The Heart's Country

I, with my eyes fastened on the romance of Mrs. Payne and Mr. Sylvester, had noticed nothing; the explanation that Roger had gone off for a few days with friends was enough for...

I saw a good deal of her and so did Alec. Alec at this time was preparing to work his way through college. Even Roger, who treated the village youth with the kindly tolerance of...

During the winter Alec came home from college every Saturday, walking over the mountain each Saturday afternoon for fifteen miles, and going back Monday morning by a stage that...

Various important things happened that winter. The first was a deep surprise to all of Alec's friends. He became engaged to his landlady's daughter in the town where he went to...

It was with her mind utterly made up as to what course to take that she went to her ordeal. She was going to offer herself a little, white offering before the altar of the fetis...

The old Scudder place in those days was full of laughter and young people. We were happier there than any place else, and I have never known any parties gayer than those, where...

If the world has little pity for a jilted girl, how shall it have much understanding for any one who suffers after having voluntarily sent her lover away, especially when it was...

While Ellen was going through these hours of anguish her mother and Mr. Sylvester sat in my grandmother's kitchen, a pair of helpless, middle-aged children, discussing how they...

There came a beautiful spring month where she put the thought of the future from her, for Elizabeth was away on a visit and Ellen could forget her. Alec might have gone to his v...

Ellen and her mother drove in a "shay" to take possession of the old Scudder house, which had been vacant long enough to have a deserted and haunted look. It was far back from t...

Ellen's formal renouncing of goodness helped us find our place in the grown-up world. Her gayety had always made her overstep the bounds of perfect decorum demanded of young wom...

Ellen was very bad at mathematics, and her uncle, who rarely left his seclusion to interest himself in her affairs and who merely enjoyed her personality, thought it would be a...

Here my long-cherished resentment toward Roger overflowed. No one could have been with Ellen as I had been without seeing the turmoil in which her spirit lived. She had grown th...

"I've had a long letter from Lucia Byington," she said to my grandmother, "explaining that precious scapegrace of a son of hers, but I can tell Lucia she might have spared herse...

There comes a moment in the life of almost every one when, bewildered, for the first time they meet an everyday and faulty person in place of the beloved. Sometimes this is the...

Ellen wiped the memory of their misunderstanding completely from her mind. If she had cared for Roger before, now she burned her bridges behind her; she swamped herself in her d...

During all my life long I have occasionally had, in times of stress, a recurrence of the spiritual nausea which I felt that night. When we drove home in the closed carriage Mrs....

Thus they stood through an eternity of understanding, which in the actual flight of time was only the moment that it took for Miss Sarah to turn around, but it seemed to me that...

I remember that day very well. Ellen spent the day with me and with Alec, and we all three lay under the trees together and then Ellen went on a little tour of inspection. What...

Look back and see if you can remember when it was you drifted from that part of the river of life that is little girlhood to that time when you recognized that you were grown up...

With a deep revulsion of feeling, Ellen gave up girls, sewing, and Zinias, and made a dash into childhood with Alec Yorke. Alec at this time was a strong lad of thirteen, a head...

The heart of man is mysterious. Why a passionately expressed desire to spit upon one should be alluring, God knows--I don't. It was fatal to Alec. I see him now jumping up and d...

"Grandma Hathaway, Aunt Sarah and mamma, all don't know what to do about me. I should be much grown-upper than I am. 'Mercy,' said Aunt Sarah, 'that great girl of yours, Emily,...

No sooner had Ellen covenanted "Thou shalt not!" than off she went on her first adventure,--a trifling one but bleeding. She walked one day to the academy with Arthur McLain. He...

When Mrs. Payne had been in our village less than a year and the interest of the village in the "do-less" sister of Miss Sarah had somewhat dwindled, it flamed up again. Mrs. Pa...

When Alec came back in the early summer, he told me he was to stay for the year. The academy had offered him a place in it, and so had another school and he had chosen the academy.

Ellen, during his absence, had kept closer and closer to her high mood. She knew that certain sorts of happiness were not for her with Roger, and that certain things he did and...