they watched her merry, kindly face,--

"Ain't it the queerest thing in life, Hetty Gunn won't marry. There
isn't a fellow in town she mightn't have."

If anybody had said this to Hetty herself, she would probably have
laughed, and said with entire frankness,--

"You're quite mistaken. They don't want me," which would only have
strengthened her hearers' previous impressions that they did.

In process of time, after the weddings came the christenings, and at
these also Hetty Gunn was still the favorite friend, the desired guest.
Presently, there came to be so many little Hetty Gunns in the village,
that no young mother had courage to use the name more, however much she
loved Hetty. Hetty used to say laughingly that it was well she was an
only child, for she had now more nieces and nephews than she knew what
to do with. Very dearly she loved them all; and the little things all
loved her, the instant she put her arms round them: and more than one
young husband, without meaning to be in the least disloyal to his wife,
thought to himself, when he saw his baby's face nestling down to Hetty
Gunn's brown curls,--

"I wonder if she'd have had me, if I'd asked her. But I don't believe
Hetty'll ever marry,--a girl that's had the offers she has."

And so it had come to pass that, at the time our story begins, Hetty was
thirty-five years old, and singularly alone in the world. The death of
her mother, which had occurred first, was a great shock to her, for it
had been a sudden and a painful death. But the loss of her mother was to