NIGHT WATCHES.

Mrs. Holt had been left alone for several weeks. Solitary, almost penniless, and weary of her very life, she pined away in that dull boarding-house, thinking of the past till her heart sickened beneath its memories, and turned like a weary animal for some place of rest. She had given the last dollar of young Sterling's money to her husband, who went with it at once to the West, little heeding what became of her. Indeed, such was his faith in the talent and resources of his wife, that he rather depended on them in his own need, than thought of providing for her. The man, in his selfishness, forgot that most frequently a woman is sensitive to the same degree that she is talented; and the power to accomplish anything is often enforced at the sacrifice of pride, delicacy, and all the womanliness that often underlies great tact and energy. Still the man who could comprehend all this would put such traits of character to the test in extreme cases only. Holt could only understand the result, and had no mercy upon this poor woman. Thus he left her, penniless and alone, to battle for herself; never doubting that she would, to use his own words at parting, "Get along some way."

Poor, proud, unhappy woman! She smiled at this, kissed him with a cold return, and tried her best to think it a compliment. Thus he went away, leaving tears among the fine wrinkles on her cheek, and the saddest heart that ever beat in a woman's bosom. The dead existence which he had left to her became in a short time monotonous, and heavy as lead. For a week or two Mrs. Wheeler gave her rest from absolute dunning; then came hints, complaints of dull times, and touching accounts of a hard-hearted landlord; all of which the distressed lady understood, and shrank from, as proud women do shrink from humiliation of this kind.

Mrs. Holt loved her husband with that intense concentration of affection, which sometimes makes the love of advanced age more absorbing than the first passion of youth can ever be. When ambition, pleasure, all gay distractions fall away from the life of a woman, love remains firmer and deeper-rooted in the heart than ever. That is the one passion and grain of earthliness which her soul carries away, purified by death, into the eternal heavens, where all is love.

Thus it was that Mrs. Holt worshipped her selfish husband; the strongest and deepest passion of her lifetime came in its autumn, after all other sources of happiness had turned to ashes around her feet. In the arrogant ambition of her youth, love had been one of its passions. Now it was everything; and the man she loved had left her, sometimes she thought it might be purposely and forever.

When this idea first stung the woman, it was in the night, when pain becomes sharp as steel, and thought concentrates terribly in the mind. Was it possible? Had he, wearied by her unhappiness, sought a new existence where he could live apart from her? Was this a silent abandonment? She started up in her bed and wrung both hands in the darkness, as this question went through and through her heart like the point of a dagger. Was she so old as that? Had all her talent, and the fascinations that had once worked such marvels in society, shrunk into such weakness that they could not hold one man to his sworn faith?

The bed on which she sat moaning became unendurable. She left it, and paced up and down the floor, moving to and fro in the darkness, making it blacker by her movements, for there was no light by which the shimmer of her garments could be seen. Her footsteps were noiseless, for those bare feet made no sound on the old carpet; and you could only have told where she was by the low moans of pain that broke from her lips.

Sometimes she stood motionless in the black shadows, straining her hands together with a hard clasp of agony, and then her moans broke into speech, and the cry was,

"He has left me! He has left me!"

The daylight found her still wandering up and down that chamber, her small feet blue with cold, and her whole frame shivering. When the room was full of light, she crept into bed, cold, exhausted and crying like a child. In the night she had not cried; but hope came with the morning—and tears are often more akin to hope than despair. After the tears came sleep and dreams, that made her face look gray on its pillow.

Days went by; no letter came from Holt; and those fears, born of the night, haunted her in every hour of the twenty-four till suspense became torture, and she resolved to follow her husband. But how? Where was the money coming from? Sterling had told her with what effort he had spared the last to her urgent solicitation, and she saw that, for some reason, he had no power to aid her farther. Still she must have money.

Once more the India shawl was taken from that tattered old trunk, not lingeringly as before, but in quick haste. There was no hesitation now. It had been the gift of an Eastern satrap to her father when, in the first bloom of her girlhood, she had accompanied him to the Orient to settle some treaty, and for that reason she had clung to it, hid it away, and refused it even to the clamors of poverty, fiercely as it had hunted her down.

There was no lingering over the costly fabric now. In her intense desire to be gone, it was of no more value than a handful of shavings, only as it might bring her the means by which she could join her husband.

As Mrs. Holt went down stairs, Mrs. Wheeler was standing in the door of her parlor. A look of deep injury came to her face when she saw that her lodger was wearing a rich shawl that she had never seen before, and she gave her head a little indignant toss, as if she intended to commence an attack. But the lady glided by her, with a gentle bow of the head, and went out; after which Mrs. Wheeler withdrew into her parlor, muttering her discontent that ladies who could afford to wear things like that Ingy shawl—she knew that it was Ingy by its mixed up colors, and because it looked so every which way—didn't even try to pay their bills.

After dusk that night, Mrs. Holt came back without the shawl, and shivering a little from the cold; but she let herself in and asked for a cup of tea in her room, so that Mrs. Wheeler was quite unconscious that the India shawl never came back again.