ain or pretty. You were my own little mother, and that was all I
cared for. But I see that Peter Lars, though I can't abide him, spoke
truth when he said--"

"When he said, I had once been handsome?--thank you!"

Walter reddened. "Nay, you must not take it that way; for I think, on
the contrary, yours is a face that could not alter much in half a
lifetime."

"Possibly," she answered quietly: "By rights, a face that has never
been young, should never grow old, unless the hair turns grey." A
silence followed, while the little flame under the tea-kettle suddenly
went out, and hushed that too. At last the girl resumed. "Yet I wrong
myself; I was as young once as the youngest--happiest--most careless.
If I changed so soon it was not my fault."

"Whose then?" he said, very softly, holding his breath to listen; and
as his head rested on her knee, he felt how she shivered through all
her limbs at the recollection.

"Whose fault was it?" he whispered, with his eyes fixed on the
ceiling--on a spot where a tiny ring of light was flickering above the
cylinder of the little lamp.

"It is not a long story," she said reluctantly; "but a story that is
neither new nor pretty: and so why should I tell it you? If you had
been a daughter, instead of being a son, I should not have let you grow
up to be nineteen, without having told it. It might not have done much
good, what stories ever did? But at least, I should have done my duty
by her, as a mother. But you that are a man, what good could I have
done, by telling you that man is a rapacious and a selfish animal. If
your own conscience has not taught you that, sooner or later it will."

"Rapacious? You know me better, little mother!"

"Right dear boy;" she said, much moved. "And if I had not expected you
to be different from other men, should I have taken the trouble, all
these eleven years to help you out of your childhood? No, dear, in that
sense you will never be a man: could you have even believed it possible
that a man could break his plighted troth to a helpless maiden, simply
because she told him that she had nothing to bring him, but her face
and her fair fame, and her sweet seventeen?"

Walter started from his seat, and took a few hasty turns about the
room; then dropping down again on the stool at her feet. "Tell me all;"
he said.

"What is there to tell?" she answered sadly. "What signifies name and
date and place? I have taught myself to forget it, but it has made m