feel the same for me?’ ‘Yes; ever and always,’ said he. ‘Will you, then,
marry a maiden who honors and esteems you, although she cannot offer you
her love? but that may come.’ ‘Yes, it will come,’ said he; and we joined
our hands together, and I went home to my mistress. The gold ring which
her son had given me I wore next to my heart. I could not place it on my
finger during the daytime, but only in the evening, when I went to bed. I
kissed the ring till my lips almost bled, and then I gave it to my mistress,
and told her that the banns were to be put up for me and the glovemaker the
following week. Then my mistress threw her arms round me, and kissed
me. She did not say that I was ‘good for nothing;’ very likely I was better
then than I am now; but the misfortunes of this world, were unknown to me
then. At Michaelmas we were married, and for the first year everything
went well with us. We had a journeyman and an apprentice, and you were
our servant, Martha.”
“Ah, yes, and you were a dear, good mistress,” said Martha, “I shall
never forget how kind you and your husband were to me.”
“Yes, those were happy years when you were with us, although we had
no children at first. The student I never met again. Yet I saw him once,
although he did not see me. He came to his mother’s funeral. I saw him,
looking pale as death, and deeply troubled, standing at her grave; for she
was his mother. Sometime after, when his father died, he was in foreign
lands, and did not come home. I know that he never married, I believe he
became a lawyer. He had forgotten me, and even had we met he would not
have known me, for I have lost all my good looks, and perhaps that is all for
the best.” And then she spoke of the dark days of trial, when misfortune had
fallen upon them.
“We had five hundred dollars,” she said, “and there was a house in the
street to be sold for two hundred, so we thought it would be worth our while
to pull it down and build a new one in its place; so it was bought. The
builder and carpenter made an estimate that the new house would cost ten
hundred and twenty dollars to build. Eric had credit, so he borrowed the
money in the chief town. But the captain, who was bringing it to him, was
