“But it will be very bad for you, Miss Elizabeth.”

“I think it is right, Mrs. Nettley.”

So Mrs. Nettley went; and how their young lady passed her days and bore the quietude and the sorrow of them, the rest of the household marvelled together.

“She’d die, if there was dyin’ stuff in her,” said Clam; “but there ain’t.”

“What for should she die?” said Karen.

“I’m as near dead as I can be, myself,” was Clam’s conclusive reply.

“What ails you, girl?”

“I can’t catch my breath good among all these mountains,” said Clam.  “I guess the hills spiles the air hereabouts.”

“Your young lady don’t think so.”

“No,” said Clam, —­ “she looks at the mountains as if she’d swaller them whole —­ them and her Bible; —­ only she looks into that as if it would swaller her.”

“Poor bird! she’s beat down; —­ its too lonesome up here for her!” said Karen more tenderly than her wont was.

“That ain’t no sign she’ll go,” said Clam.  “She’s as notional as the Governor himself, when she takes a notion; only there’s some sense in his, and you never know where the sense of hers is till it comes out.”

“The house is so still, it’s pitiful to hear it,” said Karen.  “I never minded it when there wa’n’t nobody in it —­ I knowed the old family was all gone —­ but now I hear it, seems to me, the whole day long.  You can’t hear a foot, when you ain’t in there.”

“That’ll last awhile, maybe,” said Clam; “and then you’ll have a row.  ‘Tain’t in her to keep still more’n a certain length o’ time; and when she comes out, there’ll be a firing up, I tell ye.”

“The Lord ’ll keep his own,” said Karen rising from the table.  Which sentence Clam made nothing of.

Spite of her anticipations, the days, and the weeks, sped on smoothly and noiselessly.  Indeed more quietness, and not less, seemed to be the order of them.  Probably too much for Elizabeth’s good, if such a state of mere mind-life had been of long lasting.  It would not long have been healthy.  The stir of passion, at first, was fresh enough to keep her thoughts fresh; but as time went on there were fewer tears and a more settled borne-down look of sorrow.  Even her Bible, constantly studied, —­ even prayer, constantly made over it, did not hinder this.  Her active nature was in an unnatural state; it could not be well so.  And it sometimes burst the bounds she had set to it, and indulged in a passionate wrestling with the image of joys lost and longed for.  Meanwhile, the hot days of August were passed, the first heats of September were slowly gone; and days and nights began to cool off in earnest towards the frosty weather.

“If there ain’t some way found to keep Miss Haye’s eyes from cryin’, she won’t have ’em to do anything else with.  And she’ll want ’em, some day.”

Clam, like Elizabeth of old, having nobody else to speak to, was sometimes driven to speak to the nearest at hand.