Well, it was only that it might have been.  Life could hold no possible blessed change for her, you know.  Society had no place for it, though she sought it carefully with tears.  Who of all God’s happy children that he had kept from sin would have gone to her and said, “My sister, his love holds room for you and me”; have touched her with her woman’s hand, held out to her her woman’s help, and blessed her with her woman’s prayers and tears?

Do you not think Meg knew the answer?  Had she not learned it well, in seven wandering years?  Had she not read it in every blast of this bitter night, out into which she had come to find a helper, when all the happy world passed by her, on the other side?

She stood there, looking at the glittering of the city, then off into the gloom where the path lay through the snow.  Some struggle was in her face.

“Home! home and mother!  She don’t want me,—­nobody wants me.  I’d better go back.”

The storm was beating upon her.  But, looking from the city to the drifted path, and back from the lonely path to the lighted city, she did not stir.

“I should like to see it, just to look in the window, a little,—­it wouldn’t hurt ’em any.  Nobody’d know.”

She turned, walking slowly where the snow lay pure and untrodden.  On, out of sight of the town, where the fields were still; thinking only as she went, that nobody would know,—­nobody would know.

She would see the old home out in the dark; she could even say good-by to it quite aloud, and they wouldn’t hear her, or come and drive her away.  And then—­

She looked around where the great shadows lay upon the fields, felt the weakening of her limbs, her failing breath, and smiled.  Not Meg’s smile; a very quiet smile, with a little quiver in it.  She would find a still place under the trees somewhere; the snow would cover her quite out of sight before morning,—­the pure, white snow.  She would be only Maggie then.

The road, like some familiar dream, wound at last into the village.  Down the street where her childish feet had pattered in their playing, by the old town pump, where, coming home from school, she used to drink the cool, clear water on summer noons, she passed,—­a silent shadow.  She might have been the ghost of some dead life, so moveless was her face.  She stopped at last, looking about her.

“Where?  I most forget.”

Turning out from the road, she found a brook half hidden under the branches of a dripping tree,—­frozen now; only a black glare of ice, where she pushed away the snow with her foot.  It might have been a still, green place in summer, with banks of moss, and birds singing overhead.  Some faint color flushed all her face; she did not hear the icicles dropping from the lonely tree.

“Yes,”—­she began to talk softly to herself,—­“this is it.  The first time I ever saw him, he stood over there under the tree.  Let me see; wasn’t I crossing the brook?  Yes, I was crossing the brook; on the stones.  I had a pink dress.  I looked in the glass when I went home,” brushing her soft hair out of her eyes.  “Did I look pretty?  I can’t remember.  It’s a great while ago.”