the
record.

Nobody could have conjectured from Mara's calm, gentle cheerfulness of
demeanor, that any sorrow lay at the bottom of her heart; she would not
have owned it to herself.

There are griefs which grow with years, which have no marked
beginnings,--no especial dates; they are not events, but slow
perceptions of disappointment, which bear down on the heart with a
constant and equable pressure like the weight of the atmosphere, and
these things are never named or counted in words among life's sorrows;
yet through them, as through an unsuspected inward wound, life, energy,
and vigor slowly bleed away, and the persons, never owning even to
themselves the weight of the pressure,--standing, to all appearance,
fair and cheerful, are still undermined with a secret wear of this inner
current, and ready to fall with the first external pressure.

There are persons often brought into near contact by the relations of
life, and bound to each other by a love so close, that they are
perfectly indispensable to each other, who yet act upon each other as a
file upon a diamond, by a slow and gradual friction, the pain of which
is so equable, so constantly diffused through life, as scarcely ever at
any time to force itself upon the mind as a reality.

Such had been the history of the affection of Mara for Moses. It had
been a deep, inward, concentrated passion that had almost absorbed
self-consciousness, and made her keenly alive to all the moody,
restless, passionate changes of his nature; it had brought with it that
craving for sympathy and return which such love ever will, and yet it
was fixed upon a nature so different and so uncomprehending that the
action had for years been one of pain more than pleasure. Even now, when
she had him at home with her and busied herself with constant cares for
him, there was a sort of disturbing, unquiet element in the history of
every day. The longing for him to come home at night,--the wish that he
would stay with her,--the uncertainty whether he would or would not go
and spend the evening with Sally,--the musing during the day over all
that he had done and said the day before, were a constant interior
excitement. For Moses, besides being in his moods quite variable and
changeable, had also a good deal of the dramatic element in him, and put
on sundry appearances in the way of experiment.

He would feign to have quarreled with Sally, that he might detect
whether Mara would betray some gl