Alas, for romance!  Miss Euphemia Trotter, or “Miss E. Trotter,” as she preferred to sign herself, loathing her sentimental prefix, was really a poor girl who had been educated in an Eastern seminary, where she eventually became a teacher.  She had survived her parents and a neglected childhood, and had worked hard for her living since she was fourteen.  She had been a nurse in a hospital, an assistant in a reformatory, had observed men and women under conditions of pain and weakness, and had known the body only as a tabernacle of helplessness and suffering; yet had brought out of her experience a hard philosophy which she used equally to herself as to others.  That she had ever indulged in any romance of human existence, I greatly doubt; the lanky girl teacher at the Vermont academy had enough to do to push herself forward without entangling girl friendships or confidences, and so became a prematurely hard duenna, paid to look out for, restrain, and report, if necessary, any vagrant flirtation or small intrigue of her companions.  A pronounced “old maid” at fifteen, she had nothing to forget or forgive in others, and still less to learn from them.

It was spring, and down the long slopes of Buckeye Hill the flowers were already effacing the last dented footprints of the winter rains, and the winds no longer brought their monotonous patter.  In the pine woods there were the song and flash of birds, and the quickening stimulus of the stirring aromatic sap.  Miners and tunnelmen were already forsaking the direct road for a ramble through the woodland trail and its sylvan charms, and occasionally breaking into shouts and horseplay like great boys.  The schoolchildren were disporting there; there were some older couples sentimentally gathering flowers side by side.  Miss Trotter was also there, but making a short cut from the bank and express office, and by no means disturbed by any gentle reminiscence of her girlhood or any other instinctive participation in the wanton season.  Spring came, she knew, regularly every year, and brought “spring cleaning” and other necessary changes and rehabilitations.  This year it had brought also a considerable increase in the sum she was putting by, and she was, perhaps, satisfied in a practical way, if not with the blind instinctiveness of others.  She was walking leisurely, holding her gray skirt well over her slim ankles and smartly booted feet, and clear of the brushing of daisies and buttercups, when suddenly she stopped.  A few paces before her, partly concealed by a myrtle, a young woman, startled at her approach, had just withdrawn herself from the embrace of a young man and slipped into the shadow.  Nevertheless, in that moment, Miss Trotter’s keen eyes had recognized her as a very pretty Swedish girl, one of her chambermaids at the hotel.  Miss Trotter passed without a word, but gravely.  She was not shocked nor surprised, but it struck her practical mind at once that if this were an affair with impending matrimony, it meant