two pails of water instead of one, never forgot the fire, helped her
home from the mill. She saw him meet Del Ivory once upon Essex Street
with a grave and silent bow; he never spoke with her now. He meant to
pay the debt he owed her down to the uttermost farthing; that grew
plain. Did she try to speak her wretched secret, he suffocated her with
kindness, struck her dumb with tender words.

She used to analyze her life in those days, considering what it would be
without him. To be up by half past five o'clock in the chill of all the
winter mornings, to build the fire and cook the breakfast and sweep the
floor, to hurry away, faint and weak, over the raw, slippery streets, to
climb at half past six the endless stairs and stand at the endless loom,
and hear the endless wheels go buzzing round, to sicken in the oily
smells, and deafen at the remorseless noise, and weary of the rough girl
swearing at the other end of the pass; to eat her cold dinner from a
little cold tin pail out on the stairs in the three-quarters-of-an-hour
recess; to come exhausted home at half past six at night, and get the
supper, and brush up about the shoemaker's bench, and be too weak to
eat; to sit with aching shoulders and make the button-holes of her best
dress, or darn her father's stockings, till nine o'clock; to hear no
bounding step or cheery whistle about the house; to creep into bed and
lie there trying not to think, and wishing that so she might creep into
her grave,--this not for one winter, but for all the winters,--how
should _you_ like it, you young girls, with whom time runs like a story?

The very fact that her employers dealt honorably by her; that she was
fairly paid, and promptly, for her wearing toil; that the limit of
endurance was consulted in the temperature of the room, and her need of
rest in an occasional holiday,--perhaps, after all, in the mood she was
in, did not make this factory life more easy. She would have found it
rather a relief to have somebody to complain of,--wherein she was like
the rest of us, I fancy.

But at last there came a day--it chanced to be the ninth of
January--when Asenath went away alone at noon, and sat where Merrimack
sung his songs to her. She hid her face upon her knees, and listened and
thought her own thoughts, till they and the slow torment of the winter
seemed greater than she could bear. So, passing her hands confusedly
over her forehead, she said at last aloud, "That's what God means,