y rising and hard work, all her
small economies. She had not been able to get even two dollars when
she wanted it. She sat up straight and looked sadly out into the
velvet dusk, and the tears that had been long gathering in her heart
came slowly to her eyes; not the quick, glittering tears of childhood
that can be soon chased away by smiles--not that kind, no, no; but
the slow tears that scald and wither, the tears that make one old.

It was dark when Martha lifted her head. She hastily drew down the
blind, lit the lamp, and washed away, all traces of her tears. Going
to a cupboard that stood behind the door, she took out a piece of
fine embroidery and was soon at work upon it.

Hidden away in her heart, so well hidden that no one could have
suspected its presence, Martha cherished a sweet dream. To her stern
sense of right and wrong it would have seemed improper to think the
thoughts she was thinking, but for the fact that they were so idle,
so vain, so false, so hopeless. It had all begun the fall before,
when, at a party at one of the neighbours', Arthur Wemyss, the young
Englishman, had asked her to dance. He had been so different from the
young men she had known, so courteous and gentle, and had spoken to
her with such respect, that her heart was swept with a strange, new
feeling that perhaps, after all there might be for her the homage and
admiration she had seen paid to other girls. In her innocence of the
worlds ways, good and bad, she did not know that young men like
Arthur were taught to reverence all women, and that the deference of
his manner was nothing more than that.

Martha fed her heart with no false hope-she never forgot to remind
herself that she was a dull, plain girl--and even when she sat at her
embroidery and let the imagination of her heart weave for her a
golden dream, it was only a dream to her, nothing more!

When Arthur bought Jim Russell's quarter-section and began farming
independently, the Perkinses were his nearest neighbours. Martha
baked his bread for him, and seldom gave him his basket of newly made
loaves that it did not contain a pie, a loaf of cake, or some other
expression of her good-will, all of which Arthur received very
gratefully.

He never knew what pleasure it gave her to do this for him, and
although she knew he was engaged to be married to a young lady in
England, it was the one bright evening of the week for her when he
came over, to get his weekly allowance.

Mar