Of all the tragic episodes connected with the Prato, there is none that contains such elements of warm vital interest or extorts from us such sorrowful sympathy as the history of Francesco, the last of the Carraras. The old Italian chronicles are written with such sublime and pathetic simplicity that human life after centuries rises up before us with all its warm joys and sorrows, delights and agonies. We see him first, this gallant Francesco, as a youth returning home in triumph from a victory over the Scaligeri of Verona, welcomed by his old father, the lord of Padua, there on the Prato, amidst the rejoicings of the people. Then we see how, when Padua had fallen into the hands of the Visconti, the old Francesco was kept a prisoner at Monza. His son, Francesco II., was also held in bondage by the Milanese, but his proud heart revolted at the thought of his slavery, and he compassionated the sufferings of his country, for the Visconti were hard, stern rulers. He asked permission of the Visconti to reside in Asti, which lay near the frontier of the Milanese territory. A little later he quitted the town, disguised as a pilgrim and accompanied by his wife and two servants, under pretext of visiting the shrine of Sant' Antonio at Vienne in France. The emissaries of the Visconti follow him to Avignon, where he treats with the pope in person and by letter with other influential personages. Having obtained promises of assistance, he returns to Italy by way of the coast. Moneyless, friendless, dreading arrest at every step, burdened with a sick wife, Francesco knocks at the gate of Genoa. The haughty city favors the Visconti, will have nothing to do with the wanderer, and threatens him with the dungeons of the ducal palace. So they follow the coast down to Pisa, the wife almost dead with fatigue and privation, for they are often obliged to walk all day, and no peasant is bold enough to offer them assistance. At last, one of their servants, by much diplomacy, procures a miserable nag and a shaky market-wagon filled with straw, and in this state the outcast rulers of Padua drive up to the gates of Pisa. They are refused admittance, and wander sorrowfully on. Outside the town they chance upon a deserted hovel. How these princes praise God for his goodness, for now Madonna Taddea can have a night's rest on the straw in the corner! One of the servants steals back to the town and bribes a shopkeeper to sell him bread and meat and wine. They build a fire and warm their poor weatherbeaten limbs, and are right merry in a desperate, reckless way. With the morrow they take up their march, and at last reach a friendly city, where the wife rejoins her children. Francesco is provided with men and arms to enable him to attack his native town, which is ready to welcome him back. He assaults the city one midnight, surprises the Milanese, is welcomed by the Paduans with the old shout, "Viva il Carro!" and at dawn is encamped in triumph upon the Prato. He ruled for a long time wisely and well, for he had known the discipline of life, and had hungered and thirsted like the lowest of his subjects. How he must have laughed, this stately soldier banqueting in his palace-halls, at the thought of the night when he had been so thankful for that bit of bread and drop of wine snatched from the grudging Pisan! And Madonna Taddea, a blooming matron, surrounded by her children, laughed with the tears in her eyes, and told them how one of their number had come near being born not in a manger like our Lord, but in the open fields.

But a terrible fate hangs over this princely house. Francesco is accused by the Venetians of violating a treaty, and war is declared against him. The flower of the Venetian army, led by the bravest of the Venetian generals, is sent against Padua. There is a long, fierce struggle. In spite of famine and plague, Francesco holds out to the very last, but one night the Venetians scale the walls and build their camp-fires on the Prato. Francesco, with his two sons, Jacopo and Francesco, is loaded with chains and carried to Venice, and lodged in the dungeons of the ducal palace. There is the mockery of a trial in one of those great painted rooms, but there is only one opinion with regard to the sentence that will be pronounced against them. It is a terrible sight, the proclamation of that judgment to the prisoners, nearly blind, wan and half dead in their cells under the canal. When the executioner prepares to read the fatal document one of them rushes at him and throws his stool at his head. When the day of execution comes they embrace one another, and Jacopo writes a letter to his wife, which the tenderness and sorrow of the chronicler have handed down to us, bidding her pray for his soul and love their children. Then they are placed upon wooden chairs in their several dungeons, with their backs toward the door. The executioner jerks a silken cord about their necks, and the race of the Carraras has vanished from among the rulers of the earth. Their bodies, wrapped in velvet cloaks and adorned with golden spurs, are laid in different churches, but their graves are nameless and the memory of the old heroic lords of Padua is branded with shame.

We wandered on with the holiday crowd through the narrow arcades. Against the pillars leaned little stalls and booths where were sold fruit and fried cakes and hard gingerbread and crucifixes and rosaries and lives of the saints and veils and ribbons and fans and silver hair-pins. The young peasant-girls, strolling up and down under the arcades, some in groups, some clinging timidly to their lovers' arms, stop at the booths and glance wistfully at the pretty trinkets, and end by buying a life of Sant' Antonio for the old mother who has stayed at home among the olives, and a clay pipe for the old father taking his holiday rest on the doorstep by her side. They form bright pictures against the open archways of the palaces beyond, through which the young green of the gardens gleams in the sunlight. There is an air of mystery and reserve about these broad gateways which contrasts well with the honest, gaudy street-life under the arcades. One of these palaces may be Baptista's, and within the unwelcome wooers of his daughters may be feasting with him or sauntering arm-in-arm through the young leafage of the garden, flouted by saucy Kate and shunned by sweet Bianca.

Conspicuous among the brown-faced peasants were the students, who strolled by in groups with a lordly air of possession or gathered in knots at the street-corners and waxed loud in discussion. They were lithe, slender, handsome fellows, with dark eyes and fair skins and oval faces. They had that nameless poetic grace which is the birthright of all young Italians. The soft feminine beauty of these young Paduans, with their dainty dress and pretty girlish ways, was something akin to the sleepy grace of young lions. Watch that group at the corner waxing hot over some wrong done to the leaders of their party—some one of their political heroes arrested and cast into prison for uttering the thoughts of all just men. See their eyes flash, their hands move in anger and grope instinctively toward the place where they wore their swords in their year of service. Do you say that the old Paduan flame has died out of these young hearts? They are of the same temper as the hearts that held out against the Venetian, the Visconti, the pope himself—that made a hedge for the Austrian bayonets to pierce, and yielded life and fame and fortune for their country's sake, and languished in the hundred prisons of the northern tyrants, and were lifted up at last in one great glad shout of victory. Let those battle-fields among the olive-farms on the hills outside the gates tell the story of the Paduan students. Their bright youthfulness was like sunshine warming the gray old walls of the town. The romance of the old Italian life seemed incarnate in their graceful shapes. Such heads as theirs gleam out from the dark canvases that hang high in the corridors of the old palaces—sometimes as the portrait of a long-forgotten young knight; sometimes in the guise of a warrior-saint, some George or Michael, painted by a master hand; sometimes as a beautiful young ascetic in his monk's dress.

Is it strange that the pretty peasant-girls cast shy veiled glances at the young lads that stroll by with a careless stare? For centuries they have given pledges and broken them there under the dark arcade, and so they will do for centuries to come. There will be other holidays and other prayers at Antonio's shrine, and other girls will have ribbons bought for them at the booths, and then there will be a couple of kisses and a parting and a few tears, and now and then a broken heart. The young men will take their diplomas and go out into the world, and rush into the turmoil of the state and the senate and the court, and lose the proud heroic bearing of their youth in cringing and fawning; or they will settle down on their estates and marry the Marchesa Tal Quale, who will have many quarterings and many bank-notes, and their beautiful Greek outlines will disappear under the weight of fat proper to a landed proprietor. The grand ideals of their youth will drop away from them one by one, and they will laugh with contempt at their old student notions of liberty and freedom for high and low.

Only some morning, when the children tell them it is Sant' Antonio's Day, an old pain will rise in their hearts, and they will see the dear old arcades of Padua and the little gay booths, and trustful eyes and fresh girl-faces will start up in their memories; and when the church-bells ring out they will hide their heads from the marchesa and the marchesini and cry out aloud for the old happy student-time, when love and hope of glory and high belief in God and man were theirs. God pity them, those poor young things, in spite of all their glorious youth! The beautiful promise of their spring will ripen into dull mediocrity. They will learn to be false to themselves and the truth. Happier are they who die there in old Padua in the fulness of their youth and hope, and are borne to the great hall of the university and are laid on the black-draped bier, with candles burning about them and their fellow-students rising from their seats and bowing three times before the corpse, and reading the funeral eulogy of him who is going to his grave with the spirits of the great and good that have left their footprints in the solemn halls for his mourning train.

In the vestibule of the university, high up on the walls, hang the escutcheons of the more famous of the students of past centuries, gray with age and mould and cobweb. What colossal figures stalk about the quadrangle and along the overhanging galleries! The mightiest minds of Europe are among them. Every footfall makes an echo across the centuries. Yet of all the old shadows, the one that has the greatest charm for me is that of the gray-haired serving-man who steals along the gallery with the bundle under his arm. Do you say it is only the sunlight lying athwart the arches? I tell you it is Portia's faithful servant, and he has been to the university to seek Doctor Balthazar, her cousin, and has obtained from him a lawyer's cap and gown, and he is hastening home to Belmont, that his mistress may don them and reach Venice in time to save Antonio from the Jew's hands.

Sedate groups of students were seated on the terrace of the caffè opposite sipping beer in gentlemanly Italian fashion. Here and there some honest burgher family, out for a holiday, was cooling itself with pink ices after the pilgrimage to the shrine. The female members were clothed with garments of such exaggerated form and color that one sees at once why Petruchio, in spite of his madness, had wit enough left to send to Venice for the wedding-clothes, and why Katharine, after the atrocious fashions of Padua, was disposed to be content with anything the Veronese tailor chose to offer her.

We sauntered on to where the afternoon sun flashed red against the great arched windows of the Palace of Reason. It is a mighty stone edifice, with a curved glass roof over the great justice-hall, which was the pride of mediæval Padua. Under the pointed arches of the wide galleries outside are gathered gray old milestones and funeral tablets and antique busts that carry the stranger back to the days of Latin legend, when old Antenor came up from the south and founded the city.

On the piazza, under the shadow of the beautiful loggie, the market-women are gathering up the bright fruits from the stalls and folding their red umbrellas, and thanking the saint for a profitable feast-day. A flood of yellow sunlight streams over the piazza, wrapping it about with a delicious drowsiness. No sound is in the air save the echo of a footfall in some one of the dark streets behind or the yawn of a weary fruit-seller. In the little caffè under the arcades the idlers seem to have fallen into an enchanted sleep. Now and then a student saunters by, gazing dreamily up at the graceful galleries. Tired mothers hasten across the piazza, dragging their tired but happy children after them. The mothers are red in the face with the heat, their bonnets are nigh to falling off, and their mighty castles of hair are shaken to their foundations. The children's hands are filled with dead lilies and hard cakes, and their faces are aglow with melted sugar and happiness. They have a weary air, as through surfeit of sweets. They will welcome the work-day minestra to-night when they reach their homes high up among the terraces and the chimneys and the clothes-lines. Ah, well! Sant' Antonio's Day is drawing to a close.

Those children with the lilies in their hands carried me back to the old religious masque of centuries ago. The chroniclers tell us that every year, in the month of the Blessed Virgin, a procession formed here on the piazza in front of the palace composed of all the civil dignitaries, the priests, the nobles and the different guilds. At their head went two children beautiful as seraphim, the one dressed in snowy white, with golden hair falling on his shoulders and a sceptre of white lilies in his hand—the angel of the Annunciation; the other, clothed in a flowing blue garment, with long brown hair escaping from under her golden crown—the Blessed Virgin herself. So they passed on, accompanied by music and the shouts of the people, through the streets of Padua, that were hung with crimson arazzi and tapestry from the looms of Flanders and curtains of cloth of gold. Onward they went to the vineyard outside the town, in which stands Giotto's chapel. At the gate the procession paused, and there was a colloquy in rhyme between the Virgin and the angel, and all the dignitaries listened with profound seriousness, and a mass was chanted within the chapel, and bombs were exploded, and bells rung, and there were singing and shouting and feasting throughout Padua.

After all the gaudy brilliancy of the feast-day, after all the hot unrest of the streets and the stifling atmosphere of the churches, it was pleasant to stroll toward the gray walls of the town in the late afternoon. The bells were calling from tower to tower. Along the grass-grown streets no footfall save our own broke the stillness. Here and there a goddess or a couple of cherubs bearing an escutcheon smirked at us from the high garden-walls. Sometimes from within the wrought-iron gates came the rustling of trees or the plash of a fountain. We paused at a wide weatherbeaten door, rang the bell and were admitted by a brown smiling contadina, who preceded us up the narrow path that had vines stretching out on either side, with flowering peas and beans climbing, all crimson and scarlet blossom, over the jagged stakes. The air was rilled with perfume and the eager buzzing of bees. At the end of the path stood a large square house, on the portico of which sat two blue-frocked peasants smoking and drinking red wine. There was a broad patch of green sward in front, on which three yellow-haired children and a small tawny dog were rolling in play. Under the great fig tree at the side of the house sat three brown-faced women, two knitting, the third dressing her hair. There were cool shadows under the broad leaves of the fig tree, and bars of slanting sunlight falling through the foliage on to the grass. At the right of the house stood a little Gothic chapel with the sunlight streaming across the threshold. On the arch of the door the birds were singing, and there was a growth of purple cabbages and kingly artichokes by the side of the chapel, and low in the hollows near by lay patches of brake and fern.

At the sunlit threshold a woman sat sewing. Before her was a table with photographs, and a stalk of lilies in a blue earthern pitcher upon it. The sun streamed over the sunken pavement to the neglected little altar with its coarse mosaics and paper flowers, over the rickety little pulpit and the traces of Byzantine gilding, and over the quaint old effigy of the founder. It fell, soft and brilliant and caressing, on the frescoes of Giotto. They were as pure and fresh and holy as the very lilies; and as the lilies revealed the innermost meanings of Sant' Antonio's Day to the hearts of the worshippers, so the frescoes symbolized the deepest reverence, the hidden longing of the whole brilliant, noisy Middle Age life of Padua. Their very crudeness, their nakedness, their barrenness of accessory, their sharp, brilliant coloring, cause them to stand out in strong relief. Never did the mystery of Holy Writ receive better interpretation than at the hands of Giotto. The characters in the sacred writings stand out sharp, bold, naked, crude, and Giotto caught the bare emotional and intellectual nature of every personage. He painted their souls and not their bodies, and therefore he painted well. Each character might stand for the personification of some one emotion. What can be more full of sweetness and humble adoration than the Annunciation! what more awe-inspiring, more faithful in its horror, than the miracle of Lazarus, where the corpse, swathed in its bandages, stands upright among the multitude with its hollow eyes gazing in mingled gratitude and terror at the Saviour! what more full of grotesque sternness than the Last Judgment! what more nobly imagined, more faithfully executed, than the Last Supper! The simplicity and sublimity of revelation shine down from them, and make the beholder speechless with the thought of divine love.

Let us go no farther. Let us end our holiday here. Under the altar sleeps the old knight who built the chapel, and outside the door the peasants sit upon the threshold of his palace. The butterflies saunter in on the sun-filled breeze and flutter about the lilies on the table and the painted lilies on the wall. The dark sweet faces shine down from the frescoes, as they have shone down upon the worshippers through the ages, with a blessing on their holy, sentient mouths. A deep reverent hush is in the air—a nameless expectancy fills our hearts. We stand on the threshold of all that is best and worthiest in the human life of centuries, with the shades of the great and noble pressing about us. The announcing angel has brought unto us the lilies of revelation, and we feel with glad humility that we are for ever one with all the high souls that have joined earth with heaven.

Charlotte Adams.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

"And his daughter?"

"She never comes into town: she is not a woman of society."

"I remember the little Swede was no favorite of yours," noticing a certain reserve in Neckart's tone. "But I had an object in asking for her. Of course you would not be likely to know much about them: they are out of your line."

"I have met the captain and his daughter several times during the year," said Neckart. "They were camping on the Maine coast last summer, and I stumbled into their tent one day. Miss Swendon fancied her father would grow strong on a diet of fish of his own catching. When the cold weather set in she took him to St. Augustine. I ran against him by the old fort the very morning I arrived, and in the spring we met at Omaha, and made the overland trip to California together. There is no kind of air and no kind of amusement which she has not tried, since she had the means, to give the old man his health back again. To no purpose, however."

"Very odd!" the judge nodded mysteriously. "Very odd indeed about that property! Laidley told me the very night before he died that he had made a will leaving it in charity. Now, Jane inherited by virtue of a will made two years before. No other forthcoming. I suppose remorse seized him in articulo mortis. There was a curious thing occurred in that last interview of mine with Laidley.—How can I see Swendon?" interrupting himself. "Where is their house?"

Mr. Neckart hesitated a moment: "I am going there this evening to dine and spend the night, and I will take you with me. It will be a surprise which the captain will like."

"The very thing! Precisely! The truth is, Neckart—light a cigar—the truth is," lowering his voice and leaning over the table, "Laidley exacted a half promise from me that night which troubles me. The fellow died forthwith, you see, and so clenched it on me. He had a plan for Miss Swendon's future, and asked me to forward it. I thought he was going to cheat the girl, and paid little attention to it. But he did the clean thing after all, and then died promptly. I must say Laidley acted in a much more decent and gentlemanlike way than I expected. So, now I feel as if I owed it to the fellow to keep my word."

Mr. Neckart nodded. He asked no questions, but scanned the judge's flabby face narrowly. Rhodes lifted one leg on to the other knee and nursed it. It was his confidential attitude.

"It's a delicate matter, you see. Van Ness is concerned."

"Van Ness, the antiquarian?"

"Oh, he's more than that! You don't suppose a man of his breadth of intellect confines himself to old bricks and dry bones? Why, God bless you! Pliny Van Ness is the final authority in Philadelphia on new singers or pictures or cracked teapots or great religious or philanthropic reforms. If he were taken from it, the underpinnings of that town would be knocked away, and it would fall flat."

"Last fall, I think, I heard he had a plan for enforcing compulsory education in Pennsylvania?"

"Well, yes. I don't know why that didn't pass. It died out. Van Ness was trying, too, to establish a grand scheme for the benefit of the mining population. But somehow I haven't heard of that lately. Oh he's a great man, sir! When I hear him talk half an hour it quite lifts me up to purer air. I always say when I come away, 'Joe Rhodes, you're a selfish scoundrel! A selfish scoundrel!'"

The judge smoked in silence a few minutes. "Yes," he resumed thoughtfully, "it was about Van Ness. Poor Laidley had that reverence for him which men of his calibre are apt to have for a character of perfect excellence, and in his anxiety for Jane he planned that a marriage should be brought about between them. I was to inaugurate the matter—bring them together. Easily, naturally, you understand? The sort of thing that is done every day. I've seen excellent matches made in Virginia by a little quiet management of friends."

"Yes. It is done every day." Mr. Neckart yesterday would have talked of the marriages of half the women he knew as "good matches" or "well managed" without knowing that he was vulgar in so doing. But now the whole idea struck him as loathsome and disgusting. Were women to be paraded before their buyers as in a slave-market? He looked at the poor judge babbling innocently as he might at some venal go-between in the markets of Cairo.

"Thinking the matter over," pursued the judge anxiously, "it has occurred to me that Laidley would not have been so confident of Van Ness's ultimate concurrence in the scheme unless Pliny had shown some prepossession in favor of the little girl."

"You think, then, the sultan is ready to throw the handkerchief?" dryly.

"Oh, that's a coarse way of putting it, Neckart. But, considered as a match, now, really, you know, Van Ness is—The idea that he was favorable to it was suggested to me again yesterday when he proposed that we should look up the captain and call upon him. He is not a man who usually makes advances."

"Is Mr. Van Ness in New York with you?"

"Yes, certainly. I thought you knew that."

"And you propose to take him out to-night?"

"Why, that seemed a good plan. Unless you have some objection?"

"What objection can I have? What does it matter to me?" He stooped to pat his dog, that sat upright watching his face.

"Surely, that is that savage wolf-hound of Miss Swendon's?"

"Yes. He divides his time between us." After a few minutes he said, "You seem to anticipate no difficulty in the way of your conquering hero? Yet Miss Swendon by no means belongs to the warm-blooded, susceptible order of women. This Van Ness, as I remember him, is a starved, insignificant-looking fellow."

"Oh, on the contrary! He has a very noble presence. Pliny is tall, with much dignity of carriage."

"Pompous, eh? 'I am Sir Oracle'?"

"Nothing of the kind. Rather deprecating manner, with a calm face, beaming blue eyes, and abundant fair hair and beard. The very finest of Saxon types, in fact."

"Ah? But these reformers are apt to be underbred, irritable, with nasty peculiarities of habits and manner which they never have thought it worth while to cure. I suppose your friend is like his brethren?"

"Now, Neckart, just wait until you see Van Ness. You'll be charmed, or I've no judgment. Most men are, and all women," laughing significantly.

They rose at the moment. As they left the room Neckart caught sight in a mirror of his own dwarfed bulk and the massive head set in its black mane. He stopped and looked for an instant at himself fixedly, a thing which he had not done perhaps for years, and then walked on in silence beside the judge. When they parted in the street he wrote a line on a card and gave it to him.

"In case I am not able to go out on the same train with you, this is the route to the farm," he said.

He could scarcely be courteous. He was in a rage of indignation. Not, of course, that it mattered to him whether Jane married this or any other man whom she loved. She was only an acquaintance—more perhaps—his little friend. She must marry: he had thought of that often; and she would love—with a strength and fidelity beyond that of any woman he had ever known. He had often thought of that too. When the time came—years hence, perhaps—he would consult with her father as to the man. They must be satisfied that he would make her happy—they two. It must be a careful, cautious, slow matter. He might surely claim so much of a guardianship over her! He had studied her character very carefully, and appreciated it as a rare and delicate one; and he was very fond of the captain—very fond of the captain. But as for the plan of marriage—Mr. Neckart understood his own disgust at the judge, and accounted for it naturally. He had but little of the ordinary chivalric belief in woman's modesty and purity. Much knowledge of female lobbyists and literary tramps and champagne-tippling belles had shaken his faith, probably.

"But this girl is the most innocent, sincerest thing God ever made," he said. "She is clean in thought and body and word."

In those long days on the Maine coast, or by the sea-wall at St. Augustine, or crossing the interminable mountain-ranges or alkali deserts, he had had time to read this candid soul page by page: her clear skin and liquid eyes were not more transparent than her thoughts. All through that day's work a young noble figure moved like a shadow—a woman with the brave blue eyes, the ruddy lips, the grand unconsciousness of the great women of her race. The blood of Aslauga and Ingeborg was in her veins. So strong was this feeling upon him, that always, when he was making ready to meet her, he bathed and arrayed himself as if he was going to take part in the rites of a church or some sacred place. "'So white, so fair, so sweet was she!'" he sang softly to himself. And guzzling Rhodes, with his oily laugh and fat hands, meant to show her off, exhibit her fine points to this Admirable Crichton of morality, and persuade him to marry her! Was there any danger that she would love or marry him? She was undoubtedly dull in perception of character: had she not always made a demigod of the silly old captain? The finest vessels were always first to break themselves to pieces against some earthen pitcher.

He made haste to take an early afternoon train. He would see his friends again before Rhodes arrived.

CHAPTER VII.

The Hemlock Farm, the captain's new possession, was a great untrimmed tract of farm and woodland on the Hudson, with a rough-hewn stone house, open-windowed and wide-doored, uncivilized and picturesque, set down hospitably in the midst of it. Mr. Neckart, striking across the fields from the little station, caught glimpses through the forest for a mile or two of its walls and heavy chimneys stained with smoke and lichen. They seemed to grow out of the ground as naturally as the oaks and gray beeches.

It was a damp, cool day in June. Ragged patches of clouds were driven down across the tree-tops; the dark blue of the sky had yet a tinge of moist yellow in it after the night's rains; the wind was wet as it blew now and then gustily in Neckart's face. He jumped across a brush hedge overgrown with smilax and blackberry vines, and passed in under the hemlocks. They were dark and still. Outside, the sunshine flashed sometimes, pale and watery, and the blackberries in the hedge were getting rid of their white blossoms and reddening their green knobs, and a wild tiger-lily here and there blazed its answer to the summer; but the old hemlocks, just as Neckart knew them when a boy, kept silence and nodded thoughtfully together, meditating over their ancient secret. He walked more slowly. How long was it since he had left the office or sat in the club-room at breakfast with Rhodes's puffy face and unsavory talk?

Why, even the hedge with its sleepy hum of bees and yellow butterflies seemed to be of the world, worldly here. He left it far behind. The aisles of the wood grew higher and more solemn, and slowly filled with pale-green light. The wind and rain last night had not reached these solitudes, yet he climbed over fallen trunks rank with soaked emerald moss and branching fungus yellow or red as coral. A lizard with bulging eyes of jet darted across his foot: now came the whir of a partridge from under the dead leaves, now the veery cut the air with its fine silver pipe.

Neckart stood still and drew long slow breaths. The life of the woods was like sleep to him; the air was marrowy, stimulating; he could feel himself growing quiet and stronger in it. A moment later he drew his breath deeper.

"She is coming!" A tall, erect girl, bareheaded, came noiselessly down between the gray trunks of the trees, her feet sinking at each step into the dead, ash-colored moss. Her color rose as she saw him, and her eyes lighted, but she put her finger on her lips. "You have frightened them," she whispered. "They have all gone into their houses."

"They—?"

"Hush-h!" She sat down on a fallen log and motioned him to a place beside her: then she waited, listening. There was a space of silence: presently a red squirrel came out overhead and darted along the limbs; the ragged bark of the tree in front of them was suddenly full of creeping things, busily hurrying up and down; the coffee-colored water of the brook at their feet began to glance with silvery flashes of minnows and wagtails; out of a miniature hill came a long procession of ants; they marched, deployed, disappeared, and came again; monster spiders, like lumps of glittering enamel, swung in the air by invisible threads; two black beetles rose to view by Neckart's foot, rolling a white ball twice as big as themselves toward a flicker of clear sunshine on the grass.

"They are taking the babies for a sun-bath," whispered Jane.

The muffled hammering of a woodpecker, building its nest, came from a hollow tree at a little distance. A flock of kingbirds dashed boisterously through the underbrush. The pewees began their pitiful cry of "Lost! lost!" a scarlet tanager sat like a sentinel on a dead branch and challenged them with a sharp single note. The whole air grew full of that strenuous, mysterious wood-sound which is next to silence—the voice and movement of millions of living things too small for sight. It rose to a full orchestra as the two human listeners sat motionless, though only a few notes were familiar to Neckart—the tic-tic of the grasshoppers, the low monotone of countless unseen springs escaping under the grass, the lone call of the thrush, a single minor note from a golden bugle. But it was not the grasshoppers or thrush to which he listened breathlessly: it was the soft breathing of the young girl beside him, as she sat attentive, a quiet delight in her face, her blue eyes gathering soft lustre. Nature, when she and the world were young, might have looked with such motherly tenderness on all her living things. Her large nervous hands were clasped about her knees: the yellow hair glistened close beside him, and as her full bosom rose and fell he could hear her heart beat in the silence.

He stood up quickly with a shiver: "Shall we go to the house?"

She rose: "Yes, if you will. They are learning to know me now. I come here every day. There is a partridge lives under that bush, and he came out and actually let me see him drum once, and yesterday I found a blacksnake attacking a bluebird's nest in time to help fight the battle."

They had reached the hedge: Neckart held apart the thorny bushes, but did not give her his hand to help her through, as he would have done to any other woman. He was always scant in personal courtesies to her.

She looked back at the woods: "Yes, there they all live and keep house, and marry and quarrel and die. It does not concern them at all what man you make President, Mr. Neckart. It is very hard to make their acquaintance. I think they ought to know their friends at sight."

"I don't know. I know two human beings," said Neckart gravely, "who, when they first met, felt a strong mutual antipathy, and now they—"

She turned, looking keenly at him.

"They are good friends, Miss Swendon," looking into her eyes.

"Yes. There could not be any better," putting out her hand frankly. He held it but an instant, as he might have done a boy's when offered to him; but as she turned away a soft lovely color dyed her throat and face.

"There is so much wild mint growing here," she said incoherently, stooping to gather it, "and pennyroyal, and a plenty of sweet basil. I am going to have an herb- and seed-room, and give out the seeds to Twiss myself next spring. I have not told you any of the news. Father has slept every night without a tonic. Don't you think his color is better? Did you see him yesterday?" anxiously.

"Oh, it is better without doubt."

"I am quite sure, now, we did the very wisest thing in coming here. The house is on an elevation, you see—above any chance of malaria—and then the warm moisture from the river—just what he needs. And the going to town—Do you often meet him in town? Is he enjoying himself? Did it strike you that he was improving until I suggested it?"

"Why, it was only to-day," said Neckart, "that I told Judge Rhodes how I met Captain Swendon everywhere—at the club—"

"Yes. I urged him to join the club," her face beaming.

"Couldn't have been a wiser move.—At the club, at dinners, at the theatre, meeting old friends, taking in new life everywhere, and making new life for everybody. Why, to see him on Broadway waving his hat and calling 'Hillo!' to somebody across the street puts even the cab-horses in good humor."

She laughed: "I knew it, I knew it! And here on rainy days he has so much to do. He is trying every one of his patents in the house or grounds. I am fitting up a billiard-room to surprise him on his birthday. But come and I'll show you some of the patents at work. And I have never showed you the barn or the orchard. Father will not be at home until evening. He expected to meet you on the train. We can go exploring all the afternoon."

They crossed the meadow to the barn, Jane explaining that the former owner of the Hemlocks had lived for years in Europe, and left house and land to run into their present overgrown decay. "Farmer and gardeners worry about new fences and repairs, but I will not have even the dead leaves cleared from the paths. I remember you said once you liked to hear them crisp under your feet," sliding her own feet among them.

There was nothing in the idle, purposeless afternoon which any practical man or woman would have thought worthy of an hour's remembrance; yet it stood out for ever after, above all of Bruce Neckart's life, as some fair table-land lifted from the fogs near to the sun.

They went into the house, examined patent hinges and locks, and explored the vacant rooms and mysterious garrets filled with lumber. She sat down by an old spinning-wheel, turning it and singing a scrap of Gretchen's song, while the light from the dormer window touched her white arched throat and yellow hair. They went to the stables, and the old Scotch hostler brought out the horses and talked with Neckart of the mysteries of flanks and strains of blood, while Jane looked on shyly, standing with the dog in the wide door.

"Maybe I shall know them as well as I do you some day, Bruno," she said gravely to him. "But I shall never like them as well. That wouldn't be possible: they're strangers." The dog nuzzled his head into her hand and marched steadily beside her. Then she took Neckart and Bruno over a little hill to a spring-house, into which you went through a mossy door across a sparkling little brook. She went inside and brought out a bowl of yellow cream, all of them watching the kitchen windows guiltily as she did it; and then they went on aimlessly across the stepping-stones in the brook up through the field of young corn until they skirted the brush hedge again, when Bruno left them in pursuit of ground-squirrels. There was a bank running along the river-shore, topped with nodding ferns and purple iron-weed, and brown with the soft, feathery tops of the mouse-ear. The bank was on one side, the water on the other, swift, dark, mobile, throwing back now a still belt of sunshine, now gloomy woods, now the yellow shadows of low-driven clouds. They walked with the river, not against it. The wind blew damp in their faces. Since Neckart had talked so confidently of her father's improvement, Jane had been gay and light-hearted as a child, with a nervous quaver now and then in her voice as if a word would bring the tears. She looked at him thoughtfully as they walked on.

"You ought to go to California again," she said abruptly.

"I can take tonics at home, if you mean that I need them."

"Yes. You are more worn and haggard than when we left Omaha. Every day of the journey I used to see how the wrinkles left your forehead, and your eye cleared and your voice changed. It was the mountain-air. There is no tonic for you like the mountain-air."

Neckart shifted his hat uneasily, and turned to look at the river as though the frank blue eyes anxiously inspecting his face hurt him.

"I was harassed and perplexed then as to the policy which I should adopt for the paper in a certain political question. My grim looks were no doubt owing to that. You decided the question for me."

"I? Why, I know nothing of politics."

"No. But the choice offered me was between right and financial ruin on one side, and a fortune and neutrality on the other. It would be impossible," in a tone which suddenly became careless and matter of fact, "for any man to come in contact with a nature as absolutely honest as yours, Miss Swendon, and not be influenced by it. I do not think I spoke to you at all of this question, yet it seemed to me that you dictated every step of my course. I never have told you of my affairs since, yet every day I take your advice on them. It is always different from that of my political friends, because it is simply the broad truth and common sense. I follow it." He turned to her with one of his rare smiles and an odd break in his controlled voice. "I hold your hand in mine every step of my way."

She did not smile in return. She was standing still in the path, as though she had been stopped by a blow. "Honest? I honest?" she said.

The dog jumped up on her breast to go on with his romp. She pushed him down, looking straight into Neckart's amazed face.

"You may have made mistakes: everybody is liable to do that," he stammered. "But as for sincerity—"

She drew a long breath as if throwing off a burden: "No. I have been honest. You are not wrong about me there. I have made no mistakes." She turned and walked on quickly.

As he followed her he observed for the first time how steady was her step and how close set the finely-cut jaws. His own mouth, by the way, was coarser, but more facile: it spoke when silent: the chin was cleft and sensitive.

"When she once makes up her mind, the verdict of the whole world will not make her flinch," he thought with keen approval. The quality which he had that very day damned as mulish obstinacy in one of his clerks was infinitely alluring to him in this young girl. He came closer to her, watching her averted face, a passion of delight and longing gradually dulling all past resolves or reason.

If she would but turn her eyes on his face again searching for signs of trouble or illness! It was actually the first time in Neckart's life that a woman had taken any care of him. His mother had been a burden and charge on him since his boyhood. That single kindly glance had opened to him unknown possibilities of tenderness, of the touch of a woman's fingers, and all that came to other men through them.

But she walked on without speaking, her head sunk on her breast. She seemed to have forgotten that he was in the world.

At a bend in the road they met the captain. He was heated and agitated, and tried to hide it by tremendous hilarity. He welcomed Neckart boisterously, shaking hands with him again and again before he turned to Jane, who stood watching him with delighted eyes.

"How well you are looking this afternoon, father! Your cheeks are as red as a girl's!"

"Oh, I'm all right! Don't bother about me. Think of other people sometimes, child. Now, there's a matter I want to speak to you about, if I could only put it to you properly."

"I am ready. Put it directly, point-blank: that is the best way in delicate questions."

"Don't laugh. It's no laughing matter. It's the most serious business of my life, and I've only a few minutes to make you understand," mopping his hot forehead with his handkerchief. "The train will be due in half an hour."

"The train? Serious business? The commissioner of patents is coming?—"

"Damn the patents! I beg your pardon, Jane. But really—This is a request I have to make of you. A request of you from poor Will Laidley."

She drew back. The weight which she had a moment ago thrown off fell on her again. "A request of me?" she said slowly. "Whatever he asked me to do I shall do. I owe him at least so much."

"Of course! You owe him everything. You know he might have left us without a penny, as he thought of doing. Instead of which, there was not even a legacy to any charity."

"No. Every dollar of it came to me. I know."

"Oh, Will behaved most generously, nobly, to you, there's no doubt of it! And this plan of his shows such tender care of you. I never heard of it until to-day from Judge Rhodes. God forbid that I should influence you! But you would be sorry to thwart him in his grave."

"I will not thwart him again."

"If I could put it to you properly now!" The captain grew red and coughed. Mr. Neckart looked at him with fierce disgust. Was he so brutal as to talk to any woman of her marriage with a man whom she had never seen?

"You forget," he said coldly. "Miss Swendon owes no gratitude for money which was justly her own. William Laidley, too, was a weak, impure man—the very last who should be allowed to stretch his hand out of his grave to control any woman's life. You should not hamper her with any such gratitude."

"You cannot judge of this for me, Mr. Neckart," said Jane. "He has the right, especially when it concerns his money.—What is it he wished me to do?"

The captain stammered with embarrassment.

"Tut! tut! Money has nothing to do with it.—As for poor Will, Bruce, he had his good points. De mortuis—you know. I knew him in his prime. It's a trifle, after all," evading Neckart's eye, of which he had read the meaning. "But you are so apt, Jane, to take unreasonable prejudices against people. This is a friend of Will's, whom Judge Rhodes will bring out this evening. And it was your cousin's wish that he should be your friend also—adviser, eh? I've no head for business, you know, and you might refer knotty questions to him. Consult him about stocks, and the drainage of the stables, and this and that," glancing at Neckart for approval of his delicacy and cunning. "I only wanted to warn you not to take an antipathy to him, but I am clumsy—"

"Is that all?" putting her hand to her eyes for a minute as though they ached.—"Come, Bruno. It is time to dress for dinner."

"Yes, do, my dear. Haven't you any dress with frills and fal-lals, such as the ladies are wearing now? These clinging gowns do well enough for home-folks like me and Bruce, but—Something airy, gay, now. It's only as an adviser that Will recommended Mr. Van Ness to you, you understand? Your cousin consulted him of late years in all financial matters. I do suppose Van Ness—and Laidley too," turning to Neckart—"would think the child was flinging the money to the dogs, buying such a place as this to humor her old father's whims."

Jane halted, her hands on the dog's collar: "I will have no advice from Mr. Van Ness, father, as to my disposal of the money. It is mine. No man, dead or living, shall interfere with my use of it," she said in a low voice.

"Now I've prejudiced her against him," groaned the captain as soon as she was out of sight. "I saw you thought me coarse in urging this matter on her so abruptly, Bruce. But you do not understand. My time here is short—God knows how soon it may end—and I can't bear the thought of leaving the child alone. Van Ness is so pure a man—a Christian whom all the world reverences—What better can I hope than to see her his wife before I go?"

"His wife?"

"Yes. Is there any objection to him? Be frank, Bruce. It is nothing to you, but it's life and death to me. Van Ness told Judge Rhodes candidly this morning that he had watched Jane since she was a child, himself unknown, and that it was his hope their acquaintance would deepen into something warmer than friendship."

"Good God! what a model lover! Stands off watching for years—weighs her carefully in his scales. Item, so much amiability; item, so many pounds of healthy flesh; item, annual income so much. Then he steps in to inspect her a little closer, and if she prove satisfactory he will marry her."

"Bruce, you're unjust. Every man has not your sensitiveness. The way that Rhodes stated it there really was no indelicacy in it. Do you know any objection to Van Ness? Be candid. Have you any reason to urge against the marriage in case—?"

Mr. Neckart did not answer for a few moments. He had been smoking, but the cigar went out in his mouth. "No," he said at last. "I have no objection to urge to it. I have nothing to say. Go in, captain. The train is due now. I will follow you when I have finished my cigar."

CHAPTER VIII.

Miss Swendon, going up the wooded hill toward the house, raising her head, saw a man coming toward her down the narrow path. The low sunlight struck through the trees on his broad forehead and magnificent golden beard flowing full on his breast. He was in evening-dress; a topaz blazed on his snowy shirt-front; he walked meditatively, his hands clasped behind him; his eyes rested on her with beaming pleasure. She turned her head away, but saw him, without her eyes, advancing upon her—coming, it seemed to her, into her life.

Mr. Van Ness's personality indeed was too potent to admit of his slying unnoticed, like an ordinary human being, in and out of anybody's vision. You might look at him but for a moment, but his majestic port, the fineness of his linen, the very set of his high hat, his Christian benignity and grace, remained with you ever after, a possession of comfort and joy.

Jane knew him at a glance, though they had never met before. All of her life she had heard Aristides called the Just, and been a trifle bored by it. Undoubtedly this was he. She was not petulant or bored now.

If we want a key to her feeling, we can find it in the fact that there was not a moment since she burned the will that she had not known that she was right in doing it, and that there was not a moment in which she had not remembered that in the judgment of the world she was a thief.

Here was the man sent by Laidley out of his grave to judge her, a man who was embodied Virtue and Honor—in the world's eye.

There was evidently no doubt in Mr. Van Ness's mind, either, as to who the slight erect woman might be who came slowly up the rocky path, one hand on the dog's collar, the folds of her blue dress falling about her like the drapery of an antique statue, the coils of yellow hair only held in place by a black velvet band. If he had been watching her growth for years, as he said, waiting for this supreme moment, he gave no sign of emotion now that it had arrived, except that the radiance in his protruding light eyes became more intense. I may as well say, once for all, that Mr. Van Ness never was known to yield to weak emotion, irritability or any of those vicious humors which beset other men. If he had done so it would have grievously wounded the faith of his disciples. He possibly had met these temptations in his cradle, as the infant Hercules the serpents, strangled them and left them dead there, so passing into a serene boyhood and victorious middle age.

Bruno at this moment caught sight of the stranger, and began to growl ominously. Now, the dog was an amiable, courteous dog ordinarily, but subject, like his mistress, to irrational antipathies, and, like her, with a large reserve of untamed blood to support his prejudices. He stopped, dropped his head between his fore legs, his eyeballs reddened, he barked a short, sharp warning. Miss Swendon knew the signs: she had seen them once before. She caught him by the collar, looking straight at the exceptionally handsome man with the underbred blaze of yellow on his shirt-front: "Down! down, sir!—You had better go back," to Mr. Van Ness. "I beg of you to go back."

"No, no," gently, and still advancing. "Poor fellow!—Let me catch his eye, Miss Swendon."

It was something in the eye, however, which maddened the dog: he shook in every limb; his lips were drawn back; the sharp teeth glistened.

Jane threw herself on her knees, her arms about his throat: she motioned Van Ness back with her head, but the enraged animal threw her off as he would a wisp of straw, and sprang straight at his throat. Van Ness, though a heavily-built man, staggered back; but he caught the dog about the throat with both hands, and held him as in a vise. The red eyeballs and panting tongue were close to his face. Next, Bruno struck with his paw at one of the white soft hands, and tore a great gash in it, from which the blood gushed; but the pleasant smile did not leave the lips of his antagonist.

"Now, Miss Swendon," he said gently, "I think you can soothe him. I will hold him quiet to listen to reason."

Jane came to him, and in a few moments had the beast subdued and lying panting at her feet, his bloodshot eye still fixed on Van Ness. She was pale and trembling, offered her handkerchief to tie up the wounded hand, and was humble in her apologies; but Van Ness knew all the while that her sympathies were with the dog. Judge Rhodes had heard the scuffle, and arrived now, out of breath, and violent in his abuse of poor Bruno.

"Why you keep such an ill-conditioned beast, Jane, I cannot understand," he cried as he swabbed and tied the wound.

Mr. Van Ness beamed down unruffled on the stout little man: "You are always unjust to dogs, Rhodes. Now, I should say that our friend Bruno was one of the Brahmin caste—fine-natured and well-bred as a rule. Liable to mistakes, perhaps.—I am right, Miss Swendon?" and he beamed down in his turn on Jane, who sat on the bank, stroking the dog's muzzle as it lay on her knee. She forced a smile which proved a failure, said that he was right, and that she must hurry before them to the house. She stopped as soon as she was out of sight to hug the dog with a sob: "But we are not wild beasts, are we, Bruno?"

She felt the dog's insane desire to tear off this amiability, this cloying gentleness of the newcomer, and find what was beneath. It was just as it used to be long ago when prim, polite little misses came to play with her—white, pink-eyed poodles consorting with a big Newfoundland. She used to feel clumsy and worsted beside them, possessed by the devil too to scare and disgust them. Yet she knew herself more right than they all the time.

When she sat at the head of the dinner-table an hour or two later, soft silken drapery having taken the place of the soft woollen, and her usual calm good temper on the surface instead of pallor and tears, her secret mood was very much the same. Mr. Neckart sat apart from her: he spoke little, and that only to the captain, who was eager about the political question of the day. Judge Rhodes, dropping his voice, poured into her ear eulogiums on Van Ness.

"Did you see him smiling down on that brute? Now, how did he know but he had given him the hydrophobia?"

"I appreciated the self-control," smiling. "So did Bruno. It drove him mad."

"Self-control? I tell you, it's super-human! I've thought sometimes it was a divine power sustaining him. Why, I saw that man at his mother's deathbed. She lay in his arms, and he sang to her—hymns, you know—sang to her in a clear, unbroken voice until her spirit had passed out of hearing. I couldn't have done it, even for a stranger."

"I am sure you could not," said Miss Swendon.

"He sinks self out of sight wholly, you see. Now, he had a dog once—a hound like yours—brought him up. It was touching to see them together—the devotion of the poor brute. Well, he sold him, and gave the hundred dollars to his State Home for Children. He could not afford such a luxury as the dog's love, he said, while these poor wretches needed so much."

"But my dog," said Miss Swendon quite distinctly, "is more to me than all the wretches in Pennsylvania."

There was an awkward silence.

Mr. Van Ness turned his handsome face on her with a benign nod: "How natural and beautiful that is! Her dog and her babe and her lover are more to a woman than all the outside world. So they ought to be! Love is like air: when it is confined it only fills a given space, but give it escape and it spreads over all God's creation. The day is not far distant when young, fair women will freely give themselves to the work of raising the dangerous classes."

"Well, I don't know about that," said Rhodes. "I'm growing hopeless. What with ignorance and whiskey and conceit, the dangerous classes even here are too heavily handicapped to make any running. They will need two or three lives after this, it seems to me, to bring them up to a fair starting-point."

"That's a fact!" cried the captain. "Now, there are beggars. My plan is to give to 'em all, and so be on the safe side; but the organized charities tell us they are all impostors; and then every day some organized charity turns out a swindle! What is a man to do?"

"To do? Give himself up, I suppose, to the cause of the poor and the Lord, as this man has done!" cried the judge earnestly, touching Van Ness on the shoulder, who shook his head and smiled—a sad, deprecating smile.

"Don't look for wages of any sort, then. If a man wants to be suspected by the rich and abused by the poor, let him take up my work," he said a moment after, meeting Neckart's eye with a frank laugh.

"No doubt you are right," said Mr. Neckart gravely. "I never tried it."

They were rising from the table at the moment. As they passed through the hall, Mr. Neckart halted beside a window in which grew some house-plants. Jane came directly to him. She had fallen of late into the habit of consulting him in all her plans, as they both knew very well that she was not at all a capable woman—according to the New England idea: she lacked acuteness and knowledge of facts and all the fashionable aptitudes. She had not even cognizance enough of Wagner or cloisonné or old andirons to put her en rapport with her times.

It was a daily matter for her to appeal to Neckart to help her ignorance here or there, yet when he heard the soft rustle of her skirts beside him he grew perceptibly colder and stiffer, waiting without a smile for her to speak.

"I have brought my mind, as usual, to have it made up," she began gayly, growing instantly sober when she caught his glance. "What do I want with this ready-made Mentor? Do you think I need a financial adviser?"

"I have no doubt you will find Mr. Van Ness both shrewd and honest in that capacity, if you choose to consult him."

"Why should I? I suppose the money is invested properly. I draw the dividends regularly, and I have no use for money but one. I mean to make my father's life happy with it, and I know how to do that. Nobody can teach me. What have I to do with this reformer and his State Home?"

Mr. Neckart had been in the habit of looking down on her in her occasional outbursts with an amused indulgence as from an immeasurable difference of years. He was looking down at her now with unsmiling and, as she thought, unfriendly eyes; but she was suddenly, for the first time, conscious of how young he actually was, and how near to her in many unworded, fathomless ways. She drew back within the narrow limits of the window, and was silent.

He withdrew his eyes from her with an effort, and did not immediately answer. When he did, it was in a cool business tone. "I do not know what relation Mr. Van Ness may hold to you hereafter, if any," he said. "But he seems to me thoroughly honest and manly. He is the first professed reformer I ever saw who was not either subservient or aggressive to me, as a newspaper-man who did not ride his hobby."

"I do not see him with your eyes," she said with a shrug. "Bruno's, rather."

Neckart laughed. After the manner of men, he had judged the man who was crossing his life with calm common sense and justice, but he was quite satisfied that the woman with neither should condemn him.

The late clear twilight lingered with a haze of red in the sky, although the sun had been down for an hour or more. Jane stood irresolutely in the window. Through the bushes she could see the stoop where her father and the judge sat smoking, Mr. Van Ness beside them, his benign, sheep-like gaze wandering slowly around in search of her.

"Of course he does not smoke!" she said. "He has not a single weakness on which one can hang a liking; and he has actually taken father's own chair!" which by the way she had cushioned herself years ago, when it and two small stools furnished their shabby room. No wonder that she and the captain looked upon it as a sacred relic.

The window where they stood was shaded on the outside by privet and althea bushes: it opened to the ground, and a sandy little footpath ran directly to the river, where her boat was moored. Usually, while the captain took his after-dinner nap, she rowed along the shore, and Neckart, when he was there, would sit in the stern reading or scribbling his next leader, but oftener leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head, listening with half-closed eyes to her chatter. It is significant to note the occasion on which a silent woman has a flux de bouche. The necessity for talking was upon Jane at this moment. There were twenty things which she must tell Mr. Neckart to-night—how the shoemaker Twiss, who used to live—or starve—in the alley back of their garden, was here as head-gardener; and how capitally that consumptive sempstress, Nichols, managed the dairy and was growing quite fat at the work; and how that boy in the stable, whom Neckart had brought from the printing-office, where he was going headlong to the devil, had really turned out the best of fellows. The truth was, that there were very few people who had been kind to Jane or the captain in the days when they were all hungry together whom Neckart had not met at the farm, either as visitors or settled in fat sinecures of office. He had arranged the business part of their removal, indeed, in many cases. But he was in no mood for consultation to-night—answered briefly when she spoke to him: his face, hard and inflexible, was turned toward the river. "His mind is filled with some matter of state—that Navy appropriation bill, I suppose," she thought, looking at him deferentially. Her little affairs and thoughts fell back on her as if they had struck against iron.

She never wanted sympathy or advice from others: sometimes there were whole days in which, her father being gone, she scarcely spoke a word. But now, at the necessity for silence, her heart sunk with a miserable emptiness, her throat choked, hot wretched tears came up into her eyes. She had thought all the week of this day, and she had kept the best of all she had to tell until this evening. She thought, of course, they would go out in the boat, and now his mind was full of the Navy appropriation bill!

She pulled the white threads from the ragged cactus leaves beside her, looking at him sometimes from under her lashes. "I think I will go out on the river," she said timidly.

"Shall I push out the boat? The water will drift you without rowing," going promptly before her down the path. He took up the little anchor, wiped the seat of the bateau with the sponge, and held out his hand to help her in. She seated herself and took the oars. Surely he was coming? He never had allowed her to go alone. No: he waited with one hand on the stern, and then pushed her off, taking off his hat as the boat darted out into the current and her oars struck the water.

It was the bill: no doubt it was the bill! She knew he had been sent for to Washington on business concerning it. Of course he was a statesman, and it was quite right that the government and the country should have the benefit of his best thoughts. But what if this bill and other bills should always fill his mind, and leave no room there for—for the poor little affairs of his friends? "What would father do then?"

The oars rested motionless in the row-locks. Her eyes were dry, but there was a breathless stricture on her breast, as though an iron hand had clenched her and for the moment crushed the life back.