"No, dear, no. I guess we couldn't have had, I felt so humble towards him. I never forgot a minute how good it was to have him like me. No. There was somebody else. You see he was terrible smart. He put himself through college, an' then he met her, an' she was just as smart as he was. Lively, too, I guess. I never see her. But I hadn't anything but my good looks--I was real pretty then. I had that an' a kind of a way of keepin' house an' makin' folks comfortable. Well, I found out he didn't prize me; so I give him his freedom. An' he was glad, dear, he was glad." She rocked back and forth for a moment, in forgetfulness of any save the long-past moment when she was alive. "O Sabrina!" breathed the girl. It recalled her. She straightened, and resumed the habit of an ordered life. "Now this is what I was comin' to," she said, "the way to bear it. It ain't a light thing. It's a heavy one. A lot o' folks go through with it, an' they take it different ways. Sometimes their minds give out. Folks say they're love-cracked. Sometimes they die. Yes, Clelia, often I've thought that would be the easiest. But there's other ways." Clelia's tears were dried. She sat upright and looked at the woman opposite. It suddenly seemed to her that she had never known Sabrina. She had seen her nursing the sick or in the garden, smiling over her gentle tasks; but she had not known her. Sabrina spoke now with authority, as if she were passing along the laws of life into hands outstretched for them. "When it happened to me, mother was sick. She had creepin' paralysis, an' I had to be with her 'most every minute. When I got my letter, I was in the gardin, right there by the spearmint bed. You see I'd written him, dear, to offer him his freedom; but I found out afterwards I must have thought, in the bottom of my heart, he wouldn't take it. Well, I opened the letter. 'Twas a hot summer day like this. He took what I offered him, dear,--he never knew I cared,--an' he was pleased. The letter showed it. I spoke out loud. 'O God,' I says, 'I don't believe it!' Then I heard mother's voice callin' me. She wanted a drink o' water. I begun steppin' in kind o' blinded, to get it for her. Seemed as if 'twas miles across the balm-bed. 'I mustn't fall,' I says to myself. 'I mustn't die till mother does.' And then somethin' put it into my head I needn't believe it nor I needn't give up to it, not till mother died. Then 'twould be time enough to know I'd got a broken heart." It almost seemed as if she had never faced her grief before. She abandoned herself to the savor of it, the girl forgotten.