She rose quietly and folded the paper, with the loving care and lingering delay with which a mother smooths the shroud that wraps her baby.  She tied it with a pure white ribbon, so that it looked not unlike a bridal gift; and pressing her lips to it long and silently, she laid it in the old drawer.  There it still remained.  The paper was as white, the ribbon was as pure as ever.  Only the flowers were withered.  But her heart was not a flower.

“Well, Aunt Martha,” said she, several months after the death of old Christopher Burt, “I really think you are coming back to this world again.”

The young woman smiled, while the older one busily drove her needle.

“Why,” continued Amy, “here is a white collar; and you have actually smiled at least six times in as many months!”

The older woman still said nothing.  The old sadness was in her eyes, but it certainly had become more natural—­more human, as it were—­and the melodramatic gloom in which she had hitherto appeared was certainly less obvious.

“Amy,” she said at length, “God leads his erring children through the dark valley, but he does lead them—­he does not leave them.  I did not know how deeply I had sinned until I heard the young man Summerfield, who came to see me even in this room.”

She looked up and about, as if to catch some lingering light upon the wall.

“And it was Lawrence Newt’s preacher who made me feel that there was hope even for me.”

She sewed on quietly.

“I thank God for those two men; and for one other,” she added, after a little pause.

Amy only looked, she did not ask who.

“Lawrence Newt,” said Aunt Martha, calmly looking at Amy—­“Lawrence Newt, who came to me as a brother comes to a sister, and said, ’Be of good cheer!’ Amy, what is the matter with you and Lawrence Newt?”

“How, aunty?”

“How many months since you met here?”

“It was several months ago, aunty.”

Aunt Martha sat quietly sewing, and after some time said,

“He is no longer a young man.”

“But, Aunt Martha, he is not old.”

Still sewing, the grave woman looked at the burning cheeks of her younger companion.  Amy did not speak.

The older woman continued:  “When you and he went from this room months ago I supposed you would be his wife before now.”

Still Amy did not speak.  It was not because she was unwilling to confide entirely in Aunt Martha, but there was something she did not wish to say to herself.  Yet suddenly, as if lifted upon a calm, irresistible purpose—­as a leaf is lifted upon the long swell of the sea—­she said, with her heart as quiet as her eyes,

“I do not think Lawrence Newt loves me.”

The next moment the poor leaf is lost in the trough of the sea.  The next moment Amy Waring’s heart beat tumultuously; she felt as if she should fall from her seat.  Her eyes were blind with hot tears.  Aunt Martha did not look up—­did not start or exclaim—­but deliberately threaded her needle carefully, and creased her work with her thumb-nail.  After a little while, during which the sea was calming itself, she said, slowly, repeating Amy’s words syllable by syllable,