but love alone made the past years stand out for her. Sylvia, in
looking back over eighteen years, forgot the father, mother, and
sister who had died in that time; their funeral trains passed before
her eyes like so many shadows. She forgot all their cares and her
own; she forgot how she had nursed her bedridden mother for ten
years; she forgot everything but those blessed Sunday nights on which
Richard Alger had come. She called to mind every little circumstance
connected with them--how she had adorned the best room by slow
degrees, saving a few cents at a time from her sparse income, because
he sat in it every Sunday night; how she had had the bed which her
mother and grandmother kept there removed because the fashion had
changed, and the guilty audacity with which she had purchased a
hair-cloth sofa to take its place.

That adorning of the best room had come to be a religion with Sylvia
Crane. As faithfully as any worshipper of the Greek deity she laid
her offerings, her hair-cloth sofa and rocker, her copper-gilt
pitcher of apple blossoms, upon the altar of love.

Sylvia recalled, sobbing more piteously in the darkness, sundry
dreams, which had never been realized, of herself and Richard sitting
side by side and hand in hand, as confessed lovers, on that sofa.
Richard Alger, during all those eighteen years, had never made love
to Sylvia, unless his constant attendance upon Sabbath evenings could
be so construed, as it was in that rural neighborhood, and as Sylvia
was fain to construe it in her innocent heart.

It is doubtful if Sylvia, in her perfect decorum and long-fostered
maiden reserve, fairly knew that Richard Alger had never made love to
her. She scarcely expected her dreams of endearments to be realized;