would but stay away and hold his tongue when he could do no good! She was all the more unjust to him, perhaps, that she had secretly built upon his success almost as much as he himself had done, and had felt that it would justify anything that might follow out of gratitude for such a service. But the service had not been accomplished, though it had cost more trouble and expenditure of one sort and another than if it had been successfully done, and not only was Joan very miserable about her brother, but she was thrown out altogether in respect to the suitor, who had, she grudgingly allowed to herself, established a certain claim upon her by his efforts, even though he had not been successful. She was very difficult to get on with, all the household acknowledged, at this period. A lover might well have been alarmed had he heard her voice lifted high in the dairy, and in the house, setting everything in order. Woe to the maid who neglected her work in these days, or the man either. Joan came upon them like a thunderstorm; there were times when Selby, stalking up to the house with his bulletin, heard her and trembled. If this was how she was going to be, would it not be wiser in a lover to give up such a dangerous pursuit? But though it gave him a cold shiver he persevered, and took her sharpness gently, and bore with her unreason, having a soul above his judgment. There were times when this little conflict going on within him, and the trial of his faithful purpose over all doubts, was visible in his countenance, betraying Joan to a momentary amusement in the midst of her irritation and trouble; and she would be still sharper to him afterwards--then break into a short laugh within herself. It was her only diversion in her trouble to see how Selby got frightened and swerved, and then took heart again. “I’m enough to give any decent man a fright,” Joan said to herself, with her half laugh; and it was true that she led the household, as all the maids said, “a terrible life.” But Mrs. Joscelyn lay with her face to the wall, and moaned by times: but generally listened, listened, night and day, her whole being concentrated into her ears. She got a kind of monomania on the subject. He seemed to her to be always coming home, on the road, drawing nearer and nearer. Joan, dozing in a chair by her bedside, when she was at her worst, she would wake up suddenly and implore to go down to the door and look out. “Somebody went by and stopped, I am sure he stopped--and looked to see if there was any one up. Run down, run down, and open to him, Joan!” Joan did it a dozen times at least, and standing at the open door in the middle of the night, looking over the black invisible country, or into the pale moonlight which revealed it in a vague whiteness, would shed a few tears, and feel the night wind go chill to her heart before she shut and locked again the door that had been once closed upon her brother.