d turned again in weary, quiet hours of
fruitless questioning. What did he mean by this? and what did he intend
by that?--while he, the careless buffalo, meant nothing, or has
forgotten what it was, if he did. Man's utter ignorance of woman's
nature is a cause of a great deal of unsuspected cruelty which he
practices toward her.

Mara found one or two opportunities of writing to Moses; but her letters
were timid and constrained by a sort of frosty, discouraged sense of
loneliness; and Moses, though he knew he had no earthly right to expect
this to be otherwise, took upon him to feel as an abused individual,
whom nobody loved--whose way in the world was destined to be lonely and
desolate. So when, at the end of three years, he arrived suddenly at
Brunswick in the beginning of winter, and came, all burning with
impatience, to the home at Orr's Island, and found that Mara had gone to
Boston on a visit, he resented it as a personal slight.

He might have inquired why she should expect him, and whether her whole
life was to be spent in looking out of the window to watch for him. He
might have remembered that he had warned her of his approach by no
letter. But no. "Mara didn't care for him--she had forgotten all about
him--she was having a good time in Boston, just as likely as not with
some train of admirers, and he had been tossing on the stormy ocean, and
she had thought nothing of it." How many things he had meant to say! He
had never felt so good and so affectionate. He would have confessed all
the sins of his life to her, and asked her pardon--and she wasn't there!

Mrs. Pennel suggested that he might go to Boston after her.

No, he was not going to do that. He would not intrude on her pleasures
with the memory of a rough, hard-working sailor. He was alone in the
world, and had his own way to make, and so best go at once up among
lumbermen, and cut the timber for the ship that was to carry Caesar and
his fortunes.

When Mara was informed by a letter from Mrs. Pennel, expressed in the
few brief words in which that good woman generally embodied her
epistolary communications, that Moses had been at home, and gone to
Umbagog without seeing her, she felt at her heart only a little closer
stricture of cold, quiet pain, which had become a habit of her inner
life.

"He did not love her--he was cold and selfish," said the inner voice.
And faintly she pleaded, in answer, "He is a man--he has seen the
world--and has so much