when Louie rose from the bed on which she lay down that night,
the Sabrina had been a fortnight gone on her long voyage--a voyage where
the captain had sailed alone, postponing the evil day perhaps, and at any
rate pleading too much inexperience, for all his dazzling promotion, to be
trusted with so precious thing as a wife on board during the first trip.
He had not felt that hesitation once when portraying the possibilities of
the voyage to another.

It was not a long illness, Louie's, though it had been severe enough to
destroy for her consciousness both of pain and pleasure. Her aunt had left
other work and had nursed her through it; but when, strong and well once
more, she went about her old duties, it seemed to her that that
consciousness had never returned: she took up life with utter listlessness
and indifference, and she fancied that her love for Andrew was as dead as
all the rest. The poor little thing, laying this flattering unction to
heart, did not call much reason to her aid, or she would have known that
there was some meaning in it when she cried all day on coming across an
old daguerreotype of Andrew. "It isn't for love of him," she sobbed. "It's
for the loss of all that love out of my life that was heaven to me. Oh no,
no! I love him no longer: I can't, I can't love him: he is all the same as
another woman's husband." But, despite this stout assertion, she could not
bring herself to part with that picture: he was not in reality quite the
husband of another woman, and till he was indeed she meant to keep it. "He
is only promised to her yet, and he was promised first to me," she said
for salve to conscience; and meanwhile the picture grew so blurred with
conscious tears, and perhaps with unconscious kisses, that it might have
been his or another's: Miss Frarnie herself, had she seen it, could not
have told whose it was.

Notwithstanding all the elasticity of youth, life became an inexpressibly
dull thing to Louie as the year wore into the next--dull, with neither aim
nor object, the past a pain to remember, the future a blank to consider.
She could live only from day to day, one day like another, till they grew
so wearisome she wondered her hair was not gray--the pretty hair that,
shorn from her head in her illness, had grown again in a short fleece of
silky curls--for it seemed to her that she had lived a hundred years. And
because troubles never come alone, and one perhaps makes the other seem
lighter an