waves, while in reality it is tugging at the anchor which holds it. I never heard from my home. My father and Joseph were both dead, and Bettie was married again to young Henry McMasters. Sophia and Juliet had become dreams to me.
Then suddenly a great blow fell upon me. It is almost impossible even now to speak of it, so awful, so crushing was it. Ogden was killed. On a railroad. Coming home from a summer journey. Ogden! And he died at once; but Lilian lingered some days. There is nothing more to tell. And so I left the house which was my home, and I began to work for my living; but I cared nothing for that. I had friends who were indignant because neither my uncle nor Ogden had provided for my future; but I was entirely indifferent to my poverty, and I refused to think of possible legal claims on the estate. If Ogden had thought of my welfare and provided for it, how gladly all the days of my life would I have eaten of the bread he gave to me! But I sickened at the thought of what might come to me because he was dead and I was nearest of kin. Bitter, bitter would it have been to me,—the price of blood, the price of all that made life precious to me. In nothing was I so little poor as in money. I was alone. I had no family, no home, no love for whom to think and work. I lay on my bed and wept through the long nights, thinking of Lilian who was with him. Neither in life nor in death could he be mine, and the very thought of going to him was abhorrent to me, because I should find her there. In life I had tolerated her, in death I hated her. I had known that I could be nothing to him while we lived, but I had not faced an eternity apart from him. Vaguely had I looked forward to the sometime, the somewhere, when those kindly, lovely eyes were to seek for mine; and now he was dead, and she was dead, and they were together forever and forever, and I was alive, and I was alone forever! Ah, how happy should I have been to have had my father's faith, and to have believed them both perished out of God's universe! but I could only picture them in Paradise, and together there.
So I took my miserable way into the world again. I lived at a boarding-house, and I was fed at a long and dreary table, and I lay on my bed in the evening and made geometrical figures out of the pattern of the wall-paper. It tired me to teach all day; I was not used to it, and I missed the household ways in which I had so long gone. On Sundays I played on an organ, and earned a little money: so, with what my scholars paid me, I was supported, and my friends were not concerned, because they knew I was housed, fed, and clothed. Of the mute despair and misery of my life no one knew, and there was no one to care, or to help me, and I cared too little to help myself out of the pit into which I had fallen.
CHAPTER III.
In these days I fancied that I had lived my life. I had run a gamut of so much suppressed and silent unhappiness and grief that it seemed to me that there was nothing left to me but a listless bearing
