Page:Between Two Loves.djvu/19

14 things he hated the confinement and noise and smell of the mill.

The trouble with Steve was one which ruins many a promising life. Nature had made him to live with her, and to do his life's duty in some of her free, open-air workshops; and ignorance and untoward circumstances had tethered him to a Jacquard loom in a noisy mill. Sarah dimly understood something of this mistake, but thirty years ago women were not accustomed to analyze life and its conditions. They took it as it came, and thought it enough to follow their catechism and "do their duty in that state of life into which it hath pleased God to call them."

At six o'clock Sarah had reached the little cottage which she called home. It consisted only of three rooms, one down-stairs and two smaller ones above it, but it was beautifully clean and very well furnished. The flag floor was as white as water and pipe-clay could make it, the steel fender shone and glinted in the pleasant blaze of the fire, there was a home-made hearth-rug, large and thick and many-colored, before it, and a little round table set with cups and saucers of a gay pattern; the