What was to prevent Bertha's experience from becoming her own, or possibly Molly's, in case of evil fortune? If she should often be ill, who would care for them? She seemed to herself, just then, such a frail plank between them and want! She raised her white, blue-veined hands and looked at them; they did not seem made for struggling, and a sense of powerlessness, born of bodily weakness, enwrapped her in its hopeless gloom.
There is a certain period, after convalescence is well progressed, that is even more trying to many natures than actual illness—that time when we are supposed to be well, and yet have not quite resumed our wonted strength.
How the long-dropped burdens of our lives loom up before us now! Is it possible we ever bent our backs to such a load? Can we ever do it again? Yet, even as we hesitate, relentless necessity pushes us on, and bids us hoist the burden.
Sara felt this often now, and all her former bravery seemed gone with her strength. She had already decided that, next Monday, she must return to the museum, and bring up her neglected work; then there was a half- written article to be finished and copied, whose motive and central thought she had almost forgotten, while at her side loomed a basketful of stockings to be darned, and garments to be mended before the Sabbath dawn.
In this reluctant mood, trying to rally her forces for renewed conflict with life's hard duties, she could not help thinking how different it might all be—how she might be cared for, instead of looking out for others; how she might be the centre of a home, enclosed and guarded, rather than, as now, trying vainly to encompass one, making a wall of her feeble self to shelter others—and hot tears of rebellious weakness filled her eyes, and dropped slowly upon the trembling little hands, which were painfully weaving the threads to and fro through a preposterous hole in one of Morton's socks.
A step in the hall made her hasten to dash away the tell-tale drops, as
Hetty knocked, before peeping in to say,—
"There's a gentleman in the parlor asking to see you, Miss Olmstead."
"A gentleman? One of the professors?"
"I don't think it is; I never see him before—it's a young man."
Sara rose, adjusted her dress a little, and descended to the drawing- room. In its close-shuttered condition she did not at first recognize the figure which rose to meet her, but a second look wrung from her almost a cry.