One never knows exactly whether to laugh or cry over them, catching their chatter as they file past the show-windows of the long, showy street. "Look a' that pink silk with the figures on it!" "I've seen them as is betther nor that in the ould counthree.--Patsy Malorrn, let alon' hangin' onto the shawl of me!" "That's Mary Foster getting out of that carriage with the two white horses,--she that lives in the brown house with the cupilo." "Look at her dress trailin' after her. I'd like my dresses trailin' after me." "Well, may they be good,--these rich folks!" "That's so. I'd be good if I was rich; wouldn't you, Moll?" "You'd keep growing wilder than ever, if you went to hell, Meg Match: yes you would, because my teacher said so." "So, then, he wouldn't marry her, after all; and she--" "Going to the circus to-night, Bess?" "I can't help crying, Jenny. You don't _know_ how my head aches! It aches, and it aches, and it seems as if it would never stop aching. I wish--I wish I was dead, Jenny!" They separated at last, going each her own way,--pretty Del Ivory to her boarding-place by the canal, her companion walking home alone. This girl, Asenath Martyn, when left to herself, fell into a contented dream not common to girls who have reached her age,--especially girls who have seen the phases of life which she had seen. Yet few of the faces in the streets that led her home were more gravely lined. She puzzled one at the first glance, and at the second. An artist, meeting her musing on a canal-bridge one day, went home and painted a May-flower budding in February. It was a damp, unwholesome place, the street in which she lived, cut short by a broken fence, a sudden steep, and the water; filled with children,--they ran from the gutters after her, as she passed,--and filled to the brim; it tipped now and then, like an over-full soup-plate, and spilled out two or three through the break in the fence. Down in the corner, sharp upon the water, the east-winds broke about a little yellow house, where no children played; an old man's face watched at a window, and a nasturtium-vine crawled in the garden. The broken panes of glass about the place were well mended, and a clever little gate, extemporized from a wild grape-vine, swung at the entrance. It was not an old man's work. Asenath went in with expectant eyes; they took in the room at a glance, and fell. "Dick hasn't come, father?" "Come and gone child; didn't want any supper, he said. Your 're an hour before time, Senath." "Yes. Didn't want any supper, you say? I don't see why not." "No more do I, but it's none of our concern as I knows on; very like the pickles hurt him for dinner; Dick never had an o'er-strong stomach, as you might say. But you don't tell me how it m' happen you're let out at four o'clock, Senath," half complaining. "O, something broke in the machinery, father; you know you wouldn't understand if I told you what."