George stood watching her.  He did not at first take up all she had bestowed on him, for her sex has peculiar mastery over language, being diabolically angelically subtle in the art of saying something that expresses 1 oz. and implies 1 cwt.; but when he did comprehend, his heart exulted.  He strode home as if he trod on air and often kissed the little flower he had taken from the beloved hand, “and with it words of so sweet breath composed, as made the thing more rich;” and as he marched past the house kissing the flower, need I tell my reader that so innocent a girl as Susan was too high-minded to watch the effect of her proceedings from behind the curtains?  I hope not, it would surely be superfluous to relate what none would be green enough to believe.

These were Susan’s happy days.  Now all was changed.  She hated to water her flowers now.  She bade one of the farm-servants look to the garden.  He accepted the charge, and her flowers’ drooping heads told how nobly he had fulfilled it.  Susan was charitable.  Every day it had been her custom to visit more than one poor person; she carried meal to one, soup to another, linen to another, meat and bread to another, money to another—­to all words and looks of sympathy.  This practice she did not even now give up, for it came under the head of her religious duties; but she relaxed it.  She often sent to places where she used to go.  Until George went she had never thought of herself; and so the selfishness of those she relieved had not struck her.  Now it made her bitter to see that none of those she pitied, pitied her.  The moment she came into their houses it was, “My poor head, Miss Merton; my old bones do ache so.”

“I think a bit of your nice bacon would do ME good.  I’M a poor sufferer, Miss Merton. My boy is ’listed.  I thought as how you’d forgotten me altogether.  But ’tis hard for poor folk to keep a friend.”  “You see, miss, my bedroom window is broken in one or two places.  John, he stopped it up with paper the best way he could, but la, bless you, paper baint like glass.  It is very dull for me.  You see, miss, I can’t get about now as I used to could, and I never was no great reader.  I often wish as some one would step in and knock me on the head, for I be no use, I baint, neer a mossel.”  No one of them looked up in her face and said, “Lauks, how pale you ha got to look, miss; I hopes as how nothing amiss haven’t happened to you, that have been so kind to us this many a day.”  Yet suffering of some sort was plainly stamped on the face and in the manner of this relieving angel.  When they poured out their vulgar woes, Susan made an effort to forget her own and to cheer as well as relieve them.  But she had to compress her own heart hard to do it; and this suppression of feeling makes people more or less bitter.  She had better have out with it, and scolded them well for talking as if they alone were unhappy; but her woman’s