many a year before she could manage to add to this slender store anything
to increase her gratitude for mercies given, though all the time she was
outwardly busy, cheerful, and helpful.

Justin had once come back to Edgewood, and it was the bitterest drop in
her cup of bitterness that she was spending that winter in Berwick
(where, so the neighbours told him, she was a great favourite in society,
and was receiving much attention from gentlemen), so that she had never
heard of his visit until the spring had come again. Parted friends did
not keep up with one another's affairs by means of epistolary
communication, in those days, in Edgewood; it was not the custom. Spoken
words were difficult enough to Justin Peabody, and written words were
quite impossible, especially if they were to be used to define his half-
conscious desires and his fluctuations of will, or to recount his
disappointments and discouragements and mistakes.




CHAPTER IV


It was Saturday afternoon, the twenty-fourth of December, and the weary
sisters of the Dorcas band rose from their bruised knees and removed
their little stores of carpet-tacks from their mouths. This was a
feminine custom of long standing, and as no village dressmaker had ever
died of pins in the digestive organs, so were no symptoms of carpet-tacks
ever discovered in any Dorcas, living or dead. Men wondered at the habit
and reviled it, but stood confounded in the presence of its indubitable
harmlessness.