she went and
came across the provincial stage, knowing that her audience was made
up of nearly the whole population of that little seaside town. When
the curtain had fallen at last, and the old friends--seafaring men and
others and their wives--had come home from Captain Lunn's funeral, and
had spoken their friendly thoughts, and reviewed his symptoms for what
seemed to them to be the last time, everybody was conscious of a real
anxiety. The future of the captain's widow was sadly uncertain, for
every one was aware that Mrs. Lunn could now depend upon only a scant
provision. She was much younger than her husband, having been a second
wife, and she was thrifty and ingenious; but her outlook was
acknowledged to be anything but cheerful. In truth, the honest grief
that she displayed in the early days of her loss was sure to be better
understood with the ancient proverb in mind, that a lean sorrow is
hardest to bear.

To everybody's surprise, however, this able woman succeeded in keeping
the old Lunn house painted to the proper perfection of whiteness;
there never were any loose bricks to be seen on the tops of her
chimneys. The relics of the days of her prosperity kept an air of
comfortable continuance in the days of her adversity. The best black
silk held its own nobly, and the shining roundness of its handsome
folds aided her in looking prosperous and fit for all social
occasions. She lived alone, and was a busy and unprocrastinating
housekeeper. She may have made less raspberry jam than in her earlier
days, but it was always pound for pound; while her sponge-cake was
never degraded in its ingredients from the royal standard of twelve
eggs. The honest English and French stuffs that had been used in the
furnishing of the captain's house so many years before faded a little
as the years passed by, but they never wore out. Yet one cannot keep
the same money in one's purse, if one is never so thrifty, and so
Mrs. Lunn came at last to feel heavy at heart and deeply troubled. To
use the common phrase of her neighbors, it was high time for her to
make a change. She had now been living alone for four years, and it
must be confessed that all those friends who had admired her
self-respect and self-dependence began to take a keener interest than
ever in her plans and behavior.

The first indication of Mrs. Lunn's new purpose in life was her
mournful allusion to those responsibilities which so severely tax the
incompetence of a lo