sister who had died in that time; their funeral trains passed before her eyes like so many shadows.  She forgot all their cares and her own; she forgot how she had nursed her bedridden mother for ten years; she forgot everything but those blessed Sunday nights on which Richard Alger had come.  She called to mind every little circumstance connected with them—­how she had adorned the best room by slow degrees, saving a few cents at a time from her sparse income, because he sat in it every Sunday night; how she had had the bed which her mother and grandmother kept there removed because the fashion had changed, and the guilty audacity with which she had purchased a hair-cloth sofa to take its place.

That adorning of the best room had come to be a religion with Sylvia Crane.  As faithfully as any worshipper of the Greek deity she laid her offerings, her hair-cloth sofa and rocker, her copper-gilt pitcher of apple blossoms, upon the altar of love.

Sylvia recalled, sobbing more piteously in the darkness, sundry dreams, which had never been realized, of herself and Richard sitting side by side and hand in hand, as confessed lovers, on that sofa.  Richard Alger, during all those eighteen years, had never made love to Sylvia, unless his constant attendance upon Sabbath evenings could be so construed, as it was in that rural neighborhood, and as Sylvia was fain to construe it in her innocent heart.

It is doubtful if Sylvia, in her perfect decorum and long-fostered maiden reserve, fairly knew that Richard Alger had never made love to her.  She scarcely expected her dreams of endearments to be realized; she regarded them, except in desperate moods, with shame.  If her old admirer had, indeed, attempted to sit by her side upon that hair-cloth sofa and hold her hand, she would have arisen as if propelled by stiff springs of modest virtue.  She did not fairly know that she was not made love to after the most honorable and orthodox fashion without a word of endearment or a caress; for she had been trained to regard love as one of the most secret of the laws of nature, to be concealed, with shamefaced air, even from herself; but she did know that Richard had never asked her to marry him, and for that she was impatient without any self-reserve; she was even confidential with her sister, Charlotte’s mother.

“I don’t want to say anything outside,” she once said, “but I do think it would be a good deal better for him if we was settled down.  He ain’t half taken care of since his mother died.”

“He’s got money enough,” returned Mrs. Barnard.

“That can’t buy everything.”

“Well, I don’t pity him; I pity you,” said Mrs. Barnard.

“I guess I shall get along a while longer, as far as that goes,” Sylvia had replied to her sister, with some pride.  “I ain’t worried on my account.”

“Women don’t worry much on their own accounts, but they’ve got accounts,” returned Mrs. Barnard, with more contempt for her sister than she had ever shown for herself.  “You’re gettin’ older, Sylvy.”