“Now don’t you fret, Pretty,” he had said, when she bade him good-bye, “father will see to it that you have everything you want.”  And Lucina, all blushing with innocent confusion, had believed him.

In addition to all this she had in her trunks, strapped at the back of the stage-coach, two fine, new silk gowns, and one muslin, and a silk mantilla.  Also she carried a large blue bandbox containing a new plumed hat and veil, which cheered her not a little, being one of those minor sweets which providentially solace the weak feminine soul in its unequal combat with life’s great bitternesses.

Lucina was away some three months, not returning until a few days before Thanksgiving; then she brought her friend, Miss Rose Soley, with her, and also a fine young gentleman, with long, curling, fair locks, and a face as fair as her own.

While Lucina was gone, Jerome led a life easier in some respects, harder in others.  He had no longer the foe of daily temptation to overcome, but instead was the steady grind of hunger.  Jerome, in those days, felt the pangs of that worst hunger in the world—­the hunger for the sight of one beloved.  Some mornings when he awoke it seemed to him that he should die of mere exhaustion and starvation of spirit if he saw not Lucina before night.  In those days he would rather have walked over fiery plough-shares than visited any place where he had seen Lucina, and where she now was not.  He never went near the wood, where they had sat together; he would not pass even, if he could help it, the Squire’s house or Miss Camilla’s.  His was one of those minds for whom, when love has once come, place is only that which holds, or is vacant of, the beloved.  He was glad when the white frost came and burned out the gardens and the woodlands with arctic fires of death, for then the associations with old scenes were in a measure lost.

One Sunday after the frost, when the ground was shining stiff with it, as with silver mail, and all the trees thickened the distance as with glittering furze, he went to his woodland, and found that he could bear the sight of the place where he and Lucina had been together; its strangeness of aspect seemed to place it so far in the past.

Jerome threw up his head in the thin, sparkling air.  “I will have her yet,” he said, quite aloud; and “if I do not, I can bear that.”

He felt like one who would crush the stings of fate, even if against his own heart.  He had grown old and thin during the last weeks; he had worked so hard and resolutely, yet with so little hope; and he who toils without hope is no better than a slave to his own will.  That day, when he went home, his eyes were bright and his cheeks glowing.  His mother and sister noticed the difference.

“I was afraid he was gettin’ all run down,” Ann Edwards told Elmira; “but he looks better to-day.”