here is no eye to see, no ear to hear, she
will throw off for one thankful moment the ugly, hateful thing. She
will allow the dejected visage to fitly portray the dejected mind; she
will breathe freely once more, and sigh and sigh, and moan and moan,
and wring her hands in uncontrollable agony; and, ignoring the fact
that the heaviest part of her trouble is of her own making, wonder why
she had ever been born for such as this.

Hope is entirely dead in Mell's heart. Transplanted out of the lowly
valley of her own birth to the mountain-tops of her soul's desire, she
feels as lonely as we might imagine the spirit of Greek art, set down
in a modern world. Turn whatever way she would, there was but one fate
for her--martyrdom. If she did not marry Rube, she would be a martyr
in her own humble home; if she did marry him, she would be a martyr in
his more pretentious one; and there was not as great a difference as
she had thought between the air in the valley and the air on the
mountain-top. It is the lungs which breathe, and not the air inhaled,
most at issue, and a martyr is a martyr anywhere, the social type
being hardly less excruciating to undergo than others more quickly
ended.

Pitiful in the extreme are such thoughts in a young mind; pitiful such
manifestations of suffering in one too young to suffer.

How the people upstairs would be surprised if they could see her! How
the Honorable Archibald, who liked things jolly, begawd! who thought
all evidence of feeling bad form, you know; who believed, root and
branch, in British stoicism, even in the jaws of death; how he would
advise her in a spirit of friendliness and a well-bred way, not aw to
make a blawsted dolt of herself--if he only knew. Fortunately, he did
not know; fortunately, nobody knew.

Nobody?

Then who or what is that creature in semblance of man, in attitude of
deepest thought, with folded arms and hanging head, darkly shadowed,
dimly seen, scarcely discernible in the embrasure of the window over
there?

Spirit or man? If a man, he might be a dead one for all the noise he
makes--only a dead man was never known before to use his eyes in such
a lively manner, or his ears to such good purpose, or to betray so
deep an interest in a living woman, even in a ball dress.

Mell did not look towards him, did not know he was there; yet, on a
sudden, as if from some inward sense of vigilance rather than any
extraneous source of knowledge, her pulses strangely