Now for a number of years I'd been up in the other part of the town with
Aunt Netty, who kept a shop that I tended between schools and before and
after, and I'd almost forgotten there was such a soul on earth as Dan
Devereux,--though he'd not forgotten me. I'd got through the Grammar
and had a year in the High, and suppose I should have finished with an
education and gone off teaching somewhere, instead of being here now,
cheerful as heart could wish, with a little black-haired hussy tiltering
on the back of my chair.--Rolly, get down! Her name's Laura,--for his
mother.--I mean I might have done all this, if at that time mother
hadn't been thrown on her back, and been bedridden ever since. I haven't
said much about mother yet, but there all the time she was, just as she
is to-day, in her little tidy bed in one corner of the great kitchen,
sweet as a saint, and as patient; and I had to come and keep house for
father. He never meant that I should lose by it, father didn't; begged,
borrowed, or stolen, bought or hired, I should have my books, he said:
he's mighty proud of my learning, though between you and me it's little
enough to be proud of; but the neighbors think I know 'most as much as
the minister,--and I let 'em think. Well, while Mrs. Devereux was sick I
was over there a good deal,--for if Faith had one talent, it was total
incapacity,--and there had a chance of knowing the stuff that Dan was
made of; and I declare to man 'twould have touched a heart of stone to
see the love between the two. She thought Dan held up the sky, and Dan
thought she was the sky. It's no wonder,--the risks our men lead can't
make common-sized women out of their wives and mothers. But I hadn't
been coming in and out, busying about where Dan was, all that time,
without making any mark; though he was so lost in grief about his mother
that he didn't take notice of his other feelings, or think of himself at
all. And who could care the less about him for that? It always brings
down a woman to see a man wrapt in some sorrow that's lawful, and tender
as it is large. And when he came and told me what the neighbors said he