neat house in the outskirts of Saratoga Springs. In doing so he was
instigated as much by the excellence of the investment for his
pocket as by the salubrity of the place for his girls. He furnished
the house well, and then during some summer weeks his wife lived
there, and sometimes he let it.

How the widow grieved when the lord of her heart and master of her
mind was laid in the grave, I need not tell. She had already
counted ten years of widowhood, and her children had grown to be
young women beside her at the time of which I am now about to speak.
Since that sad day on which they had left Albany they had lived
together at the cottage at the Springs. In winter their life had
been lonely enough; but as soon as the hot weather began to drive
the fainting citizens out from New York, they had always received
two or three boarders--old ladies generally, and occasionally an old
gentleman--persons of very steady habits, with whose pockets the
widow's moderate demands agreed better than the hotel charges. And
so the Bells lived for ten years.

That Saratoga is a gay place in July, August, and September, the
world knows well enough. To girls who go there with trunks full of
muslin and crinoline, for whom a carriage and pair of horses is
always waiting immediately after dinner, whose fathers' pockets are
bursting with dollars, it is a very gay place. Dancing and
flirtations come as a matter of course, and matrimony follows after
with only too great rapidity. But the place was not very gay for
Hetta or Susan Bell.

In the first place the widow was a timid woman, and among other
fears feared greatly that she should be thought guilty of setting