The thing in Susan’s heart was not despair.  There was the suffering that comes from the blight of a sweet hope, from the rude dispossession of a good long withheld.  But overriding everything else was humiliation—­a feeling of degradation, such as some deed of shame would engender.  Her spirit was in the dust, for she knew now that she had given her love unasked.  Was not this enough, after all the years of longing and dreary waiting and sickening commonplace?  Could not the Fates have let her off from this cup, so bitter to a proud woman’s lips?  Why should she be delivered over to an unworthy love?  Why should they exact this uttermost farthing of anguish her heart could pay?  But is he unworthy? is this proved? asked the sweet voice of Hope.  Then the face which you were sure could never brighten, did brighten, but, alas! so little; for there was another voice, a voice that dismayed:  “Why otherwise the silence, the mystery?” Persistently the question was repeated, till Mrs. Summerhaze came in and asked Susan to do some marketing for dinner.

“You look all fagged, anyway:  the fresh air ’ll be good for you.”

So Susan put on her bonnet and went out, feeling there was nothing could do her any good.  She drew her veil down, the better to shut away her suffering from people, and a little way from home turned into a meat-market.  She was in the centre of the shop before she discovered Mr. Falconer a few yards away, his back turned to her.  She involuntarily caught at her veil to make sure it was closely drawn.  She held it securely down, and hurried away at random to the remotest part of the shop, though her ear was all the while strained to hear what Mr. Falconer was saying.

He was ordering sundry packages to be sent to No. 649 North Jefferson street—­Susan’s house.  In her remote corner, from behind her veil, with eager eyes Susan looked at the face that to her had been so noble, at the form which had seemed full of graceful strength.  She would have yielded up her life there to have had that face and form now as it had been to her.  He went out of the shop, and she went about making her purchases in a dazed kind of way that caused the shopman to stare.  Then she wandered up the street past her home to 649 North Jefferson street, to the house she had built with such abounding pride and pleasure.  How changed it now seemed!  It had become a haunted house—­haunted by the ghosts of her faith and peace.

For three days Susan as much as possible kept away from the family, and appeared very much engaged with Prescott’s Conquest of Peru.  But at the breakfast-table on the third day she received a start.  Gertrude and Tom had been at a party the evening before. (They averaged some four parties a week.) Tom looked surly and Gertrude defiant.

“Why, Tom, what’s the matter with you?” the mother asked. “’Pears to me I never did see you so pouty as you be this morning.  What’s gone crooked?”