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"Though but one day hath passed, my brother, since we first met in life, yet thou hast that heavenly magnet in thee, which draws all my soul's interior to thee. I will go on.-Having to wait for a neighbor's wagon, I arrived but late at the Sewing Circle. When I entered, the two joined rooms were very full. With the farmer's girls, our neighbors, I passed along to the further corner, where thou didst see me; and as I went, some heads were turned, and some whisperings I heard, of-'She's the new help at poor Walter Ulver's-the strange girl they've got-she thinks herself 'mazing pretty, I'll be bound;-but nobody knows her-oh, how demure! — but not over-good, I guess;-I wouldn't be her, not I-mayhap she's some other ruined Delly, run away;-minx!' It was the first time poor Bell had ever mixed in such a general crowded company; and knowing little or nothing of such things, I had thought, that the meeting being for charity's sweet sake, uncharity could find no harbor there; but no doubt it was mere thoughtlessness, not malice in them. Still, it made my heart ache in me sadly; for then I very keenly felt the dread suspiciousness, in which a strange and lonely grief invests itself to common eyes; as if grief itself were not enough, nor i
"They are vile falsifying telegraphs of me, then, sweet Isabel. What my look was I can not tell, but my heart was only dark with ill-restrained upbraidings against heaven that could unrelentingly see such i
"Quietly I sat there sewing, not brave enough to look up at all, and thanking my good star, that had led me to so concealed a nook behind the rest: quietly I sat there, sewing on a fla
"Ah, there thou wast deceived, poor Isabel," cried Pierre impulsively; "thy tears dried not fair, but dried red, almost like blood; and nothing so much moved my inmost soul as that tragic sight."
"How? how? Pierre, my brother? Dried they red? Oh, horrible! enchantment! most undreamed of!"
"Nay, the ink-the ink! something chemic in it changed thy real tears to seeming blood;-only that, my sister."
"Oh Pierre! thus wonderfully is it-seems to me-that our own hearts do not ever know the extremity of their own sufferings; sometimes we bleed blood, when we think it only water. Of our sufferings, as of our talents, others sometimes are the better judges. But stop me! force me backward to my story! Yet methinks that now thou knowest all;-no, not entirely all. Thou dost not know what pla