and sit on the hay with her, when at leisure.  Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty requital for her love.  Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with her.  For several minutes together sometimes, while my auditory nerves retained the susceptibility of delicate health, I used to hear a low, pleasant murmur ascending from the room below; and at last ascertained it to be Priscilla’s voice, babbling like a little brook to Hollingsworth.  She talked more largely and freely with him than with Zenobia, towards whom, indeed, her feelings seemed not so much to be confidence as involuntary affection.  I should have thought all the better of my own qualities had Priscilla marked me out for the third place in her regards.  But, though she appeared to like me tolerably well, I could never flatter myself with being distinguished by her as Hollingsworth and Zenobia were.

One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a gentle tap at my chamber door.  I immediately said, “Come in, Priscilla!” with an acute sense of the applicant’s identity.  Nor was I deceived.  It was really Priscilla,—­a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she had gone far enough into her teens to be, at least, on the outer limit of girlhood), but much less wan than at my previous view of her, and far better conditioned both as to health and spirits.  As I first saw her, she had reminded me of plants that one sometimes observes doing their best to vegetate among the bricks of an enclosed court, where there is scanty soil and never any sunshine.  At present, though with no approach to bloom, there were indications that the girl had human blood in her veins.

Priscilla came softly to my bedside, and held out an article of snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly ironed.  She did not seem bashful, nor anywise embarrassed.  My weakly condition, I suppose, supplied a medium in which she could approach me.

“Do not you need this?” asked she.  “I have made it for you.”  It was a nightcap!

“My dear Priscilla,” said I, smiling, “I never had on a nightcap in my life!  But perhaps it will be better for me to wear one, now that I am a miserable invalid.  How admirably you have done it!  No, no; I never can think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought nightcap as this, unless it be in the daytime, when I sit up to receive company.”

“It is for use, not beauty,” answered Priscilla.  “I could have embroidered it and made it much prettier, if I pleased.”

While holding up the nightcap and admiring the fine needlework, I perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter which she was waiting for me to take.  It had arrived from the village post-office that morning.  As I did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she drew it back, and held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it, in a way that had probably grown habitual to her.  Now, on turning my eyes from the nightcap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me that her air, though not her