the summer noon
and the young girl had passed out of the door and into the street , bearing the second letter which had that day left the little house for the great one on the hill , and bearing -- oh , what a terrible change in knowledge and feeling since she had entered the door less than an hour before ! Her brain throbbed almost to bursting , and every nerve in her body seemed to be strung to an unendurable tension , as she left the little gate and took her way homeward . She was wretched , in the knowledge of guilt and wrong which had been imparted to her , and in the fear of the future , which she could not shake away ; but she confided , spite of herself , in the counsel which had been given her , and there was a happiness out-weighing all the misery , in the knowledge that the idol of her young heart was not a base and miserable counterfeit . The gulf between Richard Crawford and herself might have grown too wide to be over-leaped -- she might have become , to him , only a name to be regretted and yet despised -- but it was still something in life to know that he was true and worthy , even if he was to be nothing more to _ her _ ; and the foot of the young girl trod more firmly upon the green sward of the pathway than it had done for many a long month , and half the languor was gone from eye and nerve , as she walked slowly homeward through the summer noon , to try that strange experiment upon which she felt that the happiness or misery of her whole future life might depend . As for Josephine Harris , those who know the depressions which sometimes fall upon high nervous organizations after severe and continued effort , scarcely need be told that she was almost prostrated the moment she felt that her work was for the time concluded . She had been suffering with throbbing temples and a too-rapid motion about the heart , during a large part of her conversation with Mary Crawford ; and when Aunt Betsey , seeing from the window the departure of Mary , and little Susan , recalled by the voice of her cousin , re-entered the sitting-room , they found Joe shedding tears like a great baby and sobbing a little , with a fair prospect of an afternoon and night in the company of that most unromantic of companions -- _ sick-headache _ . It is a matter of no consequence how much of the conversation which had just passed , Josephine narrated to her aunt and cousin .