he socks, or, 'Is that what you call love?' they
grumble. You want mortal patience if you love a man,--it is like a
fretful child that thumps you when your breast is bare to it. Still, be
you patient, dear, just as I am, just as I am."

And Bebee would shudder as she swept the cobwebs from the garret
walls,--patient as she was, she who had sat here fifty years watching
for a dead man and for a wrecked ship.

CHAPTER XXIII.

The wheat was reapen in the fields, and the brown earth turned afresh.
The white and purple chrysanthemums bloomed against the flowerless
rose-bushes, and the little gray Michaelmas daisy flourished where the
dead carnations had spread their glories. Leaves began to fall and chilly
winds to sigh among the willows; the squirrels began to store away their
nuts, and the poor to pick up the broken bare boughs.

"He said he would come before winter," thought Bebee, every day when she
rose and felt each morning cooler and grayer than the one before it;
winter was near.

Her little feet already were cold in their wooden shoes; and the robin
already sang in the twigs of the sear sweetbrier; but she had the brave
sweet faith which nothing kills, and she did not doubt--oh! no, she did
not doubt, she was only tired.

Tired of the strange, sleepless, feverish nights; tired of the long,
dull, empty days: tired of watching down the barren, leafless lane:
tired of hearkening breathless to each step on the rustling dead leaves;
tired of looking always, always, always, into the ruddy autumn evenings
and the cold autumn starlight, and never hearing what she listened for,
never seeing what she sought; tired as a child may be lost in a wood, and
wearily wearing its small strength and breaking its young heart in search
of the track forever missed, of the home forever beyond the horizon.

Still she did her work and kept her courage.

She took her way into the town with her basket full of the ruby and amber
of the dusky autumn blossoms, and when those failed, and the garden was
quite desolate, except for a promise of haws and of holly, she went, as
she had always done, to the lace-room, and gained her bread and the
chickens' corn each day by winding the thread round the bobbins; and at
nightfall when she had plodded home through the darksome roads and over
the sodden turf, and had lit her rushlight and sat down to her books,
with her hand buried in her hair, and her eyes smarting from the strain
of the lac