Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/20

uation had occurred at that place when she was only a girl of nineteen.

How well she remembered it, that first act in her little tragi-comedy, the death of her reverend husband's first wife. It happened on a spring evening, and she who now and for many years had filled that first wife’s place was then parlor-maid in the parson’a house.

When everything had been done that could be done, and the death was announced, she had gone ont in the dusk to visit her parents, who were living in the same village, to tell them the sad news, As she opened the white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose westward, shutting out the pale light of the evening sky, she discerned, without much surprise, the figura of a man standing in the hedge, thongh she roguishly exclaimed,as a matter of form, “Oh, Sam, how you frightened me !”

He was a young gardener of her acquaintance. She told him the particulars of the late event, and they stood silent, these two young people, in that elevated, calmly philosophic mind which is engendered when a tragedy has happened close at hand, and has not happened to the philosophers themselves. But it had its bearings upon their relations.

“And will yon stay on now at the Vicarage, just the same ?” asked he.

She had hardly thought of that. “Oh yes—I suppose,” she said, “Everything will be just as usual, I imagine.”

He walked beside her towards her mother’s. Presently his arm stole round ber waist. She gently removed it; but he placed it there again, and she yielded the point. "You see, dear Sophy, you don’t know that you'll stay on ; you may want s home; and I shal? be ready to offer one some day, though I may not be ready just yet.”