a tear that had gathered in her eye.  And then it chanced that, in turning over some clothes, she came upon the child’s slipper with a broken sandal string.  She uttered a great cry here—­the first she had uttered—­and caught it to her breast, kissing it passionately again and again, and rocking from side to side with a motion peculiar to her sex.  And then she took it to the window, the better to see it through her now streaming eyes.  Here she was taken with a sudden fit of coughing that she could not stifle with the handkerchief she put to her feverish lips.  And then she suddenly grew very faint.  The window seemed to recede before her, the floor to sink beneath her feet; and staggering to the bed, she fell prone upon it with the sandal and handkerchief pressed to her breast.  Her face was quite pale, the orbit of her eyes dark; and there was a spot upon her lip, another on her handkerchief, and still another on the white counterpane of the bed.

The wind had risen, rattling the window sashes and swaying the white curtains in a ghostly way.  Later, a gray fog stole softly over the roofs, soothing the wind-roughened surfaces, and in-wrapping all things in an uncertain light and a measureless peace.  She lay there very quiet—­for all her troubles, still a very pretty bride.  And on the other side of the bolted door the gallant bridegroom, from his temporary couch, snored peacefully.

A week before Christmas Day, 1870, the little town of Genoa, in the State of New York, exhibited, perhaps more strongly than at any other time, the bitter irony of its founders and sponsors.  A driving snowstorm that had whitened every windward hedge, bush, wall, and telegraph pole, played around this soft Italian Capital, whirled in and out of the great staring wooden Doric columns of its post office and hotel, beat upon the cold green shutters of its best houses, and powdered the angular, stiff, dark figures in its streets.  From the level of the street, the four principal churches of the town stood out starkly, even while their misshapen spires were kindly hidden in the low, driving storm.  Near the railroad station, the new Methodist chapel, whose resemblance to an enormous locomotive was further heightened by the addition of a pyramidal row of front steps, like a cowcatcher, stood as if waiting for a few more houses to be hitched on to proceed to a pleasanter location.  But the pride of Genoa—­the great Crammer Institute for Young Ladies—­stretched its bare brick length and reared its cupola plainly from the bleak Parnassian hill above the principal avenue.  There was no evasion in the Crammer Institute of the fact that it was a public institution.  A visitor upon its doorsteps, a pretty face at its window, were clearly visible all over the township.

The shriek of the engine of the four-o’clock Northern express brought but few of the usual loungers to the depot.  Only a single passenger alighted, and was driven away in the solitary waiting sleigh toward the Genoa Hotel.  And then the train sped away again, with that passionless indifference to human sympathies or curiosity peculiar to express trains; the one baggage truck was wheeled into the station again; the station door was locked; and the stationmaster went home.