In an hour, she went in at Mrs. Kent’s white gate,—­Frank leaving her there.  They both felt, without saying, that it would not be kind to appear together.  Marion had that news, though, as she had had the other; from her Job’s comforter, Mrs. Knoxwell, who was persistently “sitting with her.”

“There’s Frank Sunderline and Ray Ingraham at the gate.  She’s coming in.  They’re engaged.  It’s just out.”

“What do I care?” cried Marion, fiercely, turning upon her, and astounding Mrs. Knoxwell by the sudden burst of angry words; for she had not spoken for more than an hour, in which the blacksmith’s wife had administered occasional appropriate sentences of stinging condolence and well-meant retrospection.  “I wish you would go home!”

Every monosyllable was uttered with a desperate, wrathful deliberateness and flinging away of all pretense and politeness.

“Well—­’f I never!” gasped Mrs. Knoxwell, with a sound in her voice as if she had received a blow in the pit of her stomach.

“Jest as you please, Marion—­’f I ain’t no more use!” And the aggrieved matron, who had, as she said afterward in recounting it, “done everything,” left the scene of her labors and her animadversions, with a face perfectly emptied of all expression by her inability to “realize what she did feel.”

Ray Ingraham came in, went straight up to Marion, and took her into her arms without a word.  And Marion put her head down on Ray’s shoulder, and cried her very heart out.

“You needn’t try to comfort me.  I can’t be comforted like anybody else.  It’s the day of judgment come down into my life.  I’ve sold my birthright:  I’ve nobody belonging to me any more.  I wanted the world—­to be free in it; and I’m turned out into it now; and home’s gone—­and mother.

“I never thought of her dying.  I expected one of these days to do for her, and not let her work any more.  I meant to, Ray—­I did, truly!  But she’s dead—­and I let her die!”

With sentences like these, Marion broke out now and again, putting aside all Ray’s consolations; going back continually to her self-upbraidings, after every pause in which Ray had let her rest or cry quietly; after every word with which she tried to prevail against her despair and soothe her with some hope or promise.

“They are none of them for me!” she cried.  “It would have been better if I had never been born.  Ray!” she said suddenly, in a strained, hollow voice, grasping Rachel’s arm and looking with wild, swollen eyes into hers,—­“I was just as bad by little Sue.  I was only fourteen then, but it was the same evil, unsuitable vanity and selfishness.  I was busy, while she was sick, making a white muslin burnouse to wear to a fair.  I had teased mother for it.  It was a silly thing for a girl like me to wear; it had a blue ribbon run in the hem of the hood, and a bow and long blue ends behind.  Poor little Sue was just down with the fever.  Mother had to go out, and left me to tend her.  She wanted some water—­Oh!”