chamber, staring, like Dr. Webster down-stairs, through the trees at the
rain. So she had sat the night of her arrival at Webster Hall, then a
girl of eighteen and dreams. So she had sat many times, feeling youth
slip by her, lifting her bitter protest against the monotony and
starvation of her existence, yet too timid and ignorant to start forth
in search of life. It was her birthday, this gloomy Sunday. She was
forty-two. She was revolving a problem--a problem she had revolved many
times before. For what had she stayed? Had there been an unadmitted hope
that these old people must soon die and leave her with an independence
with which she could travel and live? She loved Miss Webster, and she
had gladly responded to her invitation to leave the New England village,
where she was dependent on the charity of relatives, and make her home
in the new country. Miss Webster needed a companion and housekeeper;
there would be no salary, but a comfortable home and clothes that she
could feel she had earned. She had come full of youth and spirit and
hope. Youth and hope and spirit had dribbled away, but she had stayed,
and stayed. To-day she wished she had married any clod in her native
village that had been good enough to address her. Never for one moment
had she known the joys of freedom, of love, of individuality.

Miss Webster entered abruptly.

"Abby," she exclaimed, "Hiram is ill." And she related the tale of his
unbending.

Miss Williams listened indifferently. She was very tired of Hiram. She
accepted with a perfunctory expression of gratitude the gold piece
allotted to her. "You are forty-two, you are old, you are nobody," was
knelling through her brain.