“I am a wicked, wicked girl!” said she, as she stood before the glass, and loosened the locks that fell like sunshine over her shoulders.  But this confession, with true New-England reticence, was uttered only to one listener,—­herself.

Then, she recalled, for it was Monday night once more, the frank and noble nature of Henry:  how he had not asked her to promise him, but seemed to take for granted her truth and faith; how he had looked so fondly, so clearly into her eyes, not for what he might find there, but to show the transparent goodness and sincerity of his own; and how he had told her of all his plans and hopes, of his wish and her father’s intention that they should be married that very fall; how little he had said of his own overflowing affection, only that “he had never thought of anybody else.”  Dorcas only felt, without putting the sense into language, that in this life-boat there was safety.  But then had she not sent her heart on a venture in the other,—­that other which even now was tossing on the waves of a future, full-freighted with hope, and faith in her truth?

She opened the little box again, and looked at the ring and painted pin.  How sorrowfully she looked at them now, seen through tears of conscious experience!  How mournful seemed the ground hair, and the tints woven of so many broken hopes, sad thoughts, and wrecked expectations! the hair, kissed so many times in the weary years of waiting, and then wept over in the drearier desolation, when the sight could only bring thoughts of the salt waves dashing amongst it in the deep sea!  What a life that had been of poor Aunt Dorcas!  Then came across her busy thought the words of her mother,—­“It’s ’most always so!”

Swan sailed very far away, in these tearful reveries, and took hope and life with him.

When the next Sunday evening came, and the next, and the next,—­and when Dorcas had ceased to say, blushing and smiling,—­“Don’t, Henry! you know I should make such a poor kind of a wife for you! and your mother wouldn’t think anything of me!”—­and when, Henry had had an offer to go to Western New York, where there were nobody knew how many beautiful girls, all waiting to pounce on the tall, fine-looking young farmer,—­when Colonel Fox forgot he was a deacon, and swore that Dorcas was undeserving of such a happy lot as was offered to her,—­when the tears, and the reveries, and the pictures of far-away lands, and the hopes that might wither with long years of waiting, were all merged and effaced in the healthy happiness of the present,—­Dorcas dried her tears, and applied herself diligently to building up her flaxen trousseau, and smothered in her heart the image of dark and brilliant beauty that had for a time occupied it.

“She waited—­a long time!—­years—­and years!” murmured Dorcas, sorrowfully, as she looked at the pin and ring, which in her mind were associated strongly with only one person,—­and that one hereafter to be dead to her.  As soon as events clearly defined her duties, Dorcas had no further questions with herself.  If the box had been Pandora’s, not the less resolutely would she have shut it forever, and so crushed the hope that it could never have leaped out.