Ann Brooks
should spend the deceased Ezra's money in any way she pleased,--she
had earned it, goodness knows, by living with him for twenty-five
years,--but before the day for her departure arrived her right arm
and knee became so much more painful that it was impossible for her to
travel alone.

At this juncture Rose was called upon to act as nurse and companion in
a friendly way. She seized the opportunity hungrily as a way out of her
present trouble; but, knowing what Mrs. Brooks's temper was in time of
health, she could see clearly what it was likely to prove when pain and
anguish wrung the brow.

Rose had been in Boston now for some weeks, and she was sitting in the
Joy Street boarding-house,--Joy Street, forsooth! It was nearly bedtime,
and she was looking out upon a huddle of roofs and back yards, upon
a landscape filled with clothes-lines, ash-barrels, and ill-fed cats.
There were no sleek country tabbies, with the memory in their eyes of
tasted cream, nothing but city-born, city-bred, thin, despairing cats of
the pavement, cats no more forlorn than Rose herself.

She had "seen Boston," for she had accompanied Mrs. Brooks in the
horse-cars daily to the two different temples of healing where that
lady worshiped and offered sacrifices. She had also gone with Maude
Arthurlena to Claude Merrill's store to buy a pair of gloves, and had
overheard Miss Dix (the fashionable "lady assistant" before mentioned)
say to Miss Brackett of the ribbon department, that she thought Mr.
Merrill must have worn his blinders that time he stayed so long in
Edgewood. This bit of polished irony was unintelligible to Rose at
first, but she mastered it after an hour's reflection. She was n't
looking her best that day, she knew; the cotton dresses that seemed
so pretty at home were common and countrified here, and her best black
cashmere looked cheap and shapeless beside Miss Dix's brilliantine. Miss
Dix's figure was her strong point, and her dressmaker was particularly
skillful in the arts of suggestion, concealment, and revelation. Beauty
has its chosen backgrounds. Rose in white dimity, standing knee deep in
her blossoming brier bushes, the river running at her feet, dark pine
trees behind her graceful head, sounded depths and touched heights of
harmony forever beyond the reach of the modish Miss Dix, but she was out
of her element and suffered accordingly.

Rose had gone to walk with Claude one evening when she first arrived. He
ha