Rose colored, but she said nothing.

She looked very pretty and happy, as she sat there, sewing knitted lace on her wedding-pillows; and she really was happy.

Her passionate heart had really satisfied itself with the boyish lover whom she would have despised except for lack of a better.

She was and would be happy enough; it was only a question of deterioration of character, and the nobility of applying to the need of love the rules of ordinary hunger and thirst, and eating contentedly the crust when one could not get the pie, of drinking the water when one could not get the wine.

Contentment may be sometimes a degradation; but she was happier than she had ever been in her life, although she had a little sense of humiliation when she reflected that Tommy Ray, younger than herself, tending store under her brother, was not exactly a brilliant match for her, and that everybody in the village would think so.