More than a week had passed, and it was early October. The bare hill-tops stood mournfully against the golden sunset; but in the valleys the woods were bright with maple, oak, and chestnut, and the fields gorgeous with sumach and goldenrod, while the oldest, most crumbling fence boasted such garlands of blackberry and elder as a queen might have envied. Apples in myriads hung from the trees, or were stored away in barrels that could only be numbered by thousands; barn and storehouse over all the land were bursting with the plenteous yield of the generous harvest; and Christina Kellar walked home from her work heartsick and weary. Weary! Dear reader, have you ever known real weariness? Not the fatigue after a pleasure party or ball, to recover from which you lie abed or lounge on a sofa, and are coddled by tender hands; but weariness which, as it promises to have no end, seems also to have had no beginning; weariness which lies down with you at night and drags you backward as you rise in the morning; the faint, deadly, terrible weariness of one whose needs and whose work go on, on, on, in a treadmill round, while her strength, day by day, is failing, failing, failing! God help all those who are weary with such weariness as this. Christina Kellar was scarcely conscious of the pavement on which she trod. Her head was dizzy, her whole frame a dull steady ache, and the solid ground was like air beneath her feet, while the long, long street, where lamp after lamp twinkled redly to meet her, stretched out to interminable distances, which she did not dare to calculate. Only she permitted herself a faint throb of something like pleasure whenever a street corner was passed; otherwise it took all her strength to make one step after another. Her husband had now been away nearly six months, and what had Tina accomplished beyond the bare keeping together of body and soul! The rent which Karl Metzerott had refused to take had all gone to pay for medicine for little Paul, who had been sickly from his birth; as for outfit or travelling expenses, she had saved nothing towards them; and now she had only the money actually in her pocket to depend on; for Miss Randolph had no more work for her, nor did she know of another job she was at all likely to get. Dully feeling—scarcely thinking these things and others; and mercifully unable quite to realize that winter drew near, with a plentiful lack of fuel and warm clothing—she reached her own door, behind which there seemed, even to her tired brain, some unusual stir and bustle; while the one poor window was brilliant with firelight to a ruinous extent, that made her heart throb achingly. She must indeed scold Dora for such wastefulness! The evening was barely cool enough for fire to be a luxury; and even when it should become a necessity, their prospect of having it was scanty enough.