my hand, and the easy way I had got off with Mr.
Winthrop, making me quite elated.

"One can never tell. Mr. Winthrop is very uncertain; we may return in a
day or two, or we may stay a fortnight."

"You are not anxious to go?" I questioned, seeing her troubled face.

"Not just now, in the height of the pickling and preserving season.
Reynolds has excellent judgment, but I prefer looking after such things
myself."

She looked wistfully at me while she dried her china. "May I help you,
Mrs. Flaxman? It never occurred to me before that I might share your
burdens. I should learn to have cares, as well as others."

"I always like to have you with me, dear. Sometimes I try to make myself
believe God has given you to me, instead of my own little Medoline."

"Had you a daughter once?"

"Yes; and, like yourself, named after your own dear mother."

"Oh, Mrs. Flaxman, and you never told me. Was she grown up like me?"

"She was only six years old when she died, just a month after her father;
but the greater grief benumbed me so I scarce realized my second loss
until months afterward."

"Is it so terrible, then, to lose one's husband?"

"It depends greatly on the husband."

"The widow Larkum cries constantly after hers, but he was bread-winner,
too. A hungry grief must be a double one."

"Did Mr. Winthrop say anything further to you about being out last
night?"

"A little," I replied, with scarlet cheeks; "but he will never do so
again. I shall not give him cause to reprove me."

"That is the most lady-like course. You are no longer a little girl, or a
school-girl either."

I wiped my plates in silence, but my mortification was none the less
intense. I realized then, more keenly than ever, that I must preserve the
proprieties, and confine myself to the restrictions of polite society.
The breezy, unconventional freedom Mrs. Flaxman had for those few months
permitted me had been so keenly enjoyed. I fretted uneasily at the forms,
and ceremonies of artificial life, while the aboriginal instincts, which
every free heart hides away somewhere in its depths, had been permitted
too full development.

The china cleansed, and put away, I stood surveying the shining pieces
that comprised our breakfast equipage, and like the tired clock in the
fable, thought wearily of the many hundred times Mrs. Flaxman had washed
those dishes; of the many thousand times they, or others, would go
through the same operation, until Mrs. Wint