r hands. The poor, mistaken face!
She felt as if she would like to blot it out of the world, as her tears
used to blot out the wrong sums upon her slate. It had been so happy!
But he was sorry for it, and all that. Why did a good God make such
faces?

She slipped upon her knees, bewildered.

"He _can't_ mean any harm nohow," she said, speaking fast, and knelt
there and said it over till she felt sure of it.

Then she thought of Del once more,--of her colors and sinuous springs,
and little cries and chatter.

After a time she found that she was growing faint, and so stole down
into the kitchen for some food. She stayed a minute to warm her feet.
The fire was red and the clock was ticking. It seemed to her home-like
and comfortable, and she seemed to herself very homeless and lonely; so
she sat down on the floor, with her head in a chair, and cried as hard
as she ought to have done four hours ago.

She climbed into bed about one o'clock, having decided, in a dull way,
to give Dick up to-morrow.

But when to-morrow came he was up with a bright face, and built the
kitchen fire for her, and brought in all the water, and helped her fry
the potatoes, and whistled a little about the house, and worried at her
paleness, and so she said nothing about it.

"I'll wait till night," she planned, making ready for the mill.

"O, I can't!" she cried at night. So other mornings came, and other
nights.

I am quite aware that, according to all romantic precedents, this
conduct was preposterous in Asenath, Floracita, in the novel, never so
far forgets the whole duty of a heroine as to struggle, waver, doubt,
delay. It is proud and proper to free the young fellow; proudly and
properly she frees him; "suffers in silence"--till she marries another
man; and (having had a convenient opportunity to refuse the original
lover) overwhelms the reflective reader with a sense of poetic justice
and the eternal fitness of things.

But I am not writing a novel, and, as the biographer of this simple
factory girl, am offered few advantages.

Asenath was no heroine, you see. Such heroic elements as were in
her--none could tell exactly what they were, or whether there were any:
she was one of those people in whom it is easy to be quite
mistaken;--her life had not been one to develop. She might have a
certain pride of her own, under given circumstances; but plants grown in
a cellar will turn to the sun at any cost; how could she go back into
her