 oppose every plan she
could think of, for showing Jem how much she repented her decision against him,
and how dearly she had now discovered that she loved him. She came to the
unusual wisdom of resolving to do nothing, but strive to be patient, and improve
circumstances as they might turn up. Surely, if Jem knew of her remaining
unmarried, he would try his fortune again. He would never be content with one
rejection; she believed she could not in his place. She had been very wrong, but
now she would endeavour to do right, and have womanly patience, until he saw her
changed and repentant mind in her natural actions. Even if she had to wait for
years, it was no more than now it was easy to look forward to, as a penance for
her giddy flirting on the one hand, and her cruel mistake concerning her
feelings on the other. So, anticipating a happy ending to the course of her
love, however distant it might be, she fell asleep just as the earliest factory
bells were ringing. She had sunk down in her clothes, and her sleep was
unrefreshing. She wakened up shivery and chill in body, and sorrow-stricken in
mind, though she could not at first rightly tell the cause of her depression.
    She recalled the events of the night before, and still resolved to adhere to
the determination she had then formed. But patience seemed a far more difficult
virtue this morning.
    She hastened downstairs, and in her earnest, sad desire to do right, now
took much pains to secure a comfortable though scanty breakfast for her father;
and when he dawdled into the room, in an evidently irritable temper, she bore
all with the gentleness of penitence, till at last her mild answers turned away
wrath.
    She loathed the idea of meeting Sally Leadbitter at her daily work; yet it
must be done, and she tried to nerve herself for the encounter, and to make it
at once understood, that having determined to give up having anything further to
do with Mr. Carson she considered the bond of intimacy broken between them.
    But Sally was not the person to let these resolutions be carried into effect
too easily. She soon became aware of the present state of Mary's feelings, but
she thought they merely arose from the changeableness of girlhood, and that the
time would come when Mary would thank her for almost forcing her to keep up her
meetings and communications with her rich lover.
    So, when two days had passed over in rather too marked avoidance of Sally on
Mary's part, and when the
