By Annie Armitt.
I.
HE sat with her pen in her hand, but she could not write. Her heart was full of a story that she had heard recently and could not forget; the story of a woman who had been happier than herself, and yet more miserable. She stared at the blank paper before her instead of writing, and she said to herself: "Why are all the chances in life given to those who are not fit to use them? If such a love had been mine once I would never have let it go. There is no price that I would not have paid to keep it; and she—she threw it away for vanity!"
The story was very real to her, because she loved the man who had told it, and yet she had taken the telling of it to mean that the true history of his life was over, and that he had no love left to give again. The confidence he had reposed in her had been a compliment to her friendship, but a destruction of all her hopes of happiness. Before that confidence was made she had thought that his feeling for her was as deep as hers for him.
She had been married herself; but, though she had had a husband, she had never known a true love. Her marriage had been a sacrifice, made when she was very young, and when she acted almost entirely under the influence of a selfish mother. Her husband proved selfish, too, and—which was worse in her mother's eyes—not so prosperous as had been imagined. Eleanor's life had been a hard one always, and now she was left alone in the world, except for the little two years' old baby. It was an ailing creature, fretful, and not pretty; but it was something to hold in her arms, if not enough to fill her heart. She loved it the more passionately perhaps for its infirmities; but sometimes the loneliness of her life overpowered her like a flood of bitter waters; she wanted some mind to speak to, some heart to answer hers, some tenderness to lean upon and trust. She was yet but very young, only twenty-two years old, and all the currents of life beat strongly within her; all the imperative demands for love, for praise, for happiness, which make so large a part of our youth, were still alive in her heart, and would not easily be silenced.
Her income was insufficient for herself
