e looked so frail and lily-like that she seemed to be fading
away like a broken flower.

She tended patiently on the little children and won their love, and the
exuberant gratitude of their father, this latter so effusive that it
grew irksome to the sorrowful, reserved girl.

"Oh, Ailsa, I do not wish to seem ungrateful, but I dislike the man as
much as you do, and his attentions are getting too pointed to be
agreeable. I am afraid I shall have to leave you and the dear children,
much as I love you," she sighed, in December, after two quiet months in
the little house; and her friend rejoined, indignantly:

"I see he is trying to court you, although his wife, my dear mother, has
been dead but a few months. Oh, why did she ever marry such a brute? I
believe he broke her heart, for it was a strange decline of which she
died. He was always flirting with his women customers, and scolded his
wife harshly when she objected. He made her bitterly unhappy, the
coarse, unfaithful wretch, and that is why I hate him so for my own papa
never spoke an unkind word to her up to the day of his death. You will
have to repulse him, but not too unkindly to arouse his enmity."

But the crisis came suddenly the next day while Ailsa was at school.
Mr. Sparks boldly proposed marriage to the indignant girl.

Her blue eyes flashed disdain upon him, as she cried:

"How can you be so coarse and unfeeling, sir, showing so little respect
to the memory of the wife dead but a few months?"

"She is as dead now as she will be in ten years hence!" he replied, with
a grin that filled her with disgust; while he added, wheedlingly: "But I
know how particular women folks are over these trifles, and I would have
waited till spring before I spoke to you on the subject, but the fact
is, the neighbors are gossiping about my keeping house with two pretty
girls, and neither one any kin to me. So I thought I'd better marry one
of them, and shut scandal's mouth. And as for Ailsa, I never liked her.
She is always throwing up to me that her pa was a nicer man than I am.
But as for you, Dainty, I worship the very ground you walk on, and I'll
marry you to-morrow if you'll say the word."

"I can't marry you, sir. I--I--oh I am going right away, Mr. Sparks! I
couldn't breathe the same air with a man that was so disrespectful to
his first wife's memory as to court another in three months after her
death!" the young girl cried, in passionate disgust, arousing such
bi