Poor Miss Heathery! For twenty years she had been longing with all the intensity of a true woman to become somebody's squaw. Her heart was an urn full of sweetness. Perhaps it was of rather a sickly cloying kind that many men would have turned from with disgust, but it was sweetness all the same, and for these long, long years she had been waiting to pour this honey of her nature like a blessing upon some one's head, while only one man had been ready to say, "Pour on," and held his head ready. That one would-be suitor was old Gemp, and when he said it, poor Miss Heathery recoiled, clasping her hands tightly upon the mouth of the urn and closing it. She could not pour it there, and the love of Gemp had turned into a bitter hate. If the curate in his disappointment would only have turned to her, she sighed to herself! "Ah!" And she went on thinking and working. What comforting fleecy undergarments she could have woven for him! What ornamental braces he should have worn; and, in the sanguine hopes of that swelling urn of sweets, she designed--she never began them--a set of slippers, a set of seven, all beautifully worked in wool and silks, and lined with velvet. Sunday: white with a gold sun; Monday: dominating with a pale lambent golden green, for it was moon's day; Tuesday puzzled her, for it took her into the Scandinavian mythology, and there she was lost hopelessly for a time, but she waded out with an idea that Tuisco was Mars, so the slippers should be red. The Wednesday slippers brought in Mercury, so they were silvery. Thursday was another puzzle till the happy idea came of crossing Thor's hammer, which would give the slippers quite a college look, black hammers on a red ground. Friday--Frega, Venus--she would work a beauteous woman with golden hair on each. She felt rather doubtful about the woman's face; but love would find out the way. Then there was Saturday. Just as she reached Saturday, she remembered having once heard that Sir Gordon had a set of razors for every day in the week, and the design halted. Ah! if Sir Gordon would only have looked at her with that sad melancholy air of tenderness, how happy she could have been! How she would have prompted him to keep on that fight of his against time! But he never smiled upon her; and though she paid in all her little sums of money at the bank herself, and changed all her cheques, Mr James Thickens--as he was always called, to distinguish him from a Mr Thickens of whom some one had once heard somewhere--made no step in advance. The bank counter was always between them, and it was very broad.