tenderest of gentlemen. Providence has its mysteries; but if there be
one that taxes faith and staggers patience more than another, it is the
long misery that makes a good woman cringe and writhe and agonize in
silence under the utter rule and life-long sovereignty of a bad man.
Perhaps such women do not suffer as we fancy; for after much trial every
woman learns that it is possible to love where neither respect nor
admiration can find foothold,--that it even becomes necessary to love
some men, as the angels love us all, from an untroubled height of pity
and tenderness, that, while it sees and condemns the sin and folly and
uncleanness of its object, yet broods over it with an all-shielding
devotion, laboring and beseeching and waiting for its regeneration,
upheld above the depths of suffering and regret by the immortal power of
a love so fervent, so pure, so self-forgetting, that it will be a
millstone about the necks that disregard its tender clasping now, to
sink them into a bottomless abyss in the day of the Lord.

Now had one long and not unhappy autumn, a lingering winter, a desolate
spring, a weary summer, passed away, and from an all-unconscious and
protracted wrestling with death Hitty Dimock awoke to find her hope
fulfilled,--a fair baby nestled on her arm, and her husband, not
all-insensible, smiling beside her.

It is true, that, had she died then, Abner Dimock would have regretted
her death; for, by certain provisions of her father's will, in case of
her death, the real estate, otherwise at her own disposal, became a
trust for her child or children, and such a contingency ill suited Mr.
Dimock's plans. So long as Hitty held a rood of land or a coin of silver
at her own disposal, it was also at his; but trustees are not women,
happily for the world at large, and the contemplation of that fact
brought Hitty Hyde's husband into a state of mind well fitted to give