but she had some such hopes of converting him as women cherish who give
themselves to men confirmed in drunkenness. She learned, as other women do,
that she could hardly change her husband in the least of his habits, and
that, in this great matter of his unbelief, her love was powerless. It
became easier at last for her to add self-sacrifice to self-sacrifice than
to vex him with her anxieties about his soul, and to act upon the feeling
that, if he must be lost, then she did not care to be saved. He had never
interfered with her church-going; he had rather promoted it, for he liked
to have women go; but the time came when she no longer cared to go without
him; she lapsed from her membership, and it was now many years since she
had worshipped with the people of her faith, if, indeed, she were still of
any faith. Her life was silenced in every way, and, as often happens with
aging wives in country towns, she seldom went out of her own door, and
never appeared at the social or public solemnities of the village. Her
husband and her daughter composed and bounded her world,--she always talked
of them, or of other things as related to them. She had grown an elderly
woman, without losing the color of her yellow hair; and the bloom of
girlhood had been stayed in her cheeks as if by the young habit of
blushing, which she had kept. She was still what her neighbors called very
pretty-appearing, and she must have been a beautiful girl. The silence of
her inward life subdued her manner, till now she seemed always to have come
from some place on which a deep hush had newly fallen.

She answered the door when Bartley turned the crank that snapped the
gong-bell in its centre; and the young man, who was looking at the street
while waiting for some one to come, confronted her with a start. "Oh!" he
said, "I thought it was Marcia. Good morning, Mrs. Gaylord. Isn't Marcia at
home?"

"She went to church, this morning," replied her mother. "Won't you walk