ich should one day ripen into great
perfection.

No wonder, then, that she should be shaken by a doubt of her own
identity; and having reached her room she paused upon the threshold and
looked around as if to satisfy herself by all those silent witnesses
which made it truth. There was the chair in which she had so often sat
plying her needle with such tardy grace while her impatient thoughts did
battle with the humdrum, narrow life she led. How she had beat against
the fate which seemed to promise naught but that dull round of
commonplace events in which her early years had passed away! How as a
gall and fret had come the thought of Reuben's proffered love, because
it shadowed forth the level of respectable routine, the life she then
most dreaded! To be courted and sought after, to call forth love,
jealousy and despair, to be looked up to, thought well of, praised,
admired,--these were the delights she had craved and these the longings
she had had granted. And a sigh from the depths of that chastened heart
rendered the bitter tribute paid by all to satiated vanity and outlived
desire. The dingy walls, the ill-assorted furniture (her mother's pride
in which had sometimes vexed her, sometimes made her laugh) now looked
like childhood's friends, whose faces stamp themselves upon our inmost
hearts. The light no longer seemed obscure, the room no longer gloomy,
for each thing in it now was flooded by the tender light of
memory--that wondrous gift to man which those who only sail along life's
summer sea can never know in all the heights and depths revealed to
storm-tossed hearts.

"What! you've come back?" a voice said in her ear; and looking round Eve
saw it was Reuben, who had entered unperceived. "There's nothing fresh
gone wrong?" he asked.

"No, nothing;" but the sad smile she tried to give him welcome with was
so akin to tears that Reuben's face assumed a look of doubt. "'Tis only
that I'm thinking how I'm changed from what I was," said Eve. "Why, once
I couldn't bear this room and all the things about it; but now--Oh,
Reuben, my heart seems like to break because perhaps 'twill soon now
come to saying good-bye to all of it for ever."

Reuben winced: "You're fixed to go, then?"

"Yes, where Adam goes I shall go too: don't you think I should? What
else is left for me to do?"

"You feel, then, you'd be happy--off with him--away from all
and--everybody else?"

"Happy! Should I be happy to know he'd gone alone--happ