With a sudden impulse, she went to the mirror on her dressing table, and looked long and earnestly at her image there. Martha was twenty-five years old, and looked older. Her shoulders were slightly bent, and would suggest to an accurate observer that they had become so by carrying heavy burdens. Her hair was hay-coloured and broken. Her forehead and her eyes were her best features, and her mouth, too, was well formed and firm, giving her the look of a person who could endure. To-night, as she sat leaning her head on the window-sill, Martha's thoughts were as near to bitterness as they had ever been. This, then, was all it came to, all her early rising and hard work, all her small economies. She had not been able to get even two dollars when she wanted it. She sat up straight and looked sadly out into the velvet dusk, and the tears that had been long gathering in her heart came slowly to her eyes; not the quick, glittering tears of childhood that can be soon chased away by smiles--not that kind, no, no; but the slow tears that scald and wither, the tears that make one old. It was dark when Martha lifted her head. She hastily drew down the blind, lit the lamp, and washed away, all traces of her tears. Going to a cupboard that stood behind the door, she took out a piece of fine embroidery and was soon at work upon it. Hidden away in her heart, so well hidden that no one could have suspected its presence, Martha cherished a sweet dream. To her stern sense of right and wrong it would have seemed improper to think the thoughts she was thinking, but for the fact that they were so idle, so vain, so false, so hopeless. It had all begun the fall before, when, at a party at one of the neighbours', Arthur Wemyss, the young Englishman, had asked her to dance. He had been so different from the young men she had known, so courteous and gentle, and had spoken to her with such respect, that her heart was swept with a strange, new feeling that perhaps, after all there might be for her the homage and admiration she had seen paid to other girls. In her innocence of the worlds ways, good and bad, she did not know that young men like Arthur were taught to reverence all women, and that the deference of his manner was nothing more than that. Martha fed her heart with no false hope-she never forgot to remind herself that she was a dull, plain girl--and even when she sat at her embroidery and let the imagination of her heart weave for her a golden dream, it was only a dream to her, nothing more! When Arthur bought Jim Russell's quarter-section and began farming independently, the Perkinses were his nearest neighbours. Martha baked his bread for him, and seldom gave him his basket of newly made loaves that it did not contain a pie, a loaf of cake, or some other expression of her good-will, all of which Arthur received very gratefully.