lover, and the two sit together on a
little wrought-iron bench, or gather roses from the box-bordered beds in
the small inland garden, which lies behind the moss-grown wall and
battened gate; and sometimes the mother comes out and smiles upon the
pair.

The mother is a gentlewoman, and though she wears a steel thimble with
an open top, like a tailor's, and her finger is pricked with the needle,
she walks and smiles, even waters her roses, with a lady's grace; but it
seems to me that the pretty pink daughter's lover is less a gentleman
than this girl's lover should be--less than her grandfather must have
been when he courted her grandmother in this same rose-garden--less than
this maid's lover would be if her father had not gone to India, and her
mother did not sew seams for a living.

As I sit and watch this peaceful fragment of a family, my heart seems to
find repose in its apparent content; but late at night, when the lover
has gone and the mother and daughters are asleep, when I rise to close
my shutters I perceive, between the parted curtains in the mother's
window, a light dimly burning. When I see this beacon in the deserted
wife's chamber, and remember that I have seen it burning there, like the
faint but steadfast hope that refuses to be extinguished, for seventeen
years, the pain of pains comes into my heart.

* * * *

There is a little old man with a hump upon his shoulder who passes often
in the crowd, and a sight of him always awakens this pain within me.

It is not the tragedy of senility which his extreme age pictures, nor
yet the hump upon his back, which stirs my note of pain.

Years ago this man left his wife, for a price, to another who had
betrayed her, and disappeared from the scene of his ignominy. When the
woman was dead and her betrayer gone, the husband came back, an old man;
and now, as I see him bending beneath its weight, the hump upon his
shoulder seems to be labelled with this price which, in my imagination,
though originally the bag of gold, has by a slow and chemically
unexplained process of ossification, become a part of himself, and will
grotesquely deform his skeleton a hundred years to come. When, morning
and evening, I see this old man trudge laboriously, staggering always
towards the left, down the street, until he disappears in the clump of
willows that overshadow the cemetery gate, and I know that he is going
for a lonely vigil to