The young woman glanced around the desolately regular and forbidding room, and sighed. The other took the basket and stepped to a closet, but paused as she opened it, and turning to Amy, said, in the same dry, hopeless manner, "This bounty is too good for a sinner; and yet it would be the unpardonable sin for so great a sinner to end her own life willfully." The solemn woman put the contents of the basket into the closet; but it seemed as if, in that gloom, the sugar must have already lost its sweetness and the tea its flavor. Amy still glanced round the room, and her eyes filled with tears. "Dear Aunt Martha, when may I tell?" she asked, with piteous earnestness. "Amy, would you thwart God? He is too merciful already. I almost fear that to tolerate your sympathy and kindness is a sore offense in me. Think what a worm I am! How utterly foul and rank with sin!" She spoke with clasped hands lying before her in her lap, in the same hard tone as if the words were cut in ebony; with the same fixed lips--the same pale, unsmiling severity of face; above which the abundant hair, streaked with early gray, was almost entirely lost in the black handkerchief. "But surely God is good!" said Amy, tenderly and sadly. "If we sin, He only asks us to repent and be forgiven." "But we must pay the penalty, Amy," said the other. "There is a price set upon every sin; and mine is so vast, so enormous--" She paused a moment, as if overwhelmed by the contemplation of it; then, in the same tone, she continued: "You, Amy, can not even conceive how dreadful it is. You know what it is, but not how bad it is." She was silent again, and her soul appeared to wrap itself in denser gloom. The air of the room seemed to Amy stifling. The next moment she felt as if she were pierced with sharp spears of ice. She sprang up: "I shall smother!" said she; and opened the window. "Aunt Martha, I begin to feel that this is really wicked! If you only knew Lawrence Newt--" The older woman raised one thin finger, without lifting the hand from her lap. Implacable darkness seemed to Amy to be settling upon her too. "At least, aunt, let me have you moved to some less horrid place." "Foulness and filth are too sweet and fair for me," said the dark woman; "and I have been too long idle already." She lifted the work and began to sew. Amy's heart ached as she looked at her, with sympathy for her suffering and a sense of inability to help her. There came a violent knock at the door. "Who's there?" asked Aunt Martha, calmly. "Come, come; open this door, and let's see what's going on!" cried a loud, coarse voice. "Who is it?" "Who is it? Why, it's me--Joseph!" replied the voice. Aunt Martha rose and unlocked the door. A man whose face was like his voice bustled noisily into the room, with a cigar in his mouth and his hat on. "Come, come; where's that work? Time's up! Quick, quick! No time, no pay!" "It is not quite done, Mr. Joseph."