The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its unharmed survivors.  He returned with Myrtle to her native village, and they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence Withers, in the old family mansion.  Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle made a generous allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles distant, where she had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at The Poplars.  This was a convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe was invited to stay with them for a month or two; and one nurse and two single women under the same roof keep each other in a stew all the time, as the old dame somewhat sharply remarked.

Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle’s legal protector, and, with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property she inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that, when Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt that at least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give himself to sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing by him to pinch the features of all his ideals, and give them something of her own likeness.

Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her responsibility.  She embellished her spare person a little more than in former years.  These young people looked so happy!  Love was not so unendurable, perhaps, after all.  No woman need despair,—­especially if she has a house over her, and a snug little property.  A worthy man, a former missionary, of the best principles, but of a slightly jocose and good-humored habit, thought that he could piece his widowed years with the not insignificant, fraction of life left to Miss Silence, to their mutual advantage.  He came to the village, therefore, where Father Pemberton was very glad to have him supply the pulpit in the place of his unfortunate disabled colleague.  The courtship soon began, and was brisk enough; for the good man knew there was no time to lose at his period of life,—­or hers either, for that matter.  It was a rather odd specimen of love-making; for he was constantly trying to subdue his features to a gravity which they were not used to, and she was as constantly endeavoring to be as lively as possible, with the innocent desire of pleasing her light-hearted suitor.

“Vieille fille fait jeune mariee.”  Silence was ten years younger as a bride than she had seemed as a lone woman.  One would have said she had got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some half a dozen behind it,—­where there is often good and reasonably cheerful conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the probable amount of his property, or the little slips he may have committed, and where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense sets the four waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-hour ago in the house of mourning.  But Miss Silence, that was, thought that two families, with all the possible complications