Gripping at her heart was the old pain she had suffered years before, and the conflict that had scared her mind so long ago was roused again. Time, if not the great physician for all wounds, surely dulls the ache of them. Miss Amanda’s emotions had been dulled during the years which had passed since she and Joseph Stagg had broken their troth. Carolyn May—surely with the best intentions in the world—had rasped this wound. The woman sat in the kitchen rocker and wrung her hands tightly as she thought. How peacefully, how beautifully, her life had begun! She had bloomed into young womanhood and had met every prospect of happiness on its threshold. She had loved and had been loved. She had been as sure of her lover’s heart in those days as she was of her own. Then had come the crash of all her hopes and all her believing. Too proud to demand an explanation of her lover, too much her father’s daughter to show Joseph Stagg what she really felt and suffered, Amanda Parlow had gone her way, not steeling her heart to tenderness, but striving to satisfy its longings with a work which, after all, she realised was a thankless task. She lavished her sympathy on the afflicted; but, deep in her soul, she felt no satisfaction in this. She felt that the higher qualities of her nature were not developed. She craved that satisfaction in life which a woman finds in a home, in a husband, and in little children. “Oh, Joe! Oh, Joe! How could you?” she moaned, rocking herself to and fro. “How could you?” CHAPTER XIII—BREAKING THROUGH Carolyn May always spent a part of each Saturday afternoon, unless it rained, in the neglected graveyard behind The Corners church. One might think that this was not a very cheerful spot for a little girl—and a dog—at any time. But the little girl, as a usual thing, carried her own cheerfulness with her. Even on this day, when Chet Gormley’s ill-advised gossip had so smitten her with secret grief, she would not let the burden she carried utterly quench her spirit. She was brave. She did not tell Aunty Rose where she was going, although she reported her return from Sunrise Cove to that good woman and explained where she had stopped for dinner. “Well, well, with Jedidiah Parlow and his daughter! I would not tell Joseph Stagg about it, if I were you, child,” was Aunty Rose’s comment. Carolyn May had no intention of speaking to Uncle Joe about her visit to the carpenter and Miss Amanda; yet, having sounded the hardware dealer on that point before, she did not think he would really mind if she called on the “pretty lady.” There was something else—something very much more important—that she desired to talk to Uncle Joe about, and she was thinking very hard over it as she trimmed the long grass about the three little baby graves in the Kennedy lot and about the longer grave of Aunty Rose’s husband.