ave got about again, dear. She could never
have got beyond these rooms, and I feel sure she would always have
worried about her husband. She could never have gone about with him
again, and she would have fretted at being left behind. She is happy
now, brownie, and out of pain. No one who really loved her could
wish her back again. Don't grieve so, Huldah dear. You made the
last months of her life happier than any she had known."

"But I ran away and left her, and he beat her and Charlie for it,
and--and--"

"Brownie, dear, if you want to do what would have pleased your aunt,
you will forget all that. She loved him and forgave him everything,
and she longed for others too to forget that he was ever anything but
a kind husband."

Huldah was silent. She understood the feeling. It was what she
wanted everyone to feel with regard to Aunt Emma,--to remember only
what was good of her.

And she had her wish. The little group gathered in the churchyard a
few days later remembered only her suffering and her sorrows, and the
love which had lived through all, and many a pretty bunch of winter
flowers and leaves and berries were laid on her grave by kindly,
pitying hands. In the furthest corner of the little churchyard they
laid her, in a corner where the sun rested, and where a hawthorn
grew, in which a robin sang hopefully while they laid her to rest.

Huldah, standing by the grave-side while the beautiful words of the
Burial Service were being read, thought of those other partings, so
sad, so cruel,--oh, this was better than those, and not so complete.
She could still feel that Aunt Emma was near her, and safe, and in
the best of all keeping, at peace for ever and ever.

They thought it best that Huldah should not go back to the empty
rooms again, and she was glad; so after the service was over she
walked back to her old home once again, as though she had never left
it, and the last few months had been but a dream. And it was all so
like a dream that at the top of the lane she paused and looked about
her, half bewildered. Could she be, she asked herself, the same
Huldah who not so many months before had stood there a cowed,
frightened, hunted thing, starving, exhausted, but minding nothing as
long as--as what?

As long as she escaped from the two she had so lately parted with,
with such an aching heart. She looked down over her black frock.
She felt the sadness in her heart, the sense of loss. Could such