Ten minutes longer the spinning-wheel kept its rhythmic measure, as you may hear it in Mendelssohn's Lied; and then of a sudden Molly dropped the thread, and, clasping her hands together, stood with lifted head and steadfast eyes, while over her young face crept the look its lines would have taught a physiognomist to sometime expect there, although it might not be for years.
Joan of Arc resolving to give her young life to France; Charlotte Corday dedicating hers to Liberty; Anne Askew consecrating hers to God,—all these could recognize that look, and strike hands with one fit to be their sister; but like other great crises in our lives it passed unseen, unnoted, in silence, save as the girl's pale lips murmured almost inaudibly,—
"No! let what will come, I have made my mind: I will never be Reuben Hetherford's wife."
But the moments in which one remains on the pinnacle of a grand resolve are not minutes, and do not hold a second breath. Even as she spoke, a trouble began to shadow the girl's bright eyes, and dim the hero-light of her expression. Like a cloud, the prescience of conflict, and weary argument, and slow, crushing oppression, came over her, as she remembered her mother, who, for reasons of her own, had this marriage so much at heart, and who so well knew how to wear out her opponent in any struggle; and who never relinquished a point, though life was fretted away in fruitless opposition, as in the matter of her husband's religion. All this, and much, much more, passed through the girl's mind in that first prophetic
