recrimination; and even the little, wailing, feeble baby, that filled
Letty's arms and consoled her in his absence, was only further cause of
strife between her and her husband. Often, as I came down the street and
saw the pretty outside of the cottage, waving with creepers, and hedged
about with thorns, whose gay berries decked it as if for a festival, I
thought of what a good old preacher among the Friends once said to me:
"Sarah, thee will live to find shows are often seems; thee sees many a
quiet house, with gay windows, that is hell inside."

I soon found that I must stay all winter at Slepington. I had a hard task
before me,--to try and teach Letty that she had no right to neglect her
own duties because her husband ignored his. But six months of continual
dropping seemed to wear a tiny channel of perception; and my presence, as
well as the efforts we made together to preserve order, if not serenity,
in the house, restored a certain dim hope to Letty's mind, and I began to
see that the "purification by fire" was doing its work, in slow pain, but
to a sure end.

Selfish as it was, I cannot say that I felt sorry to return to Jo, who
wrote for me in April, urging me to come as soon as I could, for Mr.
Waring had fallen from the mill-wall and broken his leg, and the workmen,
in their confusion, had carried him to her house, and she wanted me to
help her. I learned, on reaching Valley Mills, that the new building on
the island had not been completed far enough to resist a heavy freshet,
that had swept away part of the first story, where the mortar was not yet
hardened; and it was in traversing these wet stones to ascertain the
extent of the damage that Mr. Waring had slipped, and, unable to recover
his footing, fallen on a heap of stones and received his injury.

My first question to Josephine was, "Where is Mr. Waring's mother?"