"It seems at the time as if only death
could end it, but two or three years will do a lot. And it's God's mercy
makes it so. How else could life be carried on?"

"In my case, Etta," the consul followed her story, after an interval,
"it was a landlady's daughter. I don't believe I have ever spoken of her
to you. I was in college, but I boarded outside the buildings. I wrote
to my father and begged him to let me go into business so that I could
earlier support a wife and family. The wise man let me go down to a
fruit-farm in Florida. You have noticed that I know something about
orange-growing. It was not quite a year before the dear divinity whose
name was Lottie found it too long to wait. I posted home. The room I had
once rented from her mother was let to a handsomer man. I took up my
studies where I had dropped them, and to all appearance there was little
harm done. But for a long time I thought I should die a bachelor."

"I know. Your cousin Fannie told me about it in the early days, before
we were engaged. It all goes to show.... And there again was Selina
Blackstone, one of my girlhood friends. She had a cough and they thought
her lungs affected and sent her South. There she met an unhappy boy in
the same case, only he, as it proved, really was in a bad way with his
lungs. The poor things fell desperately in love with each other, but her
parents wouldn't hear of their marrying, in which course they were
right. Now you would have thought from her face that the separation was
going to kill her. It didn't, that's all. He died, and she married. And
it can't be said of her that she was either shallow, or fickle, or
heartless. I knew her very well. Merely, time did the work that time was
set to do."

There was in the lady's tone an effect of protest against any view,
determination against any theory, but her own.

"There are the cases like Miss Seymour's, however," Mr. Foss brought in
softly, as one calls to another's attention a lapse of memory or a slip
in logic.

"Miss Seymour? Blanche? What about her?"

"That she is Miss Seymour, my dear, and to my mind a melancholy lesson.
Because Nature so plainly had not planned her for an old maid. Her
mother--who told me? I think it was Miss Brown--interfered with her
marrying the man she wished to, and she has accepted nothing in his
place. It has been an empty life. And so it goes. One can't be sure,
Etta."

"Jerome," Mrs. Foss's voice rose to a sharper protest and fir