Week after week, Anna had yielded to Sanderson’s entreaties and kept her marriage a secret from her mother.  At first he had sent her remittances of money with frequent regularity, but, lately, they had begun to fall off, his letters were less frequent, shorter and more reserved in tone, and the burden of it all was crushing the youth out of the girl and breaking her spirit.  She had grown to look like some great sorrowful-eyed Madonna, and her beauty had in it more of the spiritual quality of an angel than of a woman.  As the spring came on, and the days grew longer she looked like one on whom the hand of death had been laid.

Her friends noticed this, but not her mother, who was so engrossed with her own privations, that she had no time or inclination for anything else.

“Anna, Anna, to think of our coming to this!” she would wail a dozen times a day—­or, “Anna, I can’t stand it another minute,” and she would burst into paroxysms of grief, from which nothing could arouse her, and utterly exhausted by her own emotions, which were chiefly regret and self-pity, she would sink off to sleep.  Anna had no difficulty in accounting to her mother for the extra comforts with which Lennox Sanderson’s money supplied them.  Mrs. Standish Tremont sometimes sent checks and Mrs. Moore never bothered about the source, so long as the luxuries were forthcoming.

“Is there no more Kumyss, Anna?” she asked one day.

“No, mother.”

“Then why did you neglect to order it?”

The girl’s face grew red.  “There was no money to pay for it, mother.  I am so sorry.”

“And does Frances Tremont neglect us in this way?  When we were both girls, it was quite the other way.  My father practically adopted Frances Tremont.  She was married from our house.  But you see, Anna, she made a better marriage than I. Oh, why was your father so reckless?  I warned him not to speculate in the rash way he was accustomed to doing, but he would never take my advice.  If he had, we would not be as we are now.”  And again the poor lady was overcome with her own sorrows.

It was not Mrs. Tremont’s check that had bought the last Kumyss.  In fact, Mrs. Tremont, after the manner of rich relations, troubled her head but little about her poor ones.  Sanderson had sent no money for nearly a month, and Anna would have died sooner than have asked for it.  He had been to Waltham twice to see Anna, and once she had gone to meet him at the White Rose Tavern.  Mrs. Moore, wrapped in gloom at the loss of her own luxury, had no interest in the young man who came down from Boston to call on her daughter.

“You met him at Cousin Frances’s, did you say?  I don’t see how you can ask him here to this abominable little house.  A girl should have good surroundings, Anna.  Nothing detracts from a girl’s beauty so much as cheap surroundings.  Oh, my dear, if you had only been settled in life before all this happened, I would not complain.”  And, as usual, there were more tears.