“A Miss Topliffe and her mother were invited to take tea with us one evening. I had gathered from sundry hints—and eloquent sighs—from your grandmother that she had set her heart upon a match between her son and this young lady. She even went to the length of advising me to pay particular attention to my dress on this evening. ‘Miss Topliffe was very dressy!’ I found this to be true. She was also an airy personage, talkative to your father, and supercilious to me. A few days afterward we were asked to tea at the Topliffes. I had a wretched evening! Miss Topliffe was rather handsome and very lively, and she was in high feather that night, directing most of her conversation, as before, to my husband. She played upon the piano, and sang love-songs, and altogether made herself the attraction of the occasion. I felt small and insignificant and dull beside her, and I could see that she amused your father so much that he did not see how I was pushed into the background. “I said never a word of all this to him, still less to my mother-in-law, when she told me, next day, that ‘every one of his friends had hoped my son would marry Miss Topliffe. The match would have been very agreeable to both families. But it seems that it was not to be. The ways of Providence are past finding out!’ “Then she sighed, just as she might have mourned over a bereavement in the family. I have _hated_ that girl ever since!” “But, mother,” I essayed, consolingly, “you knew he loved you best all the time!” “Of course, child, but _she_ didn’t! There was the rub!” I can respond now. It always is the bitter drop at the bottom of the cup held to the lips of the wife who cannot resent her lord’s innocent flirtation with “that other woman.” She knows, and he is serenely conscious of his unshaken loyalty, but the other woman has her own beliefs and hugs them. In May, 1826, my brother William Edwin was born in the cosey home on the slope of Church Hill overlooking the “Pineapple Church.” More than forty years afterward, in the last drive I had with my mother, she leaned forward in the carriage to point out the neat three-story brick dwelling, now in the heart of the business section of the city: “That was the house in which I spent the first three years of my married life!” Then, dreamily and softly, she related what was the peaceful tenor of those first years. Her father was alive, and she saw him often; her sister, “Aunt Betsy,” and her children kept the old home-nest warm for him; the young couple had hosts of friends in town and country, and both were as deeply interested, as of yore, in church-work. Edwin was two years old when a single bolt from the blue changed life for her.