resurrected every dear memory, and
her passion sprung into life again to mock and jeer at her efforts to
throttle it out of existence. With him toppling from the pedestal on
which her husband must stand, she had told herself that there was naught
left but to roll a great stone against the sepulcher in which her love
must henceforth lie buried, hopeless of the coming of any bright angle
to unseal the gloomy vault. Yet, despite the entire approval given this
by her judgment, her woman's heart cried bitterly for a return of the
joys out of which the beauty had fled forever.

Hours passed in this wrestle with pain. How many she did not know, but
when she came forth it was with the composure of one who had fought the
fight and won the victory, but at a cost that forbade exultation.

----

There was one ordeal that thus far she had not been called upon to
endure. From the day on which she had donned her sable robes to that of
Harry's return no one had ventured to speak his name in her presence.
Even her father and mother, after the first burst of indignation,
had kept silence in pity for her suffering, and there was that in her
bearing that forbade others touching upon a subject in her hearing
that elsewhere was discussed with the hungry avidity of village gossips
masticating a fresh scandal.

But she could not be always spared thus. She had not been so careful
of the feelings of less favored women and girls, inferior to her in
brightness, as to gain any claim for clement treatment now, when the
displacement of a portion of her armor of superiority gave those who
envied or disliked her an unprotected spot upon which to launch their
irritating little darts.

All the sewing, dorcas and mite societies of the several churches
in Sardis had been merged into one consolidated Lint-Scraping and
Bandage-Making Union, in whose enlarged confines the waves of gossip
flowed with as much more force and volume as other waves gain when the
floods unite a number of small pools into one great lake.

In other days a sensational ripple starting, say in the Episcopalian
"Dorcas," was stilled into calmness ere it passed the calm and stately
church boundaries. It would not do to let its existence be even
suspected by the keen eyes of the freely-censorious Presbyterian dames,
or the sharp-witted, agile-tongued Methodist ladies.

And, much as these latter were disposed to talk over the weaknesses and
foibles of their absent sisters in the co