She locked the door after her, with a kind of angry satisfaction in her face, and going straight to the window leaned upon the sash and looked down into the flooded street. Her eyes were dry, but there was a heaving in her throat, a tightening of the muscles about the mouth that would have made most women weep for very relief. Sarah Hunt would have scorned the ease purchased by such weakness. She did not despise the sad loneliness that girt her around, any more than the captive warrior does his cell of iron or stone, but she held that it would be a cowardly succumbing to Fate to wound herself by dashing against the grim walls, or bring out their sleeping echoes by womanish wailings. So, presently, her throat ached and throbbed no longer, the rigid muscles compressed the lips no more than was their wont, the hands loosened their vise-like grasp of one another--the brain was free to think. The rain fell still with a solemn stateliness that befitted the coming twilight. It was a silent storm for one so heavy. The faint hum of the city, the tinkle of the car-bell, three blocks off, arose to her window above its plashing fall upon the pavement, and the trickle of the drops from sash to sill. A stream of light from the lamp-post at the corner flashed athwart the sidewalk, glittered upon the swollen gutter, made gold and silver blocks of the paving stones. As if they had waited for this signal, other lights now shone out from the windows across the way, and from time to time a broad, transient gleam from opening doors told of the return of fathers, brothers, husbands from their day's employment. "In happy homes he sees the light." What was there in the line that should make the watcher catch her breath in sudden pain and lay her hand, with stifled moan, over her heart, as she repeated it aloud? Witness with me, ye maternal Hunts, who read this page--you, the careful and solicitous about many things--in nothing more ambitious than for the advancement and success in life of your offspring--add your testimony to mine that this girl had all that was desirable for one of her age and in her circumstances. A house as handsome as her neighbors, an education unsurpassed by any of her late school-fellows, a "position in society;" a reasonable share of good looks, which only required care and cultivation on her part to become really distingue; indulgent parents and peaceably inclined brothers and sisters--read the list, and solve me, if you can, the enigma of this perturbed spirit--this hungering and thirsting after contraband or unattainable pleasures. "Some girls will do so!" Mrs. Hunt assured her husband when he "thought that Sarah did not seem so happy as Lucy. He hoped nothing ailed the child. Perhaps the doctor had better drop in to see her. Could she be fretting for anything, or had her feelings been hurt?"