Such an accident had now happened to Mary Hill. Such a thing as marriage had long passed out of her thoughts. She had gone through the ordinary process in such matters, having had her youthful dreams, her maidenly fancies, her conviction that some time, some day, the hero would come round the turn of the road, and life would change into enchantment. For a certain period in life that is to a girl the one certainty. Perhaps not to-day or to-morrow, yet possibly at any moment--a thing as sure as the rising of the sun, yet veiled in delightful mysteries and unknowableness--a vague anticipation, the poem of existence. After a time, if Prince Charming does not appear, the expectation begins to flag--a curious question, the strangest discouraging doubt creeps into the mind. Is she perhaps to be the one left out? the one to whom the enchanter is not to come. To trace the process from that first doubt, which is so startling, which gives a sudden check to life, to the calm certainty that no such thing would ever happen to her, which had long filled the gentle bosom of Mary Hill, would take too much time and space. It need only be said that Mary had accepted the position years ago. Her sister Agnes and she had long given up any thoughts of the kind. Their hearts fluttered no longer when they gazed along the blank road by which no hero had ever come. They had settled down as middle-aged women. No doubt they had both known what it was to struggle and rebel in their hearts against the strait bondage of life that confined them, the situation of girls in their father’s house which was so sweet at twenty, so little adapted to the maiden mind at forty. They had gone through all that, but had never said anything about it even to each other. Most probably they would have thought it sinful, horribly unwomanly to rebel thus against their lot. All that they permitted themselves to say was, with a sigh, that they had no education, and could not be governesses, nor do anything. Sometimes it would come over them with a shiver that their father was old, growing older every day, and that the time must come when that dear old bare house at the vicarage would be theirs no more; but so helpless were they that it was tacitly understood between them nothing should be said of this. It would be dreadful even between themselves to put it into words that the vicar must die, to seem to calculate on the end of his existence. It lay between them, a dark point in the future at which their human life seemed to stop, but that was all. As for any piece of good fortune that might happen--above all, any proposals of marriage, that was a thing as far over and passed away as the frocks of their childhood. They had both accepted the rôle of old maid without rebellion, if, at the beginning, with a faint sigh.