royes the spell that for the last few minutes has
been connecting the brain with a dead one.

Miss Penelope, raising her head, gives words to her thoughts.

"Poor, poor Katherine!" she says, gently smoothing out the letter that
lies upon her knee. "How her happiness was wrecked and what a sad ending
there has been to everything! Her children coming home to us,
fatherless--motherless! Dear child! what a life hers has been! It is
quite twenty years ago now, and yet it all seems to me as fresh as
yesterday."

"She shouldn't have taken things so easily; she should have asserted
herself at the _time_," says Miss Priscilla, whose voice is always a
note sharper than her sister's.

"It requires a great deal of thought and--and a great deal of moral
courage to assert one's self when a man has behaved abominably to
one,--has, in fact, _jilted_ one!" says Miss Penelope, bringing out the
awful word with a little shudder and a shake of her gentle head, that
sets two pale lavender ribbons on her cap swaying mildly to and fro.

"Why was she so fatally silent about everything, except the one bare
fact of his refusal, at the last moment, to marry her, without assigning
any cause for his base desertion? Why didn't she open her whole heart to
me? I wasn't afraid of the man!" says Miss Priscilla, with such terrible
energy and such a warlike front as might well have daunted "_the man_,"
or indeed any man, could he have seen her. "She should have unburdened
her poor bruised spirit to me, who--if my mother was not hers, and if I
was many years her senior--had at least a sister's love for her."

"A true love," says Miss Penelope, with another sigh.

"Instead of which," regretfully, "she hid all her sorrows in her own
bosom, and no doubt wept and pined for the miscreant in secret."

"Poor soul!" says Miss Penelope, profoundly affected by this dismal
picture. Tears born of tenderness spring to her eyes. "Do you remember,
Priscilla, how she refused to show his letter, wishing, I suppose, even
_then_ to spare him?"

"I forget nothing!" with some acerbity. "Often, when saying my prayers,
I have wished I could forget him, but I can't, so I have to go on being
uncharitable and in sin,--if indeed sin it be to harden one's heart
against a bad man."

"Do you remember, too, my dear Priscilla, how she refused to go to
church the Sunday after she received his cold-blooded missive telling
her he wished his engagement at an end? I often wonder in