Then her father was on the same side.  “John Meadows seems down like, Susan.  Do try and cheer him up a bit, I am sure he has often cheered thee.”

“That he has, father.”

Susan pitied Meadows.  Pitying him, she forced herself at times to be gracious, and when she did he was so happy that she was alarmed at her power and drew in.

Old Merton saw now how the land lay, and he clung to a marriage between these two as his only hope.  “John Meadows will pull me through, if he marries my Susan.”

And so the two selfish ones had got the unselfish one between them, one pulling gently, the other pushing quietly, but both without intermission.  Thus days and days rolled on.

Meadows now came four times a week instead of two, and courted her openly, and beamed so with happiness that she had not always the heart to rob him of this satisfaction, and he overwhelmed her with kindness and attention of every sort, and, if any one else was present, she was sure to see how much he was respected; and this man whom others courted was her slave.  This soothed the pride another had wounded.

One day he poured out his love to her with such passion that he terrified her, and the next time he came she avoided him.

Her father remonstrated.  “Girl, you will break that man’s heart if you are so unkind to him; he could not say a word because you shunned him like.  Why, your heart must be made of stone.”  A burst of tears was all the reply.

At last two things presented themselves to this poor girl’s understanding; that for her there was no chance of earthly happiness, do what she would, and that, strangely enough, she the wretched one had it in her power to make two other beings happy, her father and good Mr. Meadows.

Now, a true woman lives to make others happy.  She rarely takes the self-contained views of life men are apt to do.

It passed through Susan’s mind:  “If I refuse to make these happy, why do I live, what am I on the earth for at all?”

It seemed cruel to her to refuse happiness when she could bestow it without making herself two shades more miserable than she was.

Despair and unselfishness are evil counselors in a scheming, selfish world.  The life-blood had been drained out of her heart by so many cruel blows, by the long waiting, the misgivings, the deep woe when she believed George dead, the bitter grief and mortification and sense of wrong when she found he was married to another.

Many of us, male and female, treated as Susan imagined herself treated, have taken another lover out of pique.  Susan did not so.  She was bitterly piqued, but she did not make that use of her pique.

Despair of happiness, pity, and pure unselfishness, these stood John Meadows’ friends with this unhappy dupe, and perhaps my male readers will be incredulous as well as shocked when I relate the manner in which at last this young creature, lovely as an angel, in the spring of life, loving another still, and deluding herself to think she hated and despised him, was one afternoon surprised into giving her hand to a man for whom she did not really care a button.