How different seemed the old house to Emmie returning! She settled down in it with the sense of passionate contentment. I can imagine in a dove restored to the cote after escaping the fowler's snare and the rage of wintry storms. How shut it was against the cold! how safe from arrogant men demanding money! Life in it now seemed to her one round of luxurious pleasures: one could sleep undisturbed, tea and buttered bread came as regularly as the desire for them; flowers bloomed at every season on mantel-shelf and table; the grate glowed as if to glow were no more than a grate's nature. There was undeniably the domestic tyrant still; but what a mild one by comparison! Aunt Lucretia might be peremptory and critical and contradictory: to Emmie in these days she personated a benevolent Providence. It is possible that the lady's disposition had softened towards her niece: her superior daughters were removed, and the little widow with her manifold experiences was unquestionably a person more interesting to have about than the moping girl of yore. The two ladies, sitting together with their wools, in undertones talked over Emmie's married miseries. She was as ready with her confidences as Aunt Lucretia with her listening ear. There seemed no end to what she had to tell or the number of times she might relate the same incident and be heard out with tolerance. She was glad of some one to whom to unburden her heart of its accumulated grievance; she could not but be a little glad, too, now it was well over, that so much that was unusual had happened to her, since it lent her this importance. Aunt Lucretia gave a great deal of good advice--said what she would have done in like case; Emmie accepted it with as much humble gratitude as if it had still been of service. She concurred with all her heart in her aunt's unqualified condemnation of her first lapse from the respectable path--her elopement; she declared with perfect sincerity that she was puzzled to explain how it all happened--certainly before a week had been over the folly of it had stared her in the face.