“Nothing, lately. It has been happening for two years. Two miserable years are an eternity, at Clo’s age. It is the old story,--a summer boarder; a little flirting; a little dreaming; a little pain; then autumn, and the nuts dropping on the leaves, and he was gone,--and knew not what he did,--and the child waked up. There was the future; to bake and sweep, to go to sewing-circles, and sing in the choir, and bear the moonlight nights,--and she loved him. She has lived through two years of it, and she loves him now. Reason will not reach such a passion in a girl like Clo. I did not tell her that she would put it away with other girlish things, and laugh at it herself some happy day, as women have laughed at their young fancies before her; partly because that would be a certain way of repelling her confidence,--she does not believe it, and my believing could not make her; partly because I am not quite sure about it myself. Clo has a good deal of the woman about her; her introspective life is intense. She may cherish this sweet misery as she does her musical tastes, till it has struck deep root. There is nothing in the excellent Mrs. Bentley’s household, nor in Homer anywhere, to draw the girl out from herself in time to prevent the dream from becoming a reality.” “Poor little thing! What did you say to her?” “You ought to have heard what she said to me! I wish I were at liberty to tell you the whole story. What troubles her most is that it is not going to help the matter any to die. ‘O Mrs. Forceythe,’ she says, in a tone that is enough to give the heart-ache, even to such an old woman as Mrs. Forceythe, ‘O Mrs. Forceythe, what is going to become of me up there? He never loved me, you see, and he never, never will, and he will have some beautiful, good wife of his own, and I won’t have _any_body! For I can’t love anybody else,--I’ve tried; I tried just as hard as I could to love my cousin ’Bin; he’s real good, and--I’m--afraid ’Bin likes me, though I guess he likes his carpet-sweepers better. O, sometimes I think, and think, till it seems as if I could not bear it! I don’t see how God can _make_ me happy. I wish I could be buried up and go to sleep, and never have any heaven!’” “And you told her--?” “That she should have him there. That is, if not himself, something,--somebody who would so much more than fill his place, that she would never have a lonely or unloved minute. Her eyes brightened, and shaded, and pondered, doubting. She ‘didn’t see how it could ever be.’ I told her not to try and see how, but to leave it to Christ. He knew all about this little trouble of hers, and he would make it right.