hung fretted with silver; the tangle of apple-trees and spruces was powdered and pearled.  She stole into it, as she had stolen into it in the happy sunset-time so long ago—­why! was it only day before yesterday?—­stole in and laid her cheek up against the shining, wet vines, which melted warm beneath her touch, and shut her eyes.  She thought how she would like to shut and hide herself away in a place where she could never see the frescoed frost or brightening day, nor hear the sound of chirping birds, nor any happy thing.

By and by she heard the train coming, and footsteps.  He came springing by in his strong, man’s way as he had come before.  As before, he passed near—­how very near!—­to the quivering white face crushed up against the vine-leaves, and went his way and knew nothing.

The train panted and raced away, shrieked a little in a doleful, breathless fashion, grew small, grew less, grew dim, died from sight in pallid smoke.  The track stood up on its mound of frozen bank, blank and mute, like a corpse from which the soul had fled.

Sharley came into the kitchen at six o’clock.  The fire was burning hotly under the boiler.  The soiled clothes lay scattered about.  Her mother stood over the tubs, red-faced and worried, complaining that Sharley had not come to help her.  She turned, when the girl opened the door, to scold her a little.  The best of mothers are apt to scold on Monday morning.

Sharley stood still a moment and looked around.  She must begin it with a washing-day then, this other life that had come to her.  Her heart might break; but the baby’s aprons must be boiled—­to-day, next week, another week; the years stretched out into one wearisome, endless washing-day.  O, the dreadful years!  She grew a little blind and dizzy, sat down on a heap of table-cloths, and held up her arms.

“Mother, don’t be cross to me this morning,—­don’t O mother, mother, mother!  I wish there were anybody to help me!”

* * * * *

The battle-fields of life lie in ambush.  We trip along on our smiling way and they give no sign.  We turn sharp corners where they hide in shadow.  No drum-beat sounds alarum.  It is the music and the dress-parade to-night, the groaning and the blood to-morrow.

Sharley had been little more than a child, in her unreasoning young joy, when she knotted the barbe at her throat on Saturday night.  “I am an old woman now,” she said to herself on Monday morning.  Not that her saying so proved anything,—­except, indeed, that it was her first trouble, and that she was very young to have a trouble.  Yet, since she had the notion, she might as well, to all intents and purposes, have shrivelled into the caps and spectacles of a centenarian.  “Imaginary griefs are real.”  She took, indeed, a grim sort of pleasure in thinking that her youth had fled away, and forever, in thirty-six hours.

However that might be, that October morning ushered Sharley upon battle-ground; nor was the struggle the less severe that, she was so young and so unused to struggling.