sleep, at times, and see broad patches of steel blue glittering
through the thick apple-trees and the bushes. Her mother had
fallen into a doze. Margret looked at her, thinking how sallow
the plump, fair face had grown, and how faded the kindly blue
eyes were now. Dim with crying,--she knew that, though she never
saw her shed a tear. Always cheery, going placidly about the
house in her gray dress and Quaker cap, as if there were no such
things in the world as debt or blindness. But Margret knew,
though she said nothing. When her mother came in from those
wonderful foraging expeditions in search of late pease or corn,
she could see the swollen circle round the eyes, and hear her
breath like that of a child which has sobbed itself tired. Then,
one night, when she had gone into her mother's room, after she
was in bed, the blue eyes were set in a wild, hopeless way, as if
staring down into years of starvation and misery. The fire on
the hearth burned low and clear; the old worn furniture stood out
cheerfully in the red glow, and threw a maze of twisted shadow on
the floor. But the glow was all that was cheerful. To-morrow,
when the hard daylight should jeer away the screening shadows, it
would unbare a desolate, shabby home. She knew; struck with the
white leprosy of poverty; the blank walls, the faded hangings,
the old stone house itself, looking vacantly out on the fields
with a pitiful significance of loss. Upon the mantel-shelf there
was a small marble figure, one of the Dancing Graces: the other
two were gone, gone in pledge. This one was left, twirling her
foot, and stretching out her hands in a dreary sort of ecstasy,
with no one to respond. For a moment, so empty and bitter seemed
her home and her life, that she thought the lonely dancer with
her flaunting joy mocked her,--taunted them with the slow, gray
desolation that had been creeping on them for years. Only for a