While Ellen was going through these hours of anguish her mother and Mr. Sylvester sat in my grandmother’s kitchen, a pair of helpless, middle-aged children, discussing how they would break the news to Miss Sarah Grant. They didn’t need to explain why Miss Grant would disapprove of their marriage; she would disapprove of it just as all the town would, for it was evident that if Mr. Sylvester was going to marry again it was his duty to himself and to his children to marry a “capable woman,” and you might as well ask a moon-ray or a soft breeze in the trees to be capable as Ellen’s little mother.

“I have suggested,” said Mr. Sylvester, “that we let Miss Sarah learn of it as we shall the rest of the town. A simple and efficacious way has occurred to me, Mrs. Hathaway, of informing all our friends,—I shall merely tell Mrs. Snow and Miss Nellie Lee and then nature will do the rest.” He was quite grave and simple-hearted as he said this, but I know that Alec and I did not dare to meet one another’s eyes, for the good man had mentioned not only two of the most talkative ladies in town, but also two who had, according to gossip, felt themselves very capable of taking care of an incapable but godly man. Mrs. Payne, however, insisted that Mr. Sylvester should himself tell her sister of their engagement.

“My dear,” said Mr. Sylvester, “I trust I am a soldier of the Lord, but I confess to a feebleness in the knees when it comes to confronting Miss Sarah, for both of us have been a serious anxiety to her even in an unmarried state, and what shall we be now when my housekeeper has gone?”

“And, indeed, my dear, how do you suppose,” inquired my grandmother whose spiritual attitude had been one whose hands and eyes were both raised to Heaven,—“how do you suppose you are going to take care of the children?”

Ellen’s little mother considered a moment.

“I shall love them,” she replied after an interval. Mind you, this statement was one of sheer anarchy in an age when discipline was the keynote with children and the superstition still flourished that one could not properly bring up a child without the rod.

“Yes,” said my grandmother, “I suppose you will love the holes out of their clothes and love their gingham aprons into being, won’t you?”

“I can depend upon Matilda a good deal,” considered Mrs. Payne; “but we have scarcely had time, dear Mrs. Hathaway, to think of the material side of the question, and the children adore Ellen.”

“And so, all together,” rejoined Mr. Sylvester, “we shall get along very well, but our only real trouble is the pain of breaking the news to Miss Sarah.”

“Well,” said my grandmother, with brisk sarcasm, “if that’s all that’s troubling you, I’ll tell her myself. I’ll go to her and tell her that there’s going to be a family consisting of two grown people, one grown girl, and three helpless little children, none of whom realizes that meals have to be got or housework done.” “Or, indeed,” rejoined Mr. Sylvester, “where no one is occupied in anything but considering the lilies, how they grow.”

Upon this the two smiled at each other, for they both had the wisdom of the simple in their spirits. However, it was apparent to any one what a helpless mÉnage this would be with the strong hand of Mrs. Gillig, the housekeeper, removed from it.

The news of the marriage ran through the town the way fire spreads; from house to house it galloped, then it would seem to skip a space and then mysteriously break forth afresh, as though by spontaneous combustion, and their interested chatter hid Ellen from herself a little. She wrote:—

I suppose it was because of Ellen’s absorption in Roger that she failed to write an aspect of these days that stand out to me as one of the charming memories of my girlhood, for it so sums up our New England society of that day. My grandmother had performed the kind office of announcing the betrothal to Miss Sarah, and this good woman’s reply was characteristic.

“Well,” said she, “trust Emily to get into mischief when Ellen gives us a moment’s pause, and what irritates me the most, Sophia, is that I am not even allowed my just moment of anger. If I sulk, then there will be talk, to be sure, so I’ve got to go out and countenance this marriage of those ‘babes of grace’ as though it had been my fondest hope. I, forsooth, have got to go around and smile until my jaws are fairly dislocated to prevent the magpie chattering that there’ll be; but before my anger cools I’m going down to give Emily a piece of my mind. When you consider her refusing a decent, advantageous marriage, and then becoming sentimental at her time of life, it’s enough to make one’s blood boil.”

Miss Sarah eased her mind by making remarks like this to her sister and then said she:—

“Sophia Hathaway and I are going to bring our sewing and spend the afternoon, because you’ll see that half the town will be here to find out what’s happened.”

So there we were, my grandmother and I, Mrs. Payne, Ellen, and Aunt Sarah—a solid phalanx.

“We’ll answer,” Miss Sarah announced, “no questions except those asked us.”

Deacon Archibald and his wife were the first to call. The deacon came in cheerily, rubbing his hands.

“It was such a fine day,” said Mrs. Archibald, “that we thought we’d repay the many visits that we owe.” “Yes, we are always so remiss in that,” chirped Deacon Archibald.

“Won’t you be seated? Take this more comfortable chair,” said little Mrs. Payne.

“The weather’s been fine lately,” remarked the deacon.

“A fine summer, indeed, for the crops,” agreed Miss Sarah; “the tobacco’s doing splendidly in the valley.”

There came another rap on the door and Mrs. Snow was admitted.

“I thought I’d run in just a moment to see if you had that mantle pattern,” she said.

Mrs. Butler, stiff with rheumatism, came next. A knock was heard at the back door and I heard her heavy breathing and her “Well, Ellen, I just ran over to return your mother’s hoe that Alec left at my house when he hoed my potatoes for me, but why he can’t take back the tools himself I can’t see. Has your mother got company; invited company, I mean?—because, Land Sakes! I can hear she’s got company. I’m not deaf.”

The question that they all longed to ask lay heavy in the air. It was good and bona-fide gossip that they had heard as coming direct from Mr. Sylvester himself, but so afraid is New England of making a mistake and of committing itself, that two other ladies had dropped in on an errand of one sort or another, or for calls, before Miss Sarah took advantage of a little pause in the conversation to remark:—

“I suppose every one of you here has come to find out if my sister is to marry Mr. Sylvester.”

There was a little, fluttering chorus of dissent.

“Nonsense,” said Miss Sarah, “I know what you wish to ask and what a bushel more will come to ask before the evening is over, and that’s why I’m staying here; and tell every one that you meet that we shall be happy to tell them ourselves that such, indeed, is the happy fact.”

Miss Sarah spoke with a large and grim geniality, for she always had the air of one who says, “Mankind, I am about to chastise you for your weakness, but I realize that I am human as well as you.”

Meantime my poor Ellen had heard in each one of these knocks on the door Roger’s knock, and so she continued to hear the next day. She wrote:—

Here it was for the first time that Ellen tasted that bitter pain of women, waiting. It sometimes seems to me that this is an anguish in which we live and of which men know nothing. During the course of a long life every woman passes so many hours of still agony when she must fold her hands and smile and wait. We cannot go out seeking the beloved, but must sit and wait until he comes. Like Ellen, when you have had a misunderstanding it is not yours to run generously forward; you can’t clap your hat on your head and say, “Here, I’ll make an end to this; I’ll go and find her.” No, you must sit waiting for the sound of his footsteps coming toward you; wait until your whole soul is tense; wait until each sound is part of this hope deferred. All women know this pain of waiting; and when our time of waiting for a sweetheart is over, the sons we love go out into the world, and again we can do nothing but sit still and wait for news of the travelers, wait for the little, scant messages of love which their careless hands pen to us in some casual moment. The long days pass and the letters don’t come, and still we wait. We sit and wait for our children to be born, through the long months, with the black certainty of the birth that may be death staring us in the face.

Some women get used to waiting. I think that those who do have closed the doors of their hearts to the keener range of feeling, having suffered so much that they say to themselves, “Here, I’ll suffer no longer.” There are yet others who pass through the pain of waiting, going by this thorny, bleeding, silent road of doubt and pain to a higher acquiescence. It is a long way there, and the heart of us must weep much in silence before we can attain this glorified peace. I have known the spirits of women to snap like the overstrained strings of a harp, as they waited with smiles upon their lips.

I am sorry sometimes for all women, and most of all for the impatient, tender, and flaming spirits of young girls who meet this pain for the first time.

It is because we have all suffered in this way that the most generous among us run so eagerly to meet those whom they love. Having tasted this pain, we wish forevermore to spare others anything like it. The more shallow-hearted and, perhaps, wiser women, and those who are not children of light, having tasted it, use the anguish of suspense as a weapon in the everlasting warfare between man and woman. But there is hardly a woman grown who could not echo the cry of Ellen when she wrote:—