ted to make him recognizable by any one who had ever
had the privilege of knowing him in the faulty flesh. She eliminated all
his bad qualities, and projected from her imagination a Mr. O'Rourke as
he ought to have been--a species of seraphic being mixed up in some way
with a violin; and to this ideal she erected a costly headstone in
the suburban cemetery. "It would be a proud day for Larry," observed
Margaret contemplatively, "if he could rest his oi on the illegant
monumint I 've put up to him." If Mr. O'Rourke could have read the
inscription on it, he would never have suspected his own complicity in
the matter.

But there the marble stood, sacred to his memory; and soon the snow came
down from the gray sky and covered it, and the invisible snow of weeks
and months drifted down on Margaret's heart, and filled up its fissures,
and smoothed off the sharp angles of its grief; and there was peace upon
it.

Not but she sorrowed for Larry at times. Yet life had a relish to it
again; she was free, though she did not look at it in that light; she
was happier in a quiet fashion than she had ever been, though she would
not have acknowledged it to herself. She wondered that she had the heart
to laugh when the ice-man made love to her. Perhaps she was conscious of
something comically incongruous in the warmth of a gentleman who spent
all winter in cutting ice, and all summer in dealing it out to his
customers. She had not the same excuse for laughing at the baker; yet
she laughed still more merrily at him when he pressed her hand over the
steaming loaf of brown-bread, delivered every Saturday morning at the
scullery door. Both these gentlemen had known Margaret many years, yet
neither of them had valued her very highly until another man came along
and married her. A widow, it would appear, is esteemed in some sort as a
warranted article, being stamped with the maker's name.

There was even a third lover in prospect; for according to the gossip of
the town, Mr. Donnehugh was frequently to be seen of a Sunday afternoon
standing in the cemetery and regarding Mr. O'Rourke's headstone with
unrestrained satisfaction.

A year had passed away, and certain bits of color blossoming among
Margaret's weeds indicated that the winter of her mourning was oyer. The
ice-man and the baker were hating each other cordially, and Mrs. Bilkins
was daily expecting it would be discovered before night that Margaret
had married one or both of them. Bu