By the time Miss Ida Ludington was twenty-five years old she recognised
that she had done with happiness, and that the pale pleasures of memory
were all which remained to her.

It was not so much the mere fact that her youth was past, saddening
though that might be, which had so embittered her life, but the
peculiarly cruel manner in which it had been taken from her.

The Ludingtons were one of the old families of Hilton, a little farming
village among the hills of Massachusetts. They were not rich, but were
well-to-do, lived in the largest house in the place, and were regarded
somewhat as local magnates. Miss Ludington's childhood had been an
exceptionally happy one, and as a girl she had been the belle of the
village. Her beauty, together, with her social position and amiability of
disposition, made her the idol of the young men, recognised leader of the
girls, and the animating and central figure in the social life of the
place.

She was about twenty years old, at the height of her beauty and in the
full tide of youthful enjoyment, when she fell ill of a dreadful disease,
and for a long time lay between life and death. Or, to state the case
more accurately, the girl did die--it was a sad and faded woman who rose
from that bed of sickness.

The ravages of disease had not left a vestige of her beauty--it was
hopelessly gone. The luxuriant, shining hair had fallen out and been
replaced by a scanty growth of washed-out hue; the lips, but yesterday so
full, and red, and tempting, were thin, and drawn, and colourless, and
the rose-leaf complexion had given place to an aspect so cruelly pitted,