“I know it,” Sylvia had replied, with a quick shrinking, as if from a blow.

The passing years, as they passed for her, stung her like swarming bees, with bitter humiliation; but never for herself, only for Richard.  Nobody knew how painfully she counted the years, how she would fain have held time back with her thin hands, how futilely and pitifully she set her loving heart against it, and not for herself and her own vanity, but for the sake of her lover.  She had come, in the singleness of her heart, to regard herself in the light of a species of coin to be expended wholly for the happiness and interest of one man.  Any depreciation in its value was of account only as it affected him.

Sylvia Crane, sitting in the meeting-house of a Sunday, used to watch the young girls coming in, as radiant and flawless as new flowers, in their Sunday bests, with a sort of admiring envy, which could do them no harm, but which tore her own heart.

When she should have been contrasting the wickedness of her soul with the grace of the Divine Model, she was contrasting her fading face with the youthful bloom of the young girls.  “He’d ought to marry one of them,” she thought; “he’d ought to, by good rights.”  It never occurred to Sylvia that Richard also was growing older, and that he was, moreover, a few years older than she.  She thought of him as an immortal youth; his face was the same to her as when she had first seen it.

When it came before a subtler vision than her bodily one, there in the darkness and loneliness of this last Sunday night, it wore the beauty and innocent freshness of a child.  If Richard Alger could have seen his own face as the woman who loved him saw it, he could never have doubted his own immortality.

“There he came, an’ the stone was up, an’ he had to go away,” moaned Sylvia, catching her breath softly.  Many a time she had pitied Richard because he had not the little womanly care which men need; she had worried lest his stockings were not darned, and his food not properly cooked; but to-night she had another and strange anxiety.  She worried lest she herself had hurt him and sent him home with a heavy heart.

Sylvia had gone about for the last few days with her delicate face as irresponsibly calm as a sweet-pea; nobody had dreamed of the turmoil in her heart.  On the Wednesday night before she had nearly reached the climax of her wishes.  Richard had come, departing from his usual custom—­he had never called except on Sunday before—­and remained later.  It was ten o’clock before he went home.  He had been very silent all the evening, and had sat soberly in the great best rocking-chair, which was, in a way, his throne of state, with Sylvia on the sofa on his right.  Many a time she had dreamed that he came over there and sat down beside her, and that night it had come to pass.