sting
singularly with the passionate melancholy which she had that morning
expressed.

Miss Roxy did not interrupt her meditations. The nature of her
profession had rendered her familiar with all the changing mental and
physical phenomena that attend the development of disease and the
gradual loosening of the silver cords of a present life. Certain
well-understood phrases everywhere current among the mass of the people
in New England, strikingly tell of the deep foundations of religious
earnestness on which its daily life is built. "A triumphant death" was a
matter often casually spoken of among the records of the neighborhood;
and Miss Roxy felt that there was a vague and solemn charm about its
approach. Yet the soul of the gray, dry woman was hot within her, for
the conversation of the morning had probed depths in her own nature of
whose existence she had never before been so conscious. The roughest and
most matter-of-fact minds have a craving for the ideal somewhere; and
often this craving, forbidden by uncomeliness and ungenial surroundings
from having any personal history of its own, attaches itself to the
fortune of some other one in a kind of strange disinterestedness. Some
one young and beautiful is to live the life denied to them--to be the
poem and the romance; it is the young mistress of the poor black
slave--the pretty sister of the homely old spinster--or the clever son
of the consciously ill-educated father. Something of this unconscious
personal investment had there been on the part of Miss Roxy in the
nursling whose singular loveliness she had watched for so many years,
and on whose fair virgin orb she had marked the growing shadow of a
fatal eclipse, and as she saw her glowing and serene, with that peculiar
brightness that she felt came from no earthly presence or influence, she
could scarcely keep the tears from her honest gray eyes.

When they arrived at the door of the house, Zephaniah Pennel was sitting
in it, looking toward the sunset.

"Why, reely," he said, "Miss Roxy, we thought you must a-run away with
Mara; she's been gone a'most all day."

"I expect she's had enough to talk with Aunt Roxy about," said Mrs.
Pennel. "Girls goin' to get married have a deal to talk about, what with
patterns and contrivin' and makin' up. But come in, Miss Roxy; we're
glad to see you."

Mara turned to Miss Roxy, and gave her a look of peculiar meaning. "Aunt
Roxy," she said, "you must tell them what we have b