During the winter Alec came home from college every Saturday, walking over the mountain each Saturday afternoon for fifteen miles, and going back Monday morning by a stage that started at some unearthly hour, and carried passengers over to the nearest town to us through which a railroad ran in those days.

Various boys of those he had around him would straggle down the road to meet him, so when he came into the town on cold winter nights it was with an escort of red-nosed, red-tippeted and booted youngsters.

This was before any of the new forms of education for boys had even so much as stirred in their sleep, and the town agreed in considering Alec’s friendship with the youngsters a waste of time on both sides: the parents of the boys saying that they had something better to do—in filling the wood-boxes for instance—than to tramp out and get their toes frozen off to meet Alec. Alec’s friends, on the other hand, wondered what he wanted with a “parcel of young ones.” It was only Ellen and myself who caught a glimpse of just what it was that Alec was accomplishing, when we also would walk out to meet him. Besides supplying them in his own person with a hero to worship, he drew them out and untangled their knotty minds for them; for the boy of ten and twelve was, in my girlhood, even more misunderstood and kicked about and generally at odds with life than he is now. Nothing was done to make his school days happier or the path of learning easier. Teachers, almost without exception, were the boys’ natural enemies. Almost all the communication boys had from older people in my day, besides religious instructions, were recommendations to get to work and to get to work quickly.

These snowy walks in the crisp air to meet Alec were the punctuation points of our lives, and the long, pleasant Saturday evenings that we spent together, with perhaps some of the other young people dropping in, were our greatest pleasure. I am sure Ellen’s house seemed to him the gayest place in the world, because we concentrated into those few hours on Saturday evening the gayety of the whole week, though Ellen did not have much time for “mulling,” as her aunt called it. Getting ready for her mother’s marriage meant not only the preparation of her clothes, but also the preparation of the whole Scudder house for its occupancy by Mr. Sylvester and Matilda, Flavilla, and Prudentia.

Ellen’s mood was not at all consistent with that of vague apprehension, and this warning note of her spirit she failed to listen to most of the time; as long as Roger’s letters came regularly, she lived in a shimmering world of imagination, writing to him all the things she dared, and then writing to him again all the things she was too timid to tell him. All the outward details of her life were constant and pressing enough, and very homely, most of them; while within she lived in a shimmering world of her own, her lovely garden inclosed of the spirit, into which she let no unkind breath blow; and so her love for Roger blossomed throughout the long months of the winter. Then toward Easter came her mother’s wedding, which meant to Ellen Roger’s return. The Resurrection and Roger’s return came all together in Ellen’s mind.

When his letter came that told her he couldn’t leave his office at this moment, she could not at first believe it, any more than she could at first believe that he had gone away.

Alec was there, and he asked me shortly:—

“Why couldn’t Roger come?”

“He’s busy,” I said.

Alec gave me an odd look.

“One can do what one wants to,” said he.

He was one of those over whom Love passes a maturing hand. At twenty he had lost the young-robin look of expression, just as he had lost early the puppy aspect that a boy has before he has gotten used to man-size hands and feet.

“It’s hard,” he said, “to sit back and do nothing. It’s hard when you love any one as I do Ellen not to be able to get for her any of the things in life that she wants the most.”

“What does she want,” I asked, “that she hasn’t?” “Well,” Alec reflected, “I can come to see her every week and Roger can’t.” He might have said: “I can spend my life on her and give her every thought of my heart and stand between her and unhappiness as much as I can, and Roger can’t.”

This was one of the few times that Ellen played make-believe to herself. I think she had to. It was only later that her straight mind said what Alec had said, “We can do what we want to.” She hid her own disappointment from herself, and life was good to her in that it gave her a great deal to do. Although in those days wedding journeys were very rare, Mr. Sylvester had an old friend, a minister, near Washington, who came up to marry them and they were to exchange pulpits, and so directly after her disappointment Ellen was left alone with the three Sylvester children. Matilda at this time was already eleven and she remarked gravely to Ellen,—“Ellen, we’ve all decided that you can be our mother. Of course we shall call your mother ‘Mother,’ too, and we shall love her like that, because we’ve made up our minds that it is our duty,”—Matilda was very particular about duty,—“but you’ll be our real mother. I’ve done the best I can with the children,”—for thus did Matilda always refer to her little sisters,—“but our clothes are in a terrible state since Mrs. Gillig went away.” For the Sylvesters’ housekeeper had gone promptly after the announcement of her employer’s engagement. She had departed to the next town, where her relatives lived, saying that she was not going to stay around and be any one’s “kill-joy”; so with an occasional day’s work from Mrs. Butler and help from Ellen and me, they had gotten on as best they could.

So it was that Ellen hid from herself and from the pain that was in her heart. This was one of the few times she played make-believe with herself. She was afraid of her own doubt and afraid of her own thoughts, really afraid for the first time; for this is another of the painful milestones which most of us have to pass in the long and bleeding road of love—the first time that we are afraid to face our fears.

Ellen and her mother had been buying cloth for Ellen’s trousseau, and she had put it all by for her mother to begin on when her mother should be married. I was to help her, and so, of course, was Aunt Sarah.

In our days, girls mostly made their own trousseaux, and the richer among us had some seamstress engaged for a couple of months or six weeks, but friends helped one another, and one was supposed to go to one’s husband with linen enough to last a long time in life, and with good, substantial garments, suitable for various occasions in a gentlewoman’s life. Ellen had a poplin and a cashmere among other things, and when I came a day or two after her mother’s wedding to encourage her to begin on her own things, I found her on her hands and knees cutting.

“Why, Ellen Payne! What’s that you’re doing?” For instead of cutting out one beautiful cashmere garment she was cutting three little frocks. “Oh, Miss Grant!” I exclaimed, scandalized, to Miss Sarah, “Ellen’s cutting up her blue cashmere from her trousseau for the children.”

Miss Grant adjusted her glasses and peered down at the patterns on the floor.

“Well, there,” said she, “you have Ellen. We’ll have Ellen Payne’s trousseau walking all over town on three pairs of legs, and rather than patch up their old things, she begins her new life by taking the very trousseau off her own back! Some would think you were self-sacrificing, Ellen, but I know you.”

Poor Ellen always remained the same, taking more pleasure in doing any one’s work than her own, and as she told me, “the soul of her sickened in patching up the clothes of those poor children any more,” and, besides, said she: “Everybody else has new clothes, and there’s no one on earth quite so proud as a little girl with a new frock.”

“But your own trousseau, Ellen,” I objected scandalized, because I had a proper sentiment for those things. Ellen was romantic, but seldom sentimental at all.

“Cloth’s cloth,” she replied briskly, “and goodness knows when I’m to be married and shall need it, and there’s one sure thing, they need new best dresses right straight away.”

They needed new best dresses and they needed new almost everything else, as Matilda had warned Ellen.

So here was Ellen with her hands full. In the day before the sewing-machine, when every stitch had to be put in by hand and there were no such things as ready-made garments, making clothes for a family was no light undertaking. No wonder, then, that we made our dresses of good stuff, intended to wear; and Ellen had not only to provide for the little Sylvesters garments, but for her own trousseau as well. The young ladies nowadays, who make themselves a few things and order and buy ready-made everything else, do not realize what an undertaking the preparations for a wedding used to be. It sometimes seems to me that there was as much difference in our serious preparation of our clothes and the way that girls prepare now, as there is in the way that we prepared ourselves spiritually. Ellen wrote:—

She wrote this after she had seen him, for he came for a two days’ breathless visit, just as spring was breaking. He came back the bad, little boy, ready to sulk if he was scolded for not coming sooner. This time Ellen had only sweetness for him, no tears; she was so heart-brokenly glad to see him, but she wrote:—

Lovers forever have watched the affections ebb out bit by bit, and have been as powerless to stop the ebbing as the tides of the sea. This causeless change, this heart-breaking wintertime of the affections, is one of the hardest things of all to bear. When people quarrel they can “make up” again, but this slow alteration from life to death comes as relentlessly as age and seems as little in our power to change as age’s coming. It has been the anguish of lovers from all time. All through the coming of spring and summer, Ellen had brooded over this change, wondering if it was her fault, measuring Roger’s affection and cherishing every little phrase of love which he put in his letters, every desire to see her, and magnifying them, and stitching all the while her doubts and hopes—hopes a little frayed and tarnished—into her wedding-clothes. There was a time when he promised every week to come, and every week there came a letter instead of Roger. He played fast and loose with her as it suited him, now coming to see her a splendid young prince, now leaving her without word for weeks.

It is an awful and bleeding thing when a woman realizes that the beloved has changed toward her and she doesn’t know the reason, and it is still harder to have given more of one’s self than has been wanted, and this Ellen did continually. Suffering herself, she wanted to spare Roger suffering.

So she lived along in that hope deferred that maketh the heart sick. Then all word of Roger ceased for a time. She wrote to him as she had always and then she wrote him a letter that she never sent, releasing him.

And under this page, which was written on good notepaper,—a true never-sent letter,—she had written: “Oh! if I had the courage to send this now!” Then came Roger, triumphant and upstanding, his first pleaded case in his pocket, a splendid young prince again, as prodigal with apologies as he was with love. The miracle happened; they turned back the hands of time for a few days.

“He held me from him, the way he does, at arm’s length, and said: ‘Ellen, have you doubted me?’ What could I say to him? When I had courage enough to say, ‘What’s been the matter, Roger? Where did you go so I couldn’t find you?’ he only laughed and said, ‘I’ve been in the devil’s own temper.’”