Her dreams dropped suddenly, with broken wings, in their flight, for her stepmother, a small sickly woman, with a twisted smile, looked out through the dining-room window, and remarked facetiously: 

“You all don’t look much like a co’tin couple to my eyes.”

“I’ve been admiring her butter,” replied Abel, who was always unduly regardful of his English in the presence of Mrs. Hatch.

“She’s a good hand at butter when she chooses to be, but she has her ups and downs like the rest of us.”

“All of us have them, I suppose,” he rejoined, and Mrs. Hatch drew in her head.

“I never imagined that you got put out, Judy,” he said, forgetting the tears that had led him to his sacrifice; “you always seem so quiet and sober.”

She glanced up, for there was a sound of wheels on the road, and Mr. Mullen drove by again, sitting very erect, and uncovering, with a graceful bend, to some one who was visible at the front.  Her face flushed suddenly to the colour of the brickdust, and she felt that the confusion in her soul must fill the universe with noise.  Quiet and sober, indeed, if he could only have heard it!

But Abel was busy with his own problems, while his gaze followed Mr. Mullen’s vanishing back, which had, even from a distance, a look of slight yet earnest endeavour.  He still liked the young rector for his sincerity and his uprightness, but he had found, on the whole, that he could approach his God more comfortably when the straight and narrow shadow of the clergyman did not come between.

“Aren’t you going to pat it any more?” he asked presently, returning to his consideration of the butter.

Picking up a square linen cloth, Judy dipped it into a basin of brine, and, after wringing it out, carefully folded it over the yellow bowl.

“All the buttermilk is out of it,” she answered, and thought of the unfinished pair of purple slippers laid away in tissue paper upstairs in her bureau drawer.  As a married woman could she, with virtue, continue to embroider slippers in pansies for her rector?  These had been laid aside on the day of her engagement to Abel, but she yearned now to riot in purple shades with her needle.  While she listened with a detached mind to Abel’s practical plans for the future, her only interest in the details lay in the fact that they would, in a measure, insure the possibility of a yearly offering of slippers.  And while they looked into each other’s eyes, neither suspected for a moment the existence of a secret chamber in the other’s soul.  All appeared plain and simple on the surface, and Judy, as well as Abel, was honestly of the opinion that she understood perfectly the situation and that the passionate refusal of her heart was the only element that threatened the conventional security of appearances.

She was in the morbid condition of mind when the capacity for feeling seems concentrated on a single centre of pain.  Her soul revolved in a circle, and outside of its narrow orbit there was only the arid flatness which surrounds any moment of vivid experience.  The velvet slippers, which might have been worn by the young clergyman, possessed a vital and romantic interest in her thoughts, but the mill and the machinery of which Abel was speaking showed to her merely as sordid and mechanical details of existence.