The next morning was cold and frosty, as winter mornings in New England

are wont to be, and Adah, accustomed to the more genial climate of

Kentucky, shivered involuntarily as from her uncurtained window she

looked out upon the bare woods and the frozen fields covered with the

snow of yesterday.

Across the track, near to a dilapidated board fence, a family carriage

was standing, the driver unnecessarily, as it seemed to Adah--holding

the heads of the horses, who neither sheered nor jumped, nor gave other

tokens that they feared the hissing engine. She had not seen that

carriage when it drove up before the door, nor yet the young man who had

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alighted from it; but as she stood there, a loud laugh reached her ear,

making her start suddenly, it was so like his--like George's.

"It could not be George," she said; that were impossible, and yet she

crept softly out into the hall, and leaning over the banister, listened

eagerly to the sounds from the room below, where a crowd of men were

assembled.

The laugh was not repeated, and with a dim feeling of disappointment she

went back to the window where on Willie's neck she wept the tears which

always flowed when she thought of George's desertion. There was a knock

at the door, and the baggageman appeared.

"If you please, ma'am," he began, "the Terrace Hill carriage is here. I

told the driver how't you wanted to go there. Shall I give him your

trunk?"

Adah answered in the affirmative, and then hastened to wrap up Willie,

glancing again at the carriage, which, now that it was associated with

the gentle Anna, looked far better to her than it had at first. She was

ready in a moment and descended to the room where Jim, the driver, stood

waiting for her.

"A lady," was his mental comment, and with as much politeness as if she

had been Madam Richards herself, he opened the carriage door and held

Willie while she entered, asking if she were comfortable, and peering a

little curiously in Willie's face, which puzzled him somewhat. "A near

connection, I guess, and mighty pretty too. Them old maids will raise

hob with the boy,--nice little shaver," thought the kind-hearted Jim.

Once, as Adah caught his good-humored eye, she ventured to say to him: "Has Miss Anna procured a waiting maid yet?"

There was a comical gleam in Jim's eye now, for Adah was not the first

applicant he had taken up to Terrace Hill. He never suspected that this

was Adah's business, and he answered frankly: "No, that's about played out. Madam turned the last one out doors."

"Turned her out doors?" and Adah's face was as white as the snow rifts

they were passing.

The driver felt that he had gossiped too much, and relapsed into

silence, while Adah, in a paroxysm of terror, sat with clasped hands and

closed eyes. Leaning forward, at last she said, huskily: "Driver, driver, do you think she'll turn me off, too?"




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