And so the weeks glided into months, and the months into years, and I was nineteen years old.  Four years had passed since the morning when George Hammond first awakened my self-esteem, first gave me the impulse to raise myself out of my awkwardness and ignorance, to make of myself something better than one of the worn, depressed, dispirited women I saw around me.  Had I done anything for myself?  I asked.  I was not educated, I had no acquirements, so-called; but I had read, and read well, some good and famous books, and I knew that I had made their contents my own.  I was richer for their beauties and excellences.  With my self-respect had come, too, a desire to improve my surroundings, and, as far as they lay under my control, they had been improved.  Our household was more orderly; some little attempt at neatness and decoration was to be seen around and in the house, and my own room, where I had full sway, was beautiful in its rustic adornment.

My glass, too, the poor little three-cornered, paper-framed companion of my girlhood, showed me some change.  The complexion had cleared, the hair had taken a decided brown, and the angular figure had rounded and filled.  It was hardly a week since, standing in Miss Hammond’s kitchen counting over with her servant-girl the basketful of fresh eggs which were sent from our house every week, I had overheard Mr. Hammond say to his sister,—­

“Really, Janet Rainsford has improved so much that she is almost pretty.  Her brown hair tones so well with her quiet eyes; and as to her mouth, it is really lovely, so finely cut, and with so much character in it.”

What was it to me that Miss Hammond’s cold voice answered,—­

“I think you make a fool of yourself, George, and of that girl too, going on as you do about her.  She will be entirely unfitted for her state of life, and for the people she must live with.”

Her words had hardly time to chill my heart when it bounded again, as I turned hurriedly away and passed under the window on my way out, at hearing her brother’s answer:—­

“There is too much in her to be spoiled.  I like her.  She has talent and character, and I cannot understand, Esther, why you are so prejudiced against her.”

There were others besides Mr. Hammond who thought me improved and who liked me.  Tom Salyers never let an evening pass without dropping into our house on his way home from the store, where he was a sort of overseer or salesman,—­never failed to bring in its season the earliest wild-flower or the freshest fruit,—­had thoroughly searched Catlettsburg for books to please me,—­nay, had once sent an indefinite order to a Cincinnati bookseller to put up twenty dollars’ worth of the best books for a lady, which order was filled by a collection of the Annuals of six years back and a few unsalable modern novels.  I read them all most conscientiously and gratefully, and would not listen for a moment to Mr. Hammond’s jests about them; but, a few weeks afterwards, I almost repented of my complaisance, when Tom Salyers took me at an advantage while rowing me down to Louisa one afternoon, and, seeing a long stretch of river before him without shoal or sand-bar, leisurely laid up his oars, and, letting the boat float with the stream, asked me, abruptly, to marry him, and go with him up into the country to a new place which he meant to clear and farm.