in a brief soliloquy, as she sat looking at the splendid haze of October, glorifying the scarlet maples and yellow elms of Deerfield Street, now steeped in a sunset of purpled crimson that struck its level rays across the sapphire hill-tops and transfigured briefly that melancholy earth dying into winter’s desolations.

“Well, it is curious to think I ever cared so much for anybody as I did for Ned Parker! poor, selfish cre’tur’, just playing with me for fun, as our kitty does with a mouse! and I re’lly thought he was a fine man!  Live and learn, I declare for’t!  He let me know what kind of cre’turs men are, though.  I haven’t had to be pestered with one all my life, I’m thankful:  that’s one good thing to come out of evil.  I don’t know but what I should like to feel as wide awake again as I did then; but ’tisn’t worth the price.”