V.
Year after year passed by, but not without bringing change to the
Mitchenor family. Moses had moved to Chester County soon after his
marriage, and had a good farm of his own. At the end of ten years
Abigail died; and the old man, who had not only lost his savings by
an unlucky investment, but was obliged to mortgage his farm,
finally determined to sell it and join his son. He was
getting too old to manage it properly, impatient under the
unaccustomed pressure of debt, and depressed by the loss of the
wife to whom, without any outward show of tenderness, he was, in
truth, tenderly attached. He missed her more keenly in the places
where she had lived and moved than in a neighborhood without the
memory of her presence. The pang with which he parted from his
home was weakened by the greater pang which had preceded it.
It was a harder trial to Asenath. She shrank from the encounter
with new faces, and the necessity of creating new associations.
There was a quiet satisfaction in the ordered, monotonous round of
her life, which might be the same elsewhere, but here alone was the
nook which held all the morning sunshine she had ever known.
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