or mother, but to waste by a bedridden old man, the only creature on
earth she loved as she could love. Light and air were denied the plant,
but it grew in darkness,--blanched and unblooming, it is true, but still
a growth upward, toward light.

Ten years more of monotonous patience, and Miss Hyde was thirty-six. Her
hair had thinned, and was full of silver threads; a wrinkle invaded
either cheek, and she was angular and bony; but something painfully
sweet lingered in her face, and a certain childlike innocence of
expression gave her the air of a nun; the world had never touched nor
taught her.

But now Judge Hyde was dead; nineteen years of petulant, helpless,
hopeless wretchedness were at last over, and all that his daughter cared
to live for was gone; she was an orphan, without near relatives, without
friends, old, and tired out. Do not despise me that I say "old," you
plump and rosy ladies whose life is in its prime of joy and use at
thirty-six. Age is not counted by years, nor calculated from one's
birth; it is a fact of wear and work, altogether unconnected with the
calendar. I have seen a girl of sixteen older than you are at forty. I
have known others disgrace themselves at sixty-five by liking to play
with children and eat sugar-plums!

One kind of youth still remained to Hitty Hyde,--the freshness of
inexperience. Her soul was as guileless and as ignorant as a child's;
and she was stranded on life, with a large fortune, like a helmless
ship, heavily loaded, that breaks from its anchor, and drives headlong
upon a reef.

Now it happened, that, within a year after Judge Hyde's death, Abner