After the door had slammed behind Rebecca the two women drove home, and the guest was presently feasted on company-fare for supper, and all these strange tragedies and histories to which she had listened had less of a savor in her memory, than the fine green tea and the sweet cake on her tongue.  The hostess, too, did not have them in mind any longer; she pressed the plum-cake and hot biscuits and honey on her cousin, in lieu of gossip, for entertainment.  The stories were old to her, except as she found a new listener to them, and they had never had any vital interest for her.  They had simply made her imagination twang pleasantly, and now they could hardly stir the old vibrations.

It seemed sometimes as if their hard story must finally grow old, and lose its bitter savor to Charlotte and Barney themselves.  Sometimes Charlotte’s mother looked at her inquiringly and said to herself, “I don’t believe she ever thinks about it now.”  She told Cephas so, and the old man nodded.  “She’s a fool if she does,” he returned, gruffly.

Cephas had never told anybody how he had gone once to Barney Thayer’s door, and there stood long and delivered himself of a strange harangue, wherein the penitence and desire for peace had been thinly veiled by a half-wild and eccentric philosophy; but the gist of which had been the humble craving for pardon of an old man, and his beseeching that his daughter’s lover, separated from her by his own fault, should forget it and come back to her.

“I haven’t got anything to say about it,” Barney had replied, and the old man had seemed to experience a sudden shock and rebound, as from the unexpected face of a rock in his path.

However, he still hoped that Barney would relent and come.  The next Sunday evening he had himself laid the parlor fire all ready for lighting, and hinted that Charlotte should change her dress.  When nobody came he looked more crestfallen than his daughter; she suspected, although he never knew it.

Charlotte had never learned any trade, but she had a reputation for great natural skill with her needle.  Gradually, as she grew older, she settled into the patient single-woman position as assister at feasts, instead of participator.  When a village girl of a younger generation than herself was to be married, she was in great demand for the preparation of the bridal outfit and the finest needle-work.  She would go day after day to the house of the bride-elect, and sew from early morning until late night upon the elaborate quilts, the dainty linen, and the fine new wedding-gowns.

She bore herself always with a steady cheerfulness; nobody dreamed that this preparing others for the happiness which she herself had lost was any trial to her.  Nobody dreamed that every stitch which she set in wedding-garments took painfully in a piece of her own heart, and that not from envy.  Her faithful needle, as she sewed, seemed to keep her old wounds open like a harrow, but she never shrank.  She saw the sweet, foolish smiles and blushes of happy girls whose very wits were half astray under the dazzle of love; she felt them half tremble under her hands as she fitted the bridal-gowns to their white shoulders, as if under the touch of their lovers.