“Your kissing me to-day, and another girl to-morrow:  your telling me I was every thing to you one week, and saying exactly the same thing to another girl the next.  It would be hard enough to bear if we were only friends, but as sweet-hearts, as husband and wife, it would be impossible.  No Tom, I tell you the truth, I could not stand it.”

She spoke strongly, unhesitatingly, and for an instant there flowed out of her soft eyes that wild fierce spark, latent even in these quiet humble natures, which is dangerous to meddle with.

Tom did not attempt it.  He felt all was over.  Whether he had lost or gained:  whether he was glad or sorry, he hardly knew.

“I’m not going to take this back, any how,” he said, “fiddling” with the brooch; and then going up to her, he attempted, with trembling hands, to refasten it in her collar.

The familiar action, his contrite look, were too much.  People who have once loved one another, though the love is dead (for love can die), are not able to bury it all at once, or if they do, its pale ghost will still come knocking at the door of their hearts, “Let me in, let me in!”

Elizabeth ought, I know, in proper feminine dignity, to have bade Tom farewell without a glance or a touch.  But she did not.  When he had fastened her brooch she looked up in his familiar face a sorrowful, wistful, hungering look, and then clung about his neck: 

“O Tom, Tom, I was so fond of you!”

And Tom mingled his tears with hers, and kissed her many times, and even felt his old affection returning, making him half oblivious of Esther; but mercifully—­for love rebuilt upon lost faith is like a house founded upon sands—­the door opened, and Esther herself came in.

Laughing, smirking, pretty Esther, who, thoughtless as she was, had yet the sense to draw back when she saw them.

“Come here, Esther!” Elizabeth called, imperatively; and she came.

“Esther, I’ve given up Tom; you may take him if he wants you.  Make him a good wife, and I’ll forgive you.  If not—­”

She could not say another word.  She shut the door upon them, and crept up stairs, conscious only of one thought—­if she only could get away from them, and never see either of their faces any more!

And in this fate was kind to her, though in that awful way in which fate—­say rather Providence—­often works; cutting, with one sharp blow, some knot that our poor, feeble, mortal fingers have been long laboring at in vain, or making that which seemed impossible to do the most natural, easy, and only thing to be done.

How strangely often in human life “one woe doth tread upon the other’s heel!” How continually, while one of those small private tragedies that I have spoken of is being enacted within, the actors are called upon to meet some other tragedy from without, so that external energy counteracts inward emotion, and holy sympathy with another’s sufferings stifles all personal pain.  That truth about sorrows coming “in battalions” may have a divine meaning in it—­may be one of those mysterious laws which guide the universe—­laws that we can only trace in fragments, and guess at the rest, believing, in deep humility, that one day we shall “know even as we are known.”