"Well, may they be good,--these rich folks!"

"That's so. I'd be good if I was rich; wouldn't you, Moll?"

"You'd keep growing wilder than ever, if you went to hell, Meg Match:
yes you would, because my teacher said so."

"So, then, he wouldn't marry her, after all; and she--"

"Going to the circus to-night, Bess?"

"I can't help crying, Jenny. You don't _know_ how my head aches! It
aches, and it aches, and it seems as if it would never stop aching. I
wish--I wish I was dead, Jenny!"

They separated at last, going each her own way,--pretty Del Ivory to
her boarding-place by the canal, her companion walking home alone.

This girl, Asenath Martyn, when left to herself, fell into a contented
dream not common to girls who have reached her age,--especially girls
who have seen the phases of life which she had seen. Yet few of the
faces in the streets that led her home were more gravely lined. She
puzzled one at the first glance, and at the second. An artist, meeting
her musing on a canal-bridge one day, went home and painted a May-flower
budding in February.

It was a damp, unwholesome place, the street in which she lived, cut
short by a broken fence, a sudden steep, and the water; filled with
children,--they ran from the gutters after her, as she passed,--and