“Hush, Grace; don’t speak of _love_ to me,” and Bell’s voice had in it a hard, bitter tone. “I parted company with that sentiment years ago, before you could understand. You have heard—of—Dr. Patterson, missionary to India? I would once have gone with him to the ends of the earth, but mother said I was too young, too giddy, and the _Board_ thought so, too. I was not quite seventeen, and I defied those old fogy ministers to their faces, and when they asked me so coldly if I supposed myself good enough to be a missionary, I answered that I was going for the love I bore to _Fred_, and not to be a missionary, or because I thought myself good as they termed goodness. And so it was broken off, and Fred went without me, and as they said he must have a wife, he took a tall, red-haired woman many years his senior, but who, to her other qualifications, added the fact that she was a _professor_, and believed herself called to a missionary life. She is dead now, and her grave is on the banks of the Ganges. But Fred’s life and mine have drifted widely apart; I am no wife for him now. I have grown too hard, and reckless, and selfish, and too fond of the world, to share his home in India. And so all I have to remind me of the past as connected with him is _one_ letter, the last he ever wrote me, and a lock of his hair,—black hair, not _tow color_,” and Bell smiled derisively, while Grace knew that she was thinking of Frank, whose hair, though not exactly tow color, was far from being black. Bell paused a moment, and then went on: “You know how poor we are, and how we struggle to keep up, and how much father owes. Our home is mortgaged for more than it is worth, and so is every article of any value in it. I should like brains if I could get them set off with money, but as I cannot, I have concluded to take the money. I have counted the cost. I know what I am about. I shall be Mrs. Franklin Irving, and pay our debts, and keep you all with me,—and—be—happy.” She said the last very slowly, and there was a look of pain in the eyes of this girl who had once thought to be a missionary’s wife, and who had in her many elements of a noble woman. She did not tell Grace the price she had put upon herself That was something she would rather her young sister should not know, and when Grace, whose ideas of marriage were more what Bell’s had been in the days of the Fred Patterson romance, tried to expostulate, she stopped her short with,—“It’s of no use; my mind is made up. I have told you what I have because I knew you would wonder at my choice, and I wanted you to know some of the causes which led me to make it. I want your love, your respect, your confidence, Grace, I want—”