time--had begun to fade, her face and figure to
shrink, and her brow to tighten. At last, embitterred
by her responsibilities and disappointments, she had
lost faith in human kind and had become a shrew.
Since then her tongue had swept on as relentlessly
as a scythe, sparing neither flower nor noxious weed,
a movement which it was wise, sometimes, to check.

When, therefore, Martha, with Meg now bounding
before her, caught sight of Ann Gossaway's beckoning
hand thrust out of the low window of her cottage
--the spider-web referred to by Uncle Ephraim--she
halted in her walk, lingered a moment as if undecided,
expressed her opinion of the dressmaker to
Meg in an undertone, and swinging open the gate
with its ball and chain, made her way over the grass-
plot and stood outside the window, level with the sill.

"Well, it ain't none of my business, of course,
Martha Sands," Miss Gossaway began, "and that's
just what I said to mother when I come home, but
if I was some folks I'd see my company in my parlor,
long as I had one, 'stead of hidin' down behind the
House o' Refuge. I said to mother soon's I got in,
'I'm goin' to tell Martha Sands fust minute I see
her. She ain't got no idee how them girls of hers
is carryin' on or she'd stop it.' That's what I said,
didn't I, mother?"

Martha caught an inarticulate sound escaping from