so doing, with some rather more unusual ones
added thereto. She was alone in the world, and her life with an uncle,
her mother's only relative, was an unhappy one. No assistance in the
household tasks that she had ever been able to render made her a welcome
member of the family or kept her from feeling a burden, and she belonged
no more to the little circle at seventeen, than she did when she became
a part of it at twelve. The hope of being independent and earning her
own living had sustained her through the last year; but it was a very
timid, self-distrustful, love-starved little heart that John Hathaway
stormed and carried by assault. Her girl's life in a country school and
her uncle's very rigid and orthodox home had been devoid of emotion or
experience; still, her mother had early sown seeds in her mind and
spirit that even in the most arid soil were certain to flower into
beauty when the time for flowering came; and intellectually Susanna was
the clever daughter of clever parents. She was very immature, because,
after early childhood, her environment had not been favorable to her
development. At seventeen she began to dream of a future as bright as
the past had been dreary and uneventful. Visions of happiness, of
goodness, and of service haunted her, and sometimes, gleaming through
the mists of dawning womanhood, the figure, all luminous, of The Man!

When John Hathaway appeared on the horizon, she promptly clothed him in
all the beautiful garments of her dreams; they were a grotesque misfit,
but when we intimate that women have confused the dream and the reality
before, and may even do so again, we make the only possible excuse for
poor little Susanna Nelson.

John Hathaway was the very image of the outer world that lay beyond
Susanna's village. He was a fairly prosperous, genial, handsome young
merchant, who looked upon life as a place furnished by Providence in
which to have "a good time." His parents had frequently told him that it
was expedient for him to "settle down," and he supposed that he might
finally do so, if he should ever find a girl who would tempt him to
relinquish his liberty. (The line that divides liberty and license was a
little vague to John Hathaway!) It is curious that he should not have
chosen for his life-partner some thoughtless, rosy, romping young
person, whose highest conception of connubial happiness would have been
to drive twenty miles to the seashore on a Sunday, and having partake