Mara was confounded. This implacably withered, sensible, dry woman, beneficently impassive in sickness and sorrow, weeping!--it was awful, as if one of the Fates had laid down her fatal distaff to weep. Mara sprung up impulsively and threw her arms round her neck. "Now don't, Aunt Roxy, don't. I didn't think you would feel bad, or I wouldn't have told you; but oh, you don't know how hard it is to keep such a secret all to one's self. I have to make believe all the time that I am feeling well and getting better. I really say what isn't true every day, because, poor grandmamma, how could I bear to see her distress? and grandpapa,--oh, I wish people didn't love me so! Why cannot they let me go? And oh, Aunt Roxy, I had a letter only yesterday, and he is so sure we shall be married this fall,--and I know it cannot be." Mara's voice gave way in sobs, and the two wept together,--the old grim, gray woman holding the soft golden head against her breast with a convulsive grasp. "Oh, Aunt Roxy, do you love me, too?" said Mara. "I didn't know you did." "Love ye, child?" said Miss Roxy; "yes, I love ye like my life. I ain't one that makes talk about things, but I do; you come into my arms fust of anybody's in this world,--and except poor little Hitty, I never loved nobody as I have you." "Ah! that was your sister, whose grave I have seen," said Mara, speaking in a soothing, caressing tone, and putting her little thin hand against the grim, wasted cheek, which was now moist with tears. "Jes' so, child, she died when she was a year younger than you be; she was not lost, for God took her. Poor Hitty! her life jest dried up like a brook in August,--jest so. Well, she was hopefully pious, and it was better for her." "Did she go like me, Aunt Roxy?" said Mara. "Well, yes, dear; she did begin jest so, and I gave her everything I could think of; and we had doctors for her far and near; but _'twasn't to be_,--that's all we could say; she was called, and her time was come." "Well, now, Aunt Roxy," said Mara, "at any rate, it's a relief to speak out to some one. It's more than two months that I have felt every day more and more that there was no hope,--life has hung on me like a weight. I have had to _make_ myself keep up, and make myself do everything, and no one knows how it has tried me. I am so tired all the time, I could cry; and yet when I go to bed nights I can't sleep, I lie in such a hot, restless way; and then before morning I am drenched with cold sweat, and feel so weak and wretched. I force myself to eat, and I force myself to talk and laugh, and it's all pretense; and it wears me out,--it would be better if I stopped trying,--it would be better to give up and act as weak as I feel; but how can I let them know?"