“Live where our fathers lived
And die where they died.”
It would be tedious and irrelevant to this story to tell of the various circumstances that finally led Sophie and her mother to sell out all their possessions in the little country village, and to open a boarding-house in New York, in the immediate vicinity of that church which had been the scene of William Downie’s short ministry.
For many years the house was nominally kept by the elder lady; but it was entirely managed by the younger.
Many opportunities had the pretty little widow of marrying a second time; but she remained faithful to the memory of her first love.
She had never even permitted a lover to become a suitor; for as soon as her delicate perceptions discovered that this or that young “brother” in the church, or boarder in the house, had cast an eye of “favor” on her, the very shrinking of her nature threw such a sphere of coldness around her that, however gentle and courteous her manner might be to the aspirant, he dared not cross the invisible boundary of that circle.
One of her most ardent admirers said, when “chaffed” on the subject of his infatuation:
“She is as sweet and gentle, as kind and courteous as it is possible for woman to be; but it would take a fellow with more impudence than I possess to make love to her, or to ask her to marry him. There is a sort of ‘Thus far, no farther shalt thou go’ about her that I defy any man to transgress.”
He was right.
And so, without any second love, without coquetry, and without vanity, the pretty, gentle girl-widow grew from youth to middle age. Then she lost her mother, and became the nominal, as she had long been the actual, head of the boarding-house.