husband. If not, she may plead this as some excuse for making the
venture--poor thing! But whether, even then, she has the moral
right to lessen some good girl's chances of getting a husband by
taking two for herself, has ever been and must remain a mooted
question in my mind."

Her conduct in this respect was thoroughly consistent with her
avowed principles. She was but thirty when her husdand died, after
living happily with her for ten years. Her only child had preceded
him to the grave four years before, and the attractive relict of
Frederic Sutton, comfortably jointured and without incumbrance of
near relatives, would have become a toast with gay bachelors and
enterprising widowers, but for the quiet propriety of her demeanor,
and the steadiness with which she insisted--for the most part,
tacitly--upon her right to be considered a married woman still.

"Once Frederic's wife--always his!" was the sole burden of her
answer to a proposal of marriage received when she was forty-five,
and the discomfited suitor filed it in his memory alongside of
Caesar's hackneyed war dispatch.

She had laid off crape and bombazine at the close of the first
lustrum of her widowhood as inconvenient and unwholesome wear, but
never assumed colored apparel. On the morning on which our story
opens, she took her seat at the breakfast-table in her nephew's
house--of which she was matron and supervisor-in-chief--clad in a
white cambric wrapper, belted with black; her collar fastened with a
mourning-pin of Frederic's hair, and a lace cap, trimmed with black
ribbon, set above her luxuriant tresses. She looked fresh and bright
as the early September day, with her sunny face and in her