e knowledge of guilt and wrong which
had been imparted to her, and in the fear of the future, which she could
not shake away; but she confided, spite of herself, in the counsel which
had been given her, and there was a happiness out-weighing all the
misery, in the knowledge that the idol of her young heart was not a base
and miserable counterfeit. The gulf between Richard Crawford and herself
might have grown too wide to be over-leaped--she might have become, to
him, only a name to be regretted and yet despised--but it was still
something in life to know that he was true and worthy, even if he was to
be nothing more to _her_; and the foot of the young girl trod more
firmly upon the green sward of the pathway than it had done for many a
long month, and half the languor was gone from eye and nerve, as she
walked slowly homeward through the summer noon, to try that strange
experiment upon which she felt that the happiness or misery of her whole
future life might depend.

As for Josephine Harris, those who know the depressions which sometimes
fall upon high nervous organizations after severe and continued effort,
scarcely need be told that she was almost prostrated the moment she felt
that her work was for the time concluded. She had been suffering with
throbbing temples and a too-rapid motion about the heart, during a large
part of her conversation with Mary Crawford; and when Aunt Betsey,
seeing from the window the departure of Mary, and little Susan, recalled
by the voice of her cousin, re-entered the sitting-room, they found Joe
shedding tears like a great baby and sobbing a little, with a fair
prospect of an afternoon and night in the company of that most
unromantic of companions--_sick-headache_.

It is a matter of no consequence how much of the conversation which had
just passed, Josephine narrated to her aunt and cousin. Enough to
satisfy their proper curiosity and give them assurance that she had
succeeded in her attempt at first alarming and then winning the
confidence of the young girl, and nothing more. Neither asked more, for
both felt, beyond a doubt, that there might have been confidences in
that conversation, too sacred to be revealed to other ears.

The sick-headache did come, as it had promised; and Joe Harris, her
temples bathed with cologne by the willing hands of little Susy, went up
to an enforced _siesta_ in her little bed-room. But she had the
satisfaction, as the drowsy hum of the summer afternoon