It was early
October by the calendar, but leaves brown and spotted and dry lay
already in little heaps on the pavement--heaps made and unmade
continually, as if for the sport of the keen wind that now scattered
them with a rush, and again, extemporizing a little evanescent
whirlpool, gathered a fresh heap upon the flags, again to rush asunder,
as in direst terror of the fresh-invading wind, determined yet again to
scatter them, a broken rout of escaping fugitives. Along the pavement,
seemingly in furtherance of the careless design of the wind, a girl went
heedlessly scushling along among the unresting and unresisting leaves,
making with her rather short skirt a mimic whirlwind of her own. Her
eyes were fixed on the ground, and she seemed absorbed in anxious
thought, which thought had its origin in one of the commonest causes of
human perplexity--the need of money, and the impossibility of devising a
scheme by which to procure any. It was but a few weeks since her father
had died, leaving behind him such a scanty provision for his widow and
child that only by the utmost care and coaxing were they able from the
first to make it meet their necessities. Nor, indeed, would it have been
possible for them to subsist had not a brother of the widow supplemented
their poor resources with an uncertain contingent, whose continuance he
was not able to secure, or even dared to promise.
At the present moment, however, it was not anxiety as to their own
affairs that occupied the mind of Annie Melville, near enough as that
might have lain; it was the unhappy condition in which the imprudence of
a school-friend--almost her only friend--had involved herself by her
hasty marriage with a man who, up to the present moment, had shown no
faculty for helping himself or the wife he had involved in his fate, and
who did not know where or by what means to procure even the bread of
which they were in immediate want.
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