How I hate everything!" she said again.

Half way down the street she stopped at a weak-hinged gate. Passing
through it, she walked down a brick path to a queer little brick temple
with white wooden columns supporting a pediment on which was inscribed
in tarnished gold letters: "The Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library,
1832."

Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she
would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her
only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For
Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had
enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of
the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked
literary gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle
Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene
Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy.
Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a
link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity
Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a
freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt
any deader in his grave than she did in his library.

Entering her prison-house with a listless step she took off her hat,
hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva, opened the shutters, leaned out
to see if there were any eggs in the swallow's nest above one of the
windows, and finally, seating herself behind the desk, drew out a
roll of cotton lace and a steel crochet hook. She was not an expert
workwoman, and it had taken her many weeks to make the half-yard
of narrow lace which she kept wound about the buckram back of a
disintegrated copy of "The Lamplighter." But there was no other way of
getting any lace to trim her summer blouse, and since Ally Hawes, the
poorest girl in the village, had shown herself in church with enviable
transparencies about the shoulders, Charity's hook had travelled faster.
She unrolled the lace, dug the hook into a loop, and bent to the task
with furrowed brows.

Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised her eyes she knew
that the young man she had seen going in at the Hatchard gate had
entered the library.

Without taking any notice of her he began to move slowly about the
long vault-like room, his hands behind his back, his short-sighted eyes
peering up and dow