"RUE."

—C. F. Hoffman.

The gossips of Norfolk are weary of wondering at the vagaries of the Hon. Mrs. Winans. They admired and envied her very much in the role of queen of beauty and fashion; they are simply amazed when she glides before the foot-lights in the garb of a "ministering angel."

When she first began to aid and assist Miss Clendenon in her charitable undertakings they thought it only natural, in view of the sudden intimacy that had sprung up between the two, that the one should be found wherever the other was. But it was quite a different thing when the Senator's lovely and exclusive wife assumed those duties alone. Society, wounded by her quiet and almost complete withdrawal from its fascinations, set it down to a lack of a new sensation, and predicted that as soon as the novelty wore out Mrs. Winans would seek some newer and fresher hobby.

But quietly oblivious to it all, the young lady went her way, smoothing with gentle advice and over thoughtful bounty many a thorny path where poverty walked falteringly on, lending a patient and sympathetic ear to the grievous complaints that rose from the homes of want and distress, strangely gentle to all little children, careful of their needs, thoughtful of their future, dropping the gentle promises of Christ along darkened paths barren of such precious seeds, and often society was scandalized by the not unfrequent sight of the young lady taking out for an airing on the cool, breezy suburbs or sea-shore some puny child or ailing adult from the haunts of poverty and making them comfortable by her side in that darling little phaeton that all Norfolk ran to their windows to gaze at when it passed.

Miss Lavinia Story—dear old spinster!—undertook to interview the lady on the subject of her going so far in alleviating the "fancied wants and grievances of those wretched poor trash," and was fairly driven from the field when Mrs. Winans, with a glimmer of mischief under her black lashes and a very serious voice asked her if her leisure would admit of her joining the sewing society, of which she was manager.

"For indeed," said Grace, half playfully, half in earnest, "we are in want of workers very badly. A lady from 'our set' volunteered very kindly last week as operator on the sewing-machine I donated the society, and they are so dreadfully in want of basters. Surely, Miss Lavinia, you will enlist as baster—that, if not more. Think of the poor people who need clothing so badly, and say 'yes.'"

"I? I would not spoil my eyesight with everlasting stitching for poor people, who are always lazy and shiftless, and smell of onions," said Miss Story, loftily.

"I beg your pardon, I am sure," smoothly returned her merciless tormentor. "I forgot that your eyesight cannot be as strong as it once was. Perhaps you would not object to becoming a visitor of the sick, or something of that sort."

"My eyesight not as strong as it once was?" returned the lady, in perceptible anger. "You mistake very much, Mrs. Winans; my eyes are as young as they ever were" (she was fifty at the least), "but I can use them to better advantage than by wearing them out in the service of your sewing circle."

"It is rather tedious—this endless stitching," confessed the zealous advocate of the sewing society, "but perhaps you would not object to taking a little sewing at home occasionally—little dresses or aprons, and such trifling things for the little folks—even that would be a help to us in the present limited number of workers—won't you try to help us out that much?"

Miss Lavinia adjusted her spectacles on her high Roman nose, the better to annihilate with a flashing glance the persistent young lady whom she felt dimly persuaded in her own mind was "laughing in her sleeve at her," and Mrs. Winans, with the pearly edge of one little tooth repressing the smile that wanted to dimple on her lip, sat demurely expectant.

"I did not call on you, Mrs. Winans, I assure you, to solicit a situation as seamstress. I never allow myself to be brought into personal contact with the filthy and odious poor. I do my share in taking care of them by contributing to the regular poor fund of the church."

"Oh, indeed?" said the listener, still unmoved and demure. "I am sure it is very considerate of you and very comforting to the poor people besides."

"I think, my dear," answered Miss Lavinia, pacified by the rather equivocal compliment, "that it would be better for you to confine yourself to the same plan. Let those who have not our refined and delicate instincts minister to those of the poor class who are really deserving of pity and of assistance, while we can do our part just as well by placing our contributions in the hands of some worthy person who can undertake its proper distribution. It hardly looks well for a lady of your standing to be brought into such frequent and familiar intercourse with the vulgar and low people to be met in the homes of poverty, if you will pardon such plain speaking from an old friend and well-wisher."

"And so you will not undertake to help us sew," persisted the placid little tormentor, as the rustle of Miss Story's brown silk flounces announced impending departure.

"No, indeed—quite out of the question," answered the irate spinster, as she hurried indignantly away to report to her gossips, and only sorry that it was out of her power or that of any of her peers to socially ostracize the self-possessed young advocate of the sewing society.

"The most persistent little woman you ever saw," she said. "I fairly thought she'd have coaxed me into that low sewing-circle, or sent me away with a bundle of poor children's rags to mend. I won't undertake to advise her again in a hurry; and my advice to all of her friends is to let her alone. She is 'joined to her idols.'"

And the "persistent little woman" ran up stairs and jotted down a spirited account of her pleasant sparring with the spinster in her friendly, even sympathetic journal—the dear little book to which was confided the gentle thoughts of her pure young heart.

"Dear little book," she murmured, softly fluttering the scented leaves and glancing here and there at little detatched jottings in her pretty Italian text, "how many of my thoughts, nay hopes and griefs are recorded here."

Now and then a smile dawns in her blue eyes, and anon her sweet lip quivers as the written record of a joy or grief meets her gaze. Looking back over earlier years, the pleasures of the fleeting hours, the dawning hopes of maidenhood, the deep, wild sorrow of her slighted love, she suddenly pauses, her finger between the pages, and says to herself with a half-sad smile:

"And this was about the time when I fancied myself a poet. Why have I not torn this out long ago? I wonder why I have kept this foolish rhyme all these years?"

In soft, murmuring tones she read it aloud, a faint inflection of scorn running through her low, musical voice:

"Ocean View, November, 1866."

"Rue!" she repeats, with a low, bitter laugh; "ah, me, I have been gathering a harvest of rue all my life."

The leaves fall together over the sorrowful, girlish rhyme, the book drops from her hand, and, sighing, she throws herself down on a low divan of cushioned pale blue silk, looking idly out of the open window at the evening sky glowing with the opalescent hues of a summer's sunset.

"I daresay it's quite natural to make a dunce of one's self once in a life-time," she muses, "and I presume there is a practical era in every one's life. All the same I wish it had never come to me; the consequences have followed me through life."

Her small hand goes up to her throat, touching the spring of the pearl-studded locket she wears there. The lid flying open shows the dusk glory of Paul Winans' pictured face smiling on her through a mist of her own tears.

"And I drove you from me. Lulu says I did it; spoke my own doom with fever-parched, delirious lips! Why did they believe me? Why did they not tell me of it long ago? They should have known I could not have been so cruel! All this time you have thought I hated you, all this time I have thought you hated me! You did come; you did want to make peace with your wronged though willful wife. It is joy to know that though too late for hope even. Why did I go to Washington? Why did I go in defiance of his will? All might have been well with us ere this. Both of them—the darling baby and the darling father—might have been mine now. Instead—oh, Heaven, Paul dearest, you will never know now—unless, perchance, you are in heaven—how deeply, how devotedly I loved you! Who is to blame? Ah, me! It is all rue!"

A moment her lips trembled against the pictured face, then she shuts it with a snap, and lies with closed eyes and compressed lips, thinking deeply and intensely, as "hearts too much alone" always think. But with the passing moments her sudden heart-ache softens a little. Rousing herself she walks over to the window, saying, with a faint, fluttering sigh:

"Ah, well! 'Fate is above us all.'"

How sweet the air is! The salt breeze catches the odor of the mignonette in her window, and wafts it to her, lifting the soft tresses from her aching temples with its scented breath, and with the sublime association that there is in some faint flower perfumes and grief, the bitter leaven at her heart swells again with all the painful luxury of sorrow.

"I am so weary of it all—life's daily treadmill round! What is it worth? How is it endurable when love is lost to us?"

Ah! poor child! Love is not all of life. When love is lost life's cares and duties still remain. We must endure it. Well for us that God's love is over all.

Some thought like this calms the seething waves of passion in her heart. She picks up her journal from the floor where it had fallen, and listlessly tears out the page that holds the simple rhyme of her girlhood's folly. Leaning on the window she takes it daintily between her fingers and tears it into tiny bits that scatter like snow-flakes down on the graveled path of the garden below.

"Loved by two," she says, musingly. "What was Bruce Conway's love worth, I wonder? Or Paul Winans' either, for that matter? The one fickle, unstable, the other jealous, proud, unbending as Lucifer! Not quite my ideal of perfect love, either one of them! After all, what is any man's love worth, I wonder, that it should blight a woman's life?"

Loved by three she might have said, but she did not know. How much the fleshly vail between our spirits hides from our finite eyes. How often and often a purer, better, stronger love than we have ever known is laid in silence at our feet, over which we walk blinded and never know the truth.

And yet by some odd chance, nay, rather unconscious prescience, she thinks of Willard Clendenon, recalling his words on the day of his sister's marriage:

"Never again on this side of eternity."

"What did it mean?" she mused aloud. "It was strange at the least. I trust no harm will come to Lulu, little darling. She is still well and happy, or at least her letters say so." And drawing from her pocket a letter lately received from Lulu, she ran over its contents again with all a woman's innocent pleasure in re-reading letters.

"How happy she seems," a faint smile curving the perfect lips; "and how devoted is Mr. Conway; how her innocent, joyous, loving heart mirrors itself in her letters! Sunshine, roses, honeymoon, bliss. Ah, me," with a light sigh chasing the smile away, "how evanescent are all things new and sweet; like that sky late aglow with the radiance of day, now darkening with the shades of twilight."

Norah comes in to light the gas, and is gently motioned away.

"Not yet, Norah. I have a fancy to sit in the twilight. You can come in later."

And Norah goes obediently.

Then she incloses the perfumed pink epistle in the dainty envelope bearing the monogram of the newly made wife, and laying it aside rests her head upon her hands, watching with dusk pained eyes the shadows that darken over the sky and over her golden head as she sits alone, her heart on fire with that keenest refinement of human suffering—"remembering happier things." All her brightness, all her love lies behind her in the past, in the green land of memory. The present holds no joy, the future no promise. The dimness of uncertainty, of doubt, of suspense, lies darkly on the present hour, the hopelessness of hope clouds the future. Heaven seems so far away as she lifts her mournful gaze to the purple, mysterious twilight sky, life seems so long as she remembers how young she is, and what possibilities for length of days lie before her. What wonder that her brave, long-tried strength fails her a little, that her sensitive spirit quails momentarily, and the angel of the human breast, hope,