Ellen looked after the retreating carriage, and made no comment.

She was pale and thin, and moved with a certain languor, although she held up her head proudly, and when people asked if she were not well, answered quickly that she had never been better.  Robert had not been to see her yet.  She had furtively watched for him a long time, then she had given it up.  She would not acknowledge to herself or any one else that she was not well or was troubled in spirit.  Her courage was quite equal to the demand upon it, yet always she was aware of a peculiar sensitiveness to all happenings, whether directly concerned with herself or not, which made life an agony to her, and she knew that her physical strength was not what it had been.  Only that morning she had looked at her face in the glass, and had seen how it was altered.  The lovely color was gone from her cheeks, there were little, faint, downward lines about her mouth, and, more than that, out of her blue eyes looked the eternal, unanswerable question of humanity, “Where is my happiness?”

It seemed to her when she first set out that she could not walk to the factory.  That sense of the full presence of the spring seemed to overpower her.  All the revelation of beauty and sweetness seemed a refinement of torture worse to bear than the sight of death and misery would have been.  Every blooming apple-bough seemed to strike her full on the heart.

“Only look at that bush of red flowers in that yard,” Maria said once, and Ellen looked and was stung by the sight as by the contact of a red flaming torch of spring.  “What ails you, dear; don’t you like those flowers?” Maria said, anxiously.

“Yes, of course I do; I think they are lovely,” replied Ellen, looking.

She looked after the carriage which contained the bridal party; she thought how the bridegroom had almost lost his eyesight to save her, and her old adoration of Cynthia seemed to rise to a flood-tide.  Then came the thought of Robert, how he must have ceased to love her—­how some day he would be starting off on a bridal trip of his own.  Maud Hemingway, with whom she had often coupled him in her thoughts, seemed to start up before her, all dressed in bridal white.  It seemed to her that she could not bear it all.  She continued walking, but she did not feel the ground beneath her feet, nor even Maria’s little, clinging fingers of tenderness on her arm.  She became to her own understanding like an instrument which is played upon with such results of harmonies and discords that all sense of the mechanism is lost.

“Well, Ellen Brewster,” said Sadie Peel, in her loud, strident voice, “I guess you wouldn’t have been walkin’ along here quite so fine this mornin’ if it hadn’t been for Mr. Risley.  You’d ought to send him a weddin’-present—­a spoon, or something.”

“Shut up,” said Abby Atkins; “Ellen has worried herself sick over him as it is.”  She eyed Ellen anxiously as she spoke.  Maria clung more closely to her.