Mary was silent, listening to the old man's sobs, as they mingled with the storm.
"She came back with her husband," uttered the old man, "the whitest and stillest creature you ever saw. Her husband loved her, and she was so gentle and submissive to him. Poor fellow! poor fellow! he deserved something better than the dead ashes that she had to give him.
"Anna's husband was nothing but a common artist, wanting to do something great, but with no power to do it. He could dream of beautiful things, and then pine his soul out, because his hand failed in making them. But he had a true, good heart; that was our only comfort when Anna went away with him to live in the city.
"'Why did you act so wildly, Anna?' says I, as she crept to my chair and laid her head so sorrowfully on my knee the night before they went away; 'we would have worked ourselves to death, poor child, if you had only stayed in the old place—what possessed you that night, Anna?'
"'He will never know that I was the forsaken one,' says she, and her cheeks burned with crimson once more. 'I only thought of that at first, but in the pain his letter gave me, I remembered the disappointment I had dealt on a good man who loved me—I was wild, brother Nathan, but not bad. But my husband, I will make him a humble, patient wife, see if I don't.'
"And she did, Mary Fuller—the poor girl did make a dutiful, good wife; but it was enough to break your heart to see her trying so hard to please a man, who wanted nothing but her love to make him happy, and felt she could not give him that."
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE TWO INFANTS.
And then I thought of one, who in her pale, meek beauty, died,
The fair young blossom that grew up and faded by my side;
In the cold, moist earth, we laid her, where the forest cast its
leaf,
And we sighed that one so beautiful should have a lot so brief.