“Oh, you sober old Helen,” she said, “you’ll be an owl for a thousand years after you die!  Why can’t you caper a little?  You don’t know how nice it is.”

Just then George came slowly walking down the garden path, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent forward, and his eyes fixed on the ground.

He did not see us.  Annie exclaimed,—­

“There’s Cousin George, too!  Look at him!  Wouldn’t you think he had just heard he was to be executed at twelve to-day!  I don’t see what ails everybody.”

“George, George,” she called, “come here.  For how many years are you sentenced, dear, and how could you have been so silly as to be found out?” And then she burst into a peal of the most delicious laughter at his bewildered look.

“I don’t know, darling, for how many years I am sentenced.  We none of us know,” he said, in a tone which was sadder than he meant it should be, and sobered her loving heart instantly.  She sprang to her feet, and threw both her arms around his right arm, a pretty trick she had kept from her babyhood, and said,—­

“Oh you dear, good darling, does anything really trouble you?  How heartless I am.  But you don’t know how it feels to have been so awfully ill, and then to get well again.  It makes one feel all body and no soul; but I have soul enough to love you all dearly, you know I have; and I won’t have you troubled; tell me what it is this minute;” and she looked at him with tears in her eyes.

One wonders often if there be any limit to human endurance.  If there be, who can say he has reached it?  Each year we find that the thing which we thought had taken our last strength, has left us with strength enough to bear a harder thing.  It seemed so with such scenes as this, in those sunny spring days when Annie Ware first went out into life again.  Each day I said, “There can never be another moment quite so hard to meet as this!” and the next day there came a moment which made me forget the one which had gone before.

It was an ill fortune which just at this time made it imperatively necessary for George to go to the West for three months.  He had no choice.  His mother’s whole property was at stake.  No one but he could save it; it was not certain that he could.  His last words to me were,—­

“I trust more in you, Helen, than in any other human being.  Keep my name constantly in her thought; write me everything which you would tell me if I were here.”

It had become necessary now to tell the sad story of the result of Annie’s illness to all those friends who would be likely to speak to her of her marriage.  The whole town knew what shadow rested on our hearts; and yet, as week after week went by, and the gay, sweet, winning, beautiful girl moved about among people again in her old way, people began to say more and more that it was, after all, very foolish for Annie Ware’s friends to be so distressed about her; stranger things had happened; she was evidently a perfectly well woman; and as for the marriage, they had never liked the match—­George Ware was too old and too grave for her; and, besides, he was her second cousin.