V

"... Quiet by day,Sound sleep by night; study and easeTogether mixt, sweet recreation,And innocence, which most doth pleaseWith meditation."

He read Greek and Latin with Dr. Primrose, and many an argument of ancient loves and wars I listened to, knowing by the keen-edged feeling of my teeth when the fray was over that my mouth had been wide open all the while. Letitia, too, could hear from the kitchen where she made her pies, for it was a conversational little house, just big enough for a tête-á-tête, as Dr. Primrose used to say, and when debate waxed high, she would stand sometimes in the kitchendoorway, in her gingham apron, wiping the same cup twenty times.

"Young Devon oak," the doctor called him, sometimes half vexed to find how ribbed and knotty the young tree was.

"We'll look it up, then," he would cry, "but I know I'm right."

"You'll find you are mistaken, I think, doctor."

"Well, now, we'll see. We'll see. You're fresh from the schools and I'm a bit rusty, I'll confess, but I'm sure I'm—here, now—hm, let's see—why, can that be possible?—I didn't think so, but—by George! you're right. You're right, sir. You're right, my boy."

He said it so sadly sometimes and shut the book with an air so beaten, lying back feebly in his chair, that Robin, Letitia says, would lead the talk into other channels, merely to contend for ground he knew he could never hold, to let the doctor win. It was fine to see him then, the roused old gentleman, his eyes shining, sitting bolt upright in his chair waving away the young man's arguments with his feeble hand.

"I think you are right, doctor, after all. I see it now. You make it clear to me. Yes,sir, I'm groggy. I'm down, sir. Count me out."

And you should have seen the poet then in his triumph, if victory so gracious may be called by such a name. There was no passing under the yoke—no, no! He would gaze far out of the open window, literally overlooking his vanquished foe, and delicately conveying thus a hint that it was of no utter consequence which had conquered; and so smoothing the young man's rout, he would fall to expatiating, soothingly, remarking how natural it was to go astray on a point so difficult, so many-sided, so subtle and profound—in short, speaking so eloquently for his prone antagonist, expounding so many likely arguments in defence of that lost cause, one listening would wonder sometimes who had won.

Evenings, when Letitia's work was done, she would come and sit with us, Robin and me, upon the steps. There in the summer moonlight we would listen to his tales, lore of the Dartmoor and Exmoor wilds, until my heart beat strangely at the shadows darkening my homeward way when the clock struck ten. Grape-vines, I noted then, were the very place for an ambush by the Doones, of whom they talked so much, Robin and Letitia!Later, when the grapes were ripe, a Doone could regale himself, leisurely waiting to step out, giant-wise, upon his prey! There were innumerable suspicious rustlings as I passed, and in particular a certain strange—a dreadfulbrushingsound as of ghostly wings when I squeezed, helpless, through the worn pickets!—and then I would strike out manfully across the lawn.

One day in August—it was August, I know, for it was my birthday and Robin had given me a rod and line—we took Letitia with us to the top of Sun Dial, a bald-crowned hill from which you see all Grassy Fordshire green and golden at your feet. Leaving the village, we crossed a brook by a ford of stones and plunged at once into the wild wood, forest and ancient orchard that clothed the slope. I was leading—to show the way. Robin followed with Letitia—to help her over the rocks and brambles and steeper places of the long ascent, which was far more arduous than one might think, looking up at it from the town below.

I strode on proudly, threading the narrow hunter's trail I knew by heart, a remnant of an old wagon-lane long overgrown. I strode onswiftly, I remember, breaking the cob-webs, parting the fragrant tangle that beset the way—vines below, branches above me—keeping in touch the while, vocally, when the thickets intervened, with the pair that followed. I could hear them laughing together over the green barriers which closed behind me, and I was pleased at their troubles among the briers. I had led them purposely by the roughest way. Robin, stalking across the ford, had made himself merry with my short legs, and I had vowed secretly that before the day was out he should feel how long those legs could be.

"I'll show you, Mr. Bob," I muttered, plunging through the brushwood, and setting so fast a pace it was no great while before I realized how faintly their voices came to me.

"Hello-o!" I cried.

"H'lo-o!" came back to me, but from so far behind me I deemed it wiser to stop awhile, awaiting their approach.

The day was glorious, but quiet for a boy. The world was nodding in its long, midsummer nap, and no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. I looked in vain for one; but there were berries and the mottled fruit of an antique apple-tree to while the time away—and so I waited.

I remember chuckling as I nibbled there, wondering what Mr. Bob would say of those short legs which had outstripped him. I fancied him coming up red and breathless to find me calmly eating and whistling between bites—and I did whistle when I thought them near enough. I whistled "Dixie" till I lost the pucker, thinking what fun it was, and tried again, but could not keep the tune for chuckling. And so I waited—and then I listened—but all the wood was still.

"Hello-o!" I cried.

There was no answer.

"Hello-o!" I called again, but still heard nothing in reply save my own echo.

"Hello-o!" I shouted. "Hello-o!" till the wood rang, and then they answered:

"H'lo-o!" but as faint and distant as before.

They had lost their way!

"Wait!" I shouted, plunging pell-mell through the bushes. "Wait where you are! I'm coming!"

And so, hallooing all the way, while Robin answered, I made my way to them—and found them resting on a wall.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," said Robin. "We aren't mountain-goats, you know, Bertram."

I grinned gleefully.

"I thought my legs were so short?" I said.

"And so they are," he replied, calmly, "but you go a bit too fast, my lad—for Letty."

I had forgotten Letitia! Revenging myself on Robin, it was she alone who had suffered, and my heart smote me as I saw how pale she was, and weary, sitting beside him on the wall. Yet she did not chide me; she said nothing, but sat there resting, with her eyes upon the wild-flower which she plucked to pieces in her hand.

We climbed more slowly and together after that. I was chagrined and angry with myself, and a little jealous that Robin Saxeholm, friend of but a summer-time, should teach me thoughtfulness of dear Letitia. All that steep ascent I felt a strange resentment in my soul, not that Robin was so kind and mindful of her welfare, guiding her gently to where the slope was mildest, but that it was not I who helped her steps. I feigned indifference, but I knew each time he spoke to her and I saw how trustingly she gave her hand.

And I was envious—yes, I confess it—envious of Robin for himself, he was so stalwart; and besides, his coat and trousers set so rarely! They were of some rough, brownish, Scotchy stuff, and interwoven with a fine red stripe just faintly showing through—oh, wondrous fetching! Such ever since has been my ideal pattern, vaguely in mind when I enter tailor-shops, but I never find it. It was woven, I suppose, on some by-gone loom; perhaps at Thrums.

Reaching the summit and drinking in the sweet, clear, skyey airs, with Grassy Fordshire smiling from all its hills and vales for miles about us, I forgot my pique.

"What about water?" Letitia asked.

I knew a spring.

"I'll go," said Robin. "Where is it, Bertram?"

"Oh no, you won't!" I cried, fiercely. "That's my work, Mr. Bob. You're not the only one who can help Letitia."

He looked astonished for a moment, but laughed good-naturedly and handed me his flask. Letitia smiled at me, and I whistled "Dixie" as I disappeared. I hurried desperately till I lost my breath; I skinned bothknees; I wellnigh slipped from a rocky ledge, yet with all my haste I was a full half-hour gone, and got back red and panting.

They had waited patiently. Famished as they were, neither had touched a single mouthful. Letitia said, "Thank you, Bertram," and handed me a slice of the bread and jam. She seemed wondrous busy in our service. Robin was silent—and I guessed why.

"I didn't mean to be rough," I said.

"Rough?" he asked. "When were you rough, Bertie?"

"About the water."

"Oh," he said, putting his hand upon my shoulder. "I never thought of it, old fellow," and my heart smote me for the second time that day, seeing how much he loved me.

Letitia, weary with our hard climbing, ate so little that Robin chided her, very gently, and I tried banter.

"Wake up! This is a picnic." But they did not rally, so I sprang up restlessly, crying, "It's not like our other good times at all."

"What!" said Robin, striving to be playful. "Only six slices, Bertram? This is our last holiday. Eat another, lad."

Then I understood that gloom on Sun Dial: he was going to leave us. Boylike, I had taken it for granted, I suppose, that we would go on climbing and fishing and playing cricket in Grassy Ford indefinitely. He was to go, he said, on Monday.

"News from home, Mr. Bob?"

He was silent a moment.

"Well, no, Bertie."

"Then why not stay?" I urged. "Stay till September."

He shook his head.

"Eat one more slice for me," I can hear him drawling. "I'll cut it—and a jolly fat one it shall be, Bertram—and Letty here, she'll spread it for you." Here Mr. Bob began to cut—wellnigh a quarter of the loaf he made it. "Lots of the jam, Letty," he said to her. "And you'll eat it, Bertram—and we'll call it—we'll call it the Covenant of the Seventh Slice—never to forget each other. Eh? How's that?"

Now, I did not want the covenant at all, but he was so earnest; and besides, I was afraid Letitia might think that I refused the slice because of the tears she had dropped upon it, spreading the jam.

obingone, I saw but little of Letitia, I was so busy, I suppose, with youth, and she with age. The poet's lamp had burned up bravely all that summer-time, its flame renewed by Robin's coming—or, rather, it was the brief return of his own young English manhood which he lived again in that fine, clean Devon lad. Robin gone, he felt more keenly how far he was from youth and Devonshire, what a long journey he had come to age and helplessness, and his feeble life burned dimmer than before.

Two or three years slipped by. The charm was gone which had drawn me daily through the hole in our picket-fence. Even the doctor's Rugby tales no longer held me, I knew them so by heart. When he began some old beginning,my mind recited so much more glibly than his faltering tongue, I had leaped to the end before he reached the middle of his story. He was given now to wandering in his narratives, and while he droned there in his chair, my own mind wandered where it listed, or I played restlessly with my cap and tried hard not to yawn, longing to be out-of-doors again. Many a time has my conscience winced, remembering that eagerness to desert one who had been so kind to me, who had led my fancies into pure-aired ways and primrose paths—a little too English and hawthorn-scented, some may think, for a good American, but we meant no treason. He, before Robin, had given my mind an Old-World bent never to be altered. Only last evening, with Master Shallow and a certain well-known portly one of Windsor fame, I drank right merrily and ate a last year's pippin with a dish of caraways in an orchard of ancient Gloucestershire. Before me as I write there hangs a drawing of pretty Sally of the alley and the song. Between the poet and that other younger Devonshire lad, they wellnigh made me an English boy.

We heard from Robin—rather, Letitia did.He never wrote to me, but sent me his love in Letitia's letters and a book from London,Lorna Doone, for the Christmas following his return. Letitia told me of him now and then. She knew when he left Cambridge and we sent him a present—or, rather, Letitia did—Essays of Emerson, which she bought with money that could be ill-spared, and she wrote an inscription in it, "From Grassy Fordshire, in memory of the Seventh Slice." She knew when he went back home to Devon, and then, soon afterwards, I believe, when he left England and went out to India. Now, she did not tell me that wonderful piece of news till it was old to her, which was strange, I thought. I remember my surprise. I had been wondering where Robin was and saying to her that he must be in London—perhaps in Parliament!—making his way upward in the world, for I never doubted that he would be an earl some day.

"Oh no," Letitia said, when I mentioned London. "He is in India."

"India! Mr. Bob in India?"

"Yes. He went—why, he went last autumn! Didn't you know?"

No, I did not know. Why, I asked, and asreproachfully as I could make the question—why had she never told me?

She must have forgotten, she replied, penitent—there were so many things to remember.

True, I argued, but she ought at least to have charged her mind with what was to me such important news. Mr. Bob and I were dear, dear friends, I reminded her. He had gone to India, and I had not known!

She knew it, she said, humbly. She would never forgive herself. I did not go near her for days, I remember, and long afterwards her offence still rankled in my mind. Had she not spread that slice on Sun Dial, never to forget? When next I saw her I made a rebuking point of it, asking her if she had heard from Robin. She shook her head. Months passed and no letter came.

"We don't see you often any more, Bertram," her father said to me one day.

"No," I stammered. "I'm—"

"Busy studying, I suppose," he said.

"Yes, sir; and ball-games," I replied.

"How do you get on with your Latin?" he inquired, feebly.

"We're still in Virgil, sir."

"Ah," he said, but without a trace of the old vigor the classics had been wont to rouse in him. "That's good—won'erful writer—up—"

He was pointing with his bony fore-finger.

"Yes?" I answered, wondering what he meant to say. He roused himself, and pointed again over my shoulder.

"Up there—on the—s'elf."

He was so ghastly white I thought him dying and called Letitia.

"'S all right, Bertram," he reassured me, patting my hand. I suppose he had seen the terror in my face. He smiled faintly. "'M all right, Bertram."

Outside the apple-trees were blooming, I remember, and he lived, somehow, to see them bloom again.

My conscience winces, as I say, to think how I twirled my cap by my old friend's bedside, longing to be gone; yet I comfort myself with the hope that he did not note my eagerness, or that if he did he remembered his own boyhood and the witchery of bat and ball. Not only was the poet's life-lamp waning, not only was Letitia burdened with increasing cares, fast aging her, the mater said, but I was a child nolonger; a youth, now, mindful of all about me, and seeing that neighbor household with new and comprehending eyes.

The very house grew dismal to me. The boughs outside were creeping closer—not to shelter it, not to cool it and make a breathing nook for a lad flushed with his games in the summer sun. It was damp there; the air seemed mouldy under the lindens; there was no invitation in the unkempt grass; toads hopped from beneath your feet, bird-songs came to you, but always, or so it seemed to me, they came from distance, from the yards beyond.

There within, across that foot-worn threshold which had been a goal for me in former years, there was now a—not a poet any longer, or Rugby boy, but only a sick old man. Upon a table at his side his goblets stood, covered with saucers, and a spoon in each. His drugs were watery; there was no warmth in them, no sparkle even when the sun came straggling in, no wine of life to be quaffed thirstily—only a tepid, hourly spoonful to be feebly sipped, a sop to death.

Even with windows open to the breeze the air seemed stifling to the lad I was. The sunlightfalling on the faded carpet seemed always ebbing to a kind of shadow of a glow. The clock, that ugly box upon the shelf, ticked dreadfully as if it never would strike a smiling hour again. The china ornaments at its side stood ghastly mute, and hideous flowers—ffff!those waxen faces under glass! If not quite dead, why were they kept so long a-dying there? Would no kind, sunny soul in mercy free them from their pallid misery? I was a Prince of Youth! What had I to do with tombs? I fled.

Even Letitia, kind as ever to me, seemed always busy and preoccupied—sweeping, dusting, baking, cleansing those everlasting pots and pans, or reading to her father, who listened dreamily, dozing often, but always waking if she stopped. Content to have her at his side because discontent to have her absent, even for the little while her duties or the doctor's orders led her, though quite unwillingly, away. Impatience for her return would make him querulous, which caused her tears, not for its failing consciousness of her devotion, but for its warning to her of his gentle spirit's slow decline despite her care.

"Where have you been so long, Letitia?"

"So long, father? Only an hour gone."

"Only an hour? I thought you would never come."

"See, father, I've brought you a softer pillow," she would say, smiling his plaints into oblivion. It was the smile with which she had caught the grape-thief by the fence, the one with which she had charmed a Devonshire lad, now gone three years and more—the tenderest smile I ever saw, save one, and the saddest, though not mournful, it was so genuine, so gentle, and so unselfish, and her eyes shone lovingly the while. Its sadness, as I think now of it, lay not so much in the smile itself as in the wonder of it that she smiled at all.

The mater—was she not always mother to the motherless?—was Letitia's angel in those weary days, carried fresh loaves of good brown bread to her, a pot of beans, or a pie, perhaps, passing with them through the hole in the picket-fence. I can see her now standing on Letitia's kitchen doorstep with the swathed dish in her hands.

"The good fairy," Letitia called her; and when she was for crying—for cry she must sometimes, though not for the world before her father'seyes—she shed her tears in the kitchen in the mater's arms. So it was that while I was yet a school-boy an elder sister was born unto our house and became forever one of the Weatherbys by a tie—not of blood, I have said before, yet it was of blood, now that I come to think of it—it was of gentle, gentle human blood.

There was an old nurse now to share Letitia's vigils, but only the daughter's tender hands knew how to please. She scarcely left him. Doctor or friends met the same answer, smiling but unalterable: she would rather stay. Not a night passed that she did not waken of her own anxiety to slip softly to his bedside. He smiled her welcome, and she sat beside him with his poor, thin hand in hers, sometimes till the dawn of day.

Day by day like that, all through the silent watches of the darkened world, that gentle handmaiden laid her sacrifice upon the altar of her duty, without a murmur, without one bitter word. It was her youth she laid there; it was her girlhood and her bloom of womanhood, her first, her very last young years—sparkle of eyes, rose and fulness of maiden cheeks, the golden moments of that flower-time when Love goeschoosing, playtime's silvery laughter and blithe, untrammelled song.

"'Titia," he said to her, "there's no poem—'alf so beaut'ful—'s your love, m' dear."

The words were a crown to her. He set it on her bowed head with his trembling fingers.

"Soft—brown 'air," he murmured. He could not see how the gray was coming there.

Spring came, scenting his room with apple blooms; summer, filling it with orient airs—but he was gone.

pin the attic of the Primrose house one day, I was helping Letitia with those family treasures which were too antiquated for future usage, but far too precious with memories to cast out utterly—discarded laces, broken fans, pencilled school-books, dolls and toys that had been Letitia's, the very cradle in which she had been rocked by the mother she could not remember, even the little home-made pieced and quilted coverlet they had tucked about her while she slept. She folded it, and I laid it carefully in a wooden box.

"How shall we fill it?" I asked her, gazing at the odds and ends about my feet.

"With these," she said, bringing me packages of old newspapers, each bundle tied neatly with a red ribbon, too new and bright ever to havebeen worn. I glanced carelessly at the foolish packages, as I thought them—then suddenly with a new interest.

"Why," I said, "they're papers from Bombay!"

"Yes," she answered.

"Where Robin is?" I asked.

There was no reply from the garret gloom.

"Did Mr. Bob send them?"

She was busy in a chest.

"What did you ask, Bertram?" she inquired, absently.

"Did Mr. Bob send these Bombay papers?"

"Oh," she answered, "those?"

She paused a moment.

"No," she told me.

"Oh," said I, much disappointed, "I thought he might. They're last year's papers, too, some of them."

"Do they fill the box?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "Shall I nail the cover on?"

"Oh, don'tnailit," she protested, shuddering. "We won't put any cover on, I think; at least—not yet."

Long before Dr. Primrose died he had planned with Letitia what she should do without him.His home then would be hers, and she was to sell it and become a school-mistress, the one vocation for which his classical companionship had seemed to fit her and to which her own book-loving mind inclined. Left alone then she tried vainly to dispose of her little property, living meanwhile with us next door to it, and gradually, chiefly with my own assistance and the mater's, packing and storing the few possessions from which she could not bring herself to part. To Editor Butters she presented an old edition ofKing Lear; to me, not one, but many of her father's best-loved books, which she fancied might be of charm and use to me.

Of relatives across the sea Letitia knew little beyond a few strange names she had heard her father speak, and in her native and his adopted land she had no kinsfolk she had ever seen save a distant cousin as far removed from her in miles as blood, and remembered chiefly as a marvellously brocaded waistcoat with pearl buttons, to which she had raised her timorous eyes on his only visit to her father years ago. Apparently, this little girl had gone no farther up. She could never remember a face above that saffron vest, and, what was still more remarkable, consideringher shyness, was never certain even of the knees and boots that must have been somewhere below.

Now the yellow waistcoat, whose name was George—Cousin George McLean—had a daughter Dove, or Cousin Dove, as Letitia called her, concerning whom we always used to smile and wonder, so that in course of time myths had grown up about the girl whom none of us had ever seen and of whom we had no notions save the idle fancies suggested by her odd, sweet, unforgettable little name.

The mater had always said that she must be a quaint and demure little thing—in short, dovelike.

That, my father argued, was quite unlikely, since he had never known a child to mature in keeping with a foolish, flowery, or pious Christian name. He had never known a human Lily to grow up tall and pale and slender, or a Violet to be shy and modest and petite, or a Faith or Hope or Patience to be singularly spiritual and mild. For example, there was Charity B——, of Grassy Ford, who hinted that heaven was Presbyterian, and that she knew folks, not a thousand miles off, either, who would never be—Presbyterians, my father said; and so, he added,it was dollars to dough-nuts that Cousin Dove was not at all dovelike, but a freckled and red-haired, roistering, tomboy little thing.

Letitia had a notion, she scarce knew how or why, that Cousin Dove was not birdlike, but like a flower, she said—a white-and-pink-cheeked British type with fluffy yellow hair and a fondness for candy, trinkets, and even boys.

As for myself, I had two notions as a boy—one for the forum, the other for my cell. The first was simply that Cousin Dove was pale and tall and frigid beyond endurance. I could see her, I declared, going to church somewhere with two little black-and-gilt books held limply in her hand—and she had green eyes, I said. On the other hand, privately, I kept a far different portrait in mind—a gilded one, rather a golden vision by way of analogy, I suppose, for was not Dove the veritable daughter of a gorgeous, saffron-hued brocade? From yellow waistcoat to cloth of gold is but a step for a bookish boy. She was tall and stately, I told myself; and as I saw her then, her mediæval robe clung lovingly about her, plain but edged with pearls (seed-pearls I think they called them in the old romances),and she had a necklace of larger pearls, loops of them hanging a golden cross upon her bosom. Her face was radiant, her eyes blue, her hair golden, and she wore a coronal of meadow flowers. I do not mean that I really fancied Cousin Dove was so in flesh and blood, but such to me was the spirit of her gentle name, the spell of which had conjured up for me in some rare moment of youthful fancy this Lady of the Marigolds, this Christmas-card St. Dove.

In the midst of Letitia's sad uprooting of her old garden, as she called the only home she had ever known, a letter came from the yellow waistcoat conveying surprising news. Dove herself was leaving for Grassy Ford to persuade her cousin to return with her and dwell henceforth with the McLeans. A thrill ran through our little household at the thought of that approaching maid of dreams. Now we should know, the mater said, that the girl was dovelike. "Humpf!" was my father's comment. Letitia trembled, she said, with a return of her childish awe of the yellow waistcoat. I myself was stirred—I was still in teens, and dreaded girls I had never met.

On the July morning that was to bring her, Irose early, I remember, and took down my fishing-rod.

"Not a bad idea, either," remarked my father, as he stood watching me. "Still," he added, "there's no hurry, Bertram. She'll want to change her dress first, you know."

I made no answer.

"It's a bit selfish though," he continued, "to be carrying her off this way the very first morning."

"Mother," I said, coolly, "will you put up some sandwiches? I may not be back till dark."

"Why, Bertram! Going fishing on the day—"

"I don't really see what that's got to do with it," I interrupted. "Must I give up all my fun because a mere girl's coming?"

"No, Bertram," said my father, in his kindest tones. "Go, by all means, and here [he was rummaging in the bookcase drawer]—here, my son, take these along, these old field-glasses. They may come handy. You can see our yard, you know, from the top of Sun Dial—and the front porch. Splendid fishing up on Sun Dial—"

But I was off.

"Bertram! Bertram!" called my mother, butI did not heed her. I stopped at a grocery for cheese and crackers, and strode off to the farthest brook—farthest, I mean, from Sun Dial. Troublesome Brook, it was called, not so much for the spring freshets that spread it over the lower meadows as for the law-suits it had flowed through in its fickle course between two town-ships and good farm-lands. Under its willows I cooled my wrath and disentangled my knotted tackle. The stream flowed silently. There was no wind, no sound, indeed, but the drone of insects; all about me was a world in reverie, mid-summer-green save for the white and blue above and the yellow wings of vagrant butterflies and the sun golden on the meadows. Many a time I have fished in that very spot. It is a likely one for idleness and for larger fish than any I ever caught there, and waiting for them as a boy I used to read in the little pocket-fitting books I dote on to this day—they fit the hand so warmly, unlike their bigger brethren, who at the most give you three-fingers' courtesy. There on that same moist bank I have sounded deeper pools than Troublesome's, and have come home laden with unlooked-for spoil that glistens still in a certain time-worn upper creel of mine.

But I had no book that day, having forgotten one in my hurried parting, and I had not yet mastered that other tranquil art of packing little bowls with minced brown meditation—so I was restless. The world seemed but half awake. I chafed at the stillness. Before, I had found it pleasant; now it nettled me. I frowned impatiently at my cork dozing on the waters. I roused it savagely, and gazed up at the sun.

"Queer," I said to myself. "Queer it should be so late this morning"—but I did not mean the sun.

Trains from the West glide into Grassy Ford on a long curve following the trend of Troublesome and the pastoral valley through which it runs. It is a descending grade down which the cars plunge roaring as though they had gathered speed rather than slackened it, and as though they would run the gantlet of the ugly buildings and red freight-cars that, from the windows of the train, are all one sees of our lovely town. Now the Black Arrow was the pride of the X., Y. & Z., and all that summer had arrived in the nick of its schedule time.

"Funny," said I to myself, looking at the sun. "Funny it should be late this morning."

I pulled up my hook and cast it in again. My cork shook itself—yawned, I was about to say, and settled down again as complacently as before. Leisurely the ripples widened and were effaced among the shadows.

What right had any one to assume that I had not long planned to go a-fishing that very morning?

I pulled up my line again.

Even a father should not presume on the kinship of his son.

I dropped my bait into a likelier hole.

Besides, I was not a child any longer, to be bullyragged by older people. Had I not gone fishing a hundred times?—yet no one had ever deemed it odd before.

My float drifted against a snag. I jerked it back.

It was the only unpleasant trait my father had.

Again I squinted at the sun. "Queer," said I, "it should be so late this morning." I pulled up my—

Hark!Thatwas a whistle! There would be just time to reach the open if I ran!

I ran.

Breathless, I made the meadow fence and clambered up—and saw her train go by. Yes, I—I waved to it. Suppose she had seen me! I was only some truant farm-boy on a rail.

Her train ran by me in a cloud of dust and clattered on among the freight-cars. I heard the rumble die away, but the bell kept ringing. The brakeman, doubtless, would help her off—Letitia would be waiting with out-stretched arms—girls are such fools for kissing—and then father would take her bag, and the surrey would whisk her off to the mater, bareheaded at the gate. Rails are sharp sitting; let us look at the cork again.

It was calm as ever and nestling against a snag. I pulled up my line till the bait emerged, limp, unnibbled. Savagely I swished it back—it caught in the willows. I pulled. It would not budge. In a sudden rage I whipped out my pocket-knife, severed the cord as high above me as I could reach, and wrapping the remnant about my rod, turned townward.

A dozen yards from the faithless stream, I remembered my cheese and crackers, and went back for them, and started off again, purposeless. Never before had vagabondage on a goldenmorning seemed irksome to me. It was not that I wished to see Cousin Dove, but merely that I had no desire to do anything else—a different matter. Only one way was really barred to me, since in point of pride I could not go homeward till the sun sank, yet all other ways seemed shorn somehow of their old delights, I knew so well every stick and stone of them.

While I was dallying thus, irresolute, I thought of "The Pide Bull" and my old friend Butters. It was inspiration. In twenty minutes (mindful of my father's eyes meanwhile) I had reached the shop.

"Hello," he growled, as I appeared. "You here again?"

"Yep."

"What do you want?"

"Nothing."

"Humpf! Help yourself, then."

"Mr. Butters, what kind of type is this?"

"What type?"

"This type."

"What good '11 it do to tell you? You won't remember it, if I do."

"Yes, I will."

"You won't know ten minutes after I tell you."

"Go on, Mr. Butters. Tell me."

"Well, if you must know, it's b'geois."

"B-what?"

"B'geois, I tell you, and I won't tell you again, either."

"How do you spell it, Mr. Butters?"

"Say, what do you think I am? I haven't got time to sit here all day and answer questions."

"But how do you spell it, Mr. Butters?"

"Dictionary's handy, isn't it?"

"You ought to know how to spell it," I remarked, fluttering the dictionary.

"Who said I didn't know how to spell it?"

"You told me to look it up."

"Did, hey? And what d' I do it for? D' you think I've got time to be talking to every young sprig like you?"

"Here it is, Mr. Butters. It's spelled b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s."

"Precisely," said the editor—"b-o-u-r-g-o-i-s, bur-joyce."

"No—g-e-o-i-s, Mr. Butters."

"Just what I said."

"You left out the 'e.'"

"Why, confound you, what do you mean by telling me I don't know my own business?"

"I was only fooling, Mr. Butters. You did say the 'e,' of course."

"You're a liar!" he promptly answered. "I didn't say the 'e,' and you know it!"

He broke off into a roar of triumphant laughter, but well I knew who had won the day. He was mine—he and "The Pide Bull," and the story of his wife's uncle's old yellow rooster, and the twenty legends of Tommy Rice, the sexton, who "stuttered in his walk, by George!"—yes, and the famous narrative of how Mr. Butters thrashed the barkeep—all, all his darling memories were mine till sunset if I chose to listen.

He took me to luncheon at the Palace Hotel near by his shop, and afterwards mellowed perceptibly over his pipe, as we sat together in the clutter of paper about his desk waiting for the one-o'clock whistle to blow him to work again.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Eighteen," said I, half ashamed I was no more.

"Beautiful age," he mused, nodding his head and stroking his warm, black bowl. "Beautiful age, my boy." He spoke so mildly that I waited,silent and a little awed to have come so near him unawares, and feeling the presence of some story he had never told before.

But the whistle blew one o'clock and he rose and put on his apron, and went back to his case again, talking some nonsense about the weather; and though I lingered all afternoon, he was nothing but the old, gruff printer, and never afterwards did I catch him nooning and thinking of the age he said was beautiful.

It was six when I took up my fishing-tackle and went home to supper, whistling. I found the mater in the kitchen.

"Ah," she said. "What luck, Bertram?"

"None," I replied. "The fish weren't biting."

"Oh, that's too bad. You must be tired."

"I am, and hungry. Is father home?"

"Not yet. Come, you must meet—"

But I ran up the kitchen staircase to the hall above. Safe in my room, I could hear a murmuring from Letitia's. Hers was a front room, mine a rear one, and a long hall intervened, so I made nothing of the voices.

I scrubbed and lathered till my nose was red and shining beautifully. Then I drew on my Sunday suit, in which I always stood the straighter,and my best black shoes, in which I always stamped the louder, and my highest, whitest collar, and my best light silk cravat—a Christmas present from Letitia, a wondrous thing of pale, sweet lavender, 'in which not Solomon—though itwouldhike up behind. It was not like other ties, and while I was struggling there I heard the supper knell. I pulled fiercely. The soft silk crumpled taut—and the bow stuck up seven ways for Sunday. So I unravelled it again—looped it once more with trembling fingers, for I heard the voices on the stairs, and jerked it into place—but what a jumble!

"Bertram! Bertram!" It was father's voice. "Supper, Bertram."

"In a minute."

The face in the glass was red as a sunset in harvest-time. The eyes I saw there popped wildly.

"Bertram!"

"Yes; I hear you! [Confound it.]"

"Supper, Bertram. We are all waiting."

I deigned no answer.

Then father rang. Oh, I knew it was father. I looped desperately and hauled again like a sailor at his cordage, and so, muttering, wrungout a bow-knot. Then in the mirror I took a last despairing look, leaped for the doorway, slipped, stumbled, and almost fell upon the stairs, hearing below me a lusty warning—"Here he comes!"—and so emerged, rosy, a youth-illumined, with something lavender, they tell me, fluttering in my teeth (and something blood-red, I could tell them, trembling in my heart).

And there she was!

There she stood in the smiling midst of them, smiling herself and giving me her hand—Cousin Dove—Cousin Dove McLean, at the first sight of whom my shyness vanished.

"Your tie, my son, seems a trifle—"

Sothiswas Cousin Dove?—this was the daughter of the golden waistcoat—this brown-eyed school-girl with brown—no, as I lived!—red hair.

twas a golden summer that last of my youth at home, with Cousin Dove to keep us forever smiling. She was just eighteen and of that blessed temperament which loves each day for its gray or its sunny self. She coaxed Letitia out-of-doors where they walked much in the mater's garden with their arms about each other's waist. Letitia's pace was always deliberate, while Dove had the manner of a child restrained, as if some blithe and skipping step would have been more pleasant, would have matched better her restless buoyancy, her ever upturned beaming face as she confided in the elder woman—what? What do girls talk so long about? I used to marvel at them, wondering what Dove could find so merry among our currant-vines. She was a child beside Letitia. She had no memoriesto modulate that laughing voice of hers, no tears to quench the twin flames dancing in her eyes, and never an anxious thought in those days to cast its shadow there where her hair—red, I first called it; it was pure chestnut—brown, I mean, with the red just showing through, and wondrous soft and pretty on the margin of her fair white forehead, where it clung like tendrils of young scampering vine reddening in the April sun. Even Letitia, whose Present seemed always twilit, was tempted by-and-by into claiming something of that heritage of youth of which she had been so long deprived. From mere smiling upon her gay young cousin she fell to making little joyous venturings herself into our frolics, repartees, and harmless badinage—"midsummer madness," father called it—a sort of scarlet rash, he said, which affected persons loitering on starlit evenings on the porch or wandering under trees. He was the soul of our table banter, and after supper sat with us on the steps smoking his cigar and "devilling," as he said, "you younger caps and bells." Whom he loved he teased, after the fashion of older men, and Dove was the chief butt of that rude fondness. It was not his habitto caress, but his eyes twinkled at his fair victim.

"And to think, Dove," he was wont to say-when she had charmed him, "that Bertram here swore that you carried prayer-books and had green eyes!"

"And what did you prophesy, Uncle Weatherby?"

"I? The truth."

"And what was that?"

"Why,Isaid you were an angel, though a little frolicsome perhaps, and with beautiful auburn hair. Did I not, my son?"

"No, sir. You thought she would be a tomboy with red—"

"Precisely," he would interrupt. "You see, my dear, how in every particular I am corroborated by my son."

Into these quiet family tournaments, Letitia, as I have said, was slowly drawn, but it was a new world to her and she was timid in it. Doctor Primrose had been endowed with wit, even with a quiet, subtle humor in which his daughter shared, but beneath their lighter moments there had flowed always an undercurrent of that sad gravity which tinged their lives together. Ifthey were playful in each other's company, it was out of pity for each other's lot, his in his chair, hers by its side, rather than because they could not help the jest. It was meant to cheer each other—that kind of tender gayety which, however fanciful, however smiling, ends where it begins—in tears unshed. Waters in silent woodland fountains, all untouched by a single gleam from the sky above the boughs, lose sometimes their darker hues and turn to amber beneath the fallen leaves—but they are never golden like the meadow pools; they never flash and sparkle in the sun.

Letitia was not yet thirty; life stretched years before her yet; so, coaxed by Cousin Dove and me, she gave her hands to us, half-delighted, half-afraid. Here now, at last, were holidays, games, tricks, revels, the mummery and masque, the pipe and tabor—all the rosy carnival of youth. Her eyes kindled, her heart beat faster as we led her on—but at the first romp failed her. It was beautiful, she pleaded—only let her smile upon it as from a balcony—she could not dance—she had never learned our songs.

We did not urge her. She sat with the mater and smiled gladly upon our mirth. In all thefrolics of that happy summer her eyes were always on Cousin Dove, as if, watching, she were thinking to herself—enviously, often sadly, I have no doubt, but through it all lovingly and with a kind of pride in that grace and flowerness—

"There is the girl I might have been."

Dove, even when she seemed the very spirit of our effervescence, kept always a certain letter of that lovely quaintness which her name implied. Shewasa dove, the mater said, reminding us for the hundredth time of her old prediction—a dove always, even among the magpies; meaning, I suppose, father and myself.

It was not all play that summer. I was to enter college in the fall, and I labored at exercises, helped not a little by a voice still saying:

"That's right, my boy. Remember what Dr. Primrose said when he gave you Horace."

Now was I under the spell of that ancient life which had held him thralled to his very end. Mine were but meagre vistas, it is true, but I caught such glimpses of marble beauty through the pergola of Time, as made me a little proud of my far-sightedness. Seated with Dove and Letitia beneath a favorite oak, half-way up SunDial, I discoursed learnedly, as I supposed, only to find that in classic lore the poet's daughter was better versed than I. She brightened visibly at the sound of ancient names; they had been the music of her father's world, and from earliest childhood she had listened to it. Seated upon the grass, I, the school-boy, expounded text-book notes. She, the daughter of "Old David Homer," as Butters called him, told us bright tales of gods and heroes, nymphs and flowers and the sailing clouds shell-pink in the setting sun. They had been to her whatMother GooseandRobinson Crusoehad been to me; they had been her fairy stories, told her at eve ere she went to bed; and now as she told them, an eager winsomeness crept upon her, her voice was sweeter, her face was glorified with something of that roseate light in which her scenes were laid; she was a child again, and Dove and I, listening, were children with her, asking more.

She sat bolt-upright while she romanced for us. I lay prone before her with my chin upon my hands, nibbling grass-stalks. Dove, like Letitia, sat upon the turf, now gazing raptly with her round brown eyes at the story-teller's face, now gazing off at the purple woodlanddistance or at Grassy Ford's white spires among the elms below.

"Why, Letty, you're a poetess," Dove once said, so breathlessly that Letitia laughed. "And I," Dove added, "why, I don't know a single story."

"Why should you know one?" replied Letitia, pinching Dove's rueful face. "Why tell an idyl, when you can live one, little Chloe, little wild olive? You yourself shall be a heroine, my dear."

Idling there under distant trees for refuge from the August sun, which burns and browns our Grassy Fordshire, crumbling our roads to a gray powder and veiling with it the green of way-side hedge and vine—idling there, Dove was a creature I had never seen before and but half-divined in visions new to me. Fair as she seemed under our roof-tree, there in the woodland she was far the lovelier. Young things flowered about us, their fragrance scenting the summer air. Like them her presence wore a no less subtle spell. It was an ancient glamour, though I did not know it then, it seemed so new to me—one which young shepherds felt, wondering at it, in the world's morning; and since earth's daughters,then as now, with all their fairness, could scarce be credited with such wondrous witchery, those young swains came home breathless from the woodland with tales of dryads and their spells. Maiden mine, in the market-place, you are only one among many women, though you be beautiful as a dream, but under boughs the birds still sing those songs the first birds sang—there it is always Eden, and thou art the only woman there.

On my nineteenth birthday three climbed Sun Dial as three had climbed it once before. Leaving the village we crossed the brook by that self-same ford of stones, and plunged at once into the forest and ancient orchard that clothed the slope. I was not leading now, but helping them, Dove and Letitia, over the rocks and brambles and steeper places of the ascent. Threading as before that narrow trail I knew by heart, I broke the cob-webs and parted the fragrant tangle that beset our way, vines below, branches above us. It was just such another August noon, and the world was nodding; no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. We stopped for breath, resting upon a wall shaded by an ancient oak.

"The very spot!" I cried. "Do you remember, Letitia, how you and Robin rested here?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Do you remember how I called to you, and came running back?"

"Yes."

"I'd been waiting for you under an apple-tree. How I should like to see old Robin now!"

"Who was Robin?" asked Cousin Dove, and so I told her of the Devonshire lad. During my story Letitia wandered, as she liked to do, searching for odd, half-hidden flowers among the grasses. Soon she was nowhere to be seen, nor could we hear her near us.

"Letitia was fond of Robin, was she not?" asked Cousin Dove.

"Oh yes," I said. "So were we all."

"But I mean—don't you think she may have loved him?"

"Oh," I said, "I never thought of that; besides, Letitia never had time for—"

Dove opened wide her eyes.

"Must you have time for—"

"I mean," I stammered, "she was never free like—you or me; we—"

"I see," she replied, coloring. "He must have been a splendid fellow."

"He was," I said.

"Dear Letitia!" murmured Cousin Dove, gazing thoughtfully at the wilted flower she held. The wood which had been musical with voices was strangely silent now. It was something more than a mere stillness. It was like a spell, for I could not break it, though I tried. Dove, too, was helpless. There was no wind—I should have known had one been blowing—yet the boughs parted above her head, and a crown fell shining on her hair!—her hair, those straying tendrils of it, warm and ruddy and now fired golden at that magic touch—her brow, pure as a nun's, beneath that veiling—the long, curved lashes of her hidden eyes—her cheeks still flushed—her lips red-ripe and waiting motionless.

She raised her eyes to me!—a moment only, but my heart leaped, for in that instant it dawned upon me how all that vision there—flesh, blood, and soul—was just arm's-length from me!

It was—I know.

reciselyat half-past seven there was a faint rustling on our staircase and a moment later Letitia Primrose appeared at our breakfast-table smiling "Good-morning." She was dressed invariably in the plainest of black gowns with the whitest of ruching about her wrists and throat, and at the collar a pin which had been her mother's, a cameo Minerva in an antique setting of vine leaves wrought in gold. The gown itself—I scarcely know how to style it, for no frill or foible of the day was ever visible in its homely contour, or if existing there, had been so curbed by the wearer's modesty as to be quite null and void to the naked eye. Every tress of her early whitening hair lay smoothly back about her forehead, and behind was caught so neatly beneath her comb, it mightbe doubted how or if she ever slept upon it. Just so immaculate, virginal, irreproachable did the older Letitia come softly down to us every week-day morning of her life, and taking her chair between Dove's seat and mine, she would adjust her gold-rimmed glasses to better see how the night had dealt with us, and beaming upon us with one of the pleasantest of inquiring smiles, would murmur—

"Well?"

She ate little, and that so unobtrusively, I used to wonder if she ate at all. I can remember her lifting her cup, but do not recall that it ever reached her lips. She had, I think, some trick of magnetism, some power of the eye that held yours at the crucial moment, so that you never really saw her sip or bite, and she never chewed, I swear, yet I never heard of her bad digestion. Eating in her was a chaste indulgence common only, I believe, to spinsterhood—a rite, communionlike, rather than a feast.

When the clock struck eight, we would rise together—I for my office, Dove for farewells, Letitia for the school-room; I with a clattering chair, Dove demurely, Letitia noiselessly, to put on a hat as vague and unassuming as thatdecorous garment in which she cloaked herself from the outer world—a kind of cape and jacket, I think it was, in winter, but am not quite sure. In summer it was a cashmere shawl. Then slipping on a pair of gloves, black always and always whole, however faded, she would take up her small pearl-handled parasol, storm or shine, and that linen bag of hers, a marvellous reticule for books and manuscripts with a separate pocket in the cover-flap for a comb and mirror and extra handkerchief—though not to my knowledge; I am merely telling what was told. Nor am I telling all that was said of Letitia's panoply and raiment, the manner of which at every season, at every hour of the night and day, was characterized—if I have understood the matter—not so much by a charm of style as of precaution, a modest providence, a truly exquisite foresight and readiness for all emergencies, however perilous, so that fire nor flood nor war's alarms nor death itself, however sudden, should find her unprepared. Fire at night would merely have illumined a slender, unobtrusive figure descending a stair or ladder unabashed, decently, even gracefully arrayed in a silk kimono which hung nightly on the foot-board of herbed; and since for other purposes it was never worn, it remains unscorched, and, indeed, unblemished, to this very day. But for that grim hand the moment of whose clutch can never be foretold with certainty, nothing could exceed Letitia's watchfulness and care. She dressed invariably, I have said, in the plainest black, but I have heard, and on authority I could not question, that however simple and inexpensive those outer garments were, the inner vestments were of finest linen superimposing the softest silk. Thus—for a tendency to some heart-affection was hereditary in the Primrose family—thus could no sudden dissolution or surrender, such as might occur in an absence from home and the ministration of loving friends, be attended ever by anypost-mortemembarrassment or chagrin, but rather would disclose a pride and delicacy of taste and consideration, the more remarkable and worthy of approval and regret, because it could never otherwise have been revealed. Nothing I know of in the way of gifts was more acceptable to Letitia Primrose than those black silk ones which she took such pains to purchase and secrete.

It was a wondrous reticule, that linen pouchof which I spoke, bearing "L. P." embroidered on its outer side. I say its outer, for so she carried it always; and in years, so many I will not count them, I never knew that monogram turned in, or down. She met me with it in the doorway from which Dove watched us till we had left the gate. Mornings, for years, we went to our work together, save when an urgent matter summoned me earlier or compelled me, against my will and exercise, to drive. Morn after morn we walked together to the red brick school-house, talking of village news and the varying moods of our fickle northern weather, or perhaps of books, old ones and new ones, or of those golden memories that we shared. They were not perfunctory as I recall them, those morning dialogues. There was no abstraction about Letitia, no cursory, unweighed chattering of things so obvious as to need no comment. Every topic might be a theme for her mild eloquence. It might be of Keats that she discoursed to me, or Browning or Alfred Tennyson or perhaps the Corsican, whom she hated, partly for tyranny, partly because he made her "look at him," she said; it might be the Early Church, whose records she had read and read again,though not one-half so much for Cuthbert's holiness, I told her, as for Fuller's quaintness, which she loved; or it might be a March morning that we walked together, while she spoke like a poet's daughter of the first pink arbutus some grinning farm-boy had laid but yesterday upon her desk.

Why no one ever wooed and won such fervor seemed passing strange to Dove and me. With all the grace of goodness and gentle courage in which she faced the world alone, in all those years which had followed her father's death, she had never, to Dove's ken or mine, won a single suitor. Those burdens of care and sacrifice laid too soon upon her frail, young shoulders had borne early fruit—patience, wisdom, and a sweet endurance beyond her years—but on such harvest young men set small store. A taste for it comes late. It made her pleasing to her elders, but those of her own years shrank instinctively from its very perfectness. She had matured too soon. How then should any one so coolly virtuous know trial or passion? Surely so young a saint could have no warm impetuous hours to remember, no sweet abandonment, no pretty idyls—had she even a spring-time to recall?

Men admired her for her mind and heart, but in her presence secretly were ill at ease. Her self-dependence rendered useless their stronger arms accustomed to being leaned upon. She smiled upon them, it is true, but not as men like to be smiled upon—neither as a child, trustingly, nor as a queen, confident of their homage and gallant service. She appealed neither to their protection nor to their pride. She awoke the friend, but not the lover, in them; and so the years slipped by and she won no chivalry, because she claimed none. She had but asked and but received respect.

Our raillery, harmlessly meant, was not always kind, as I look back at it. It is scarcely pleasant to be reminded that among one's kind one is not preferred, yet Letitia bore all our jesting with steadfast pleasantry.

"Do I look forlorn? Do I look so helpless?" she would ask. Her very smile, her voice, her step, seemed in themselves an answer. "What do I want with a husband then?"

"Why," Dove would say, "to make you happy, Letitia."

"You child: I am perfectly happy."

"Well," Dove would answer, stubbornly, "to make you happier, then."

I have forgotten Letitia's answers—all but one of them:

"I lived so long with my scholar-love," she once said, sweetly, of her father, "I fear I never should be content with an ordinary man."

Dove declared that no one in Grassy Fordshire was half worthy of her cousin; at least, she said, she knew but one, and he was already wedded—and to a woman, she added, humbly, not half so good or wise or wonderful as Letitia. Dove stoutly held that Letitia could have married, had she wished it, and whom she would. Father would shake his head at that.

"No," he would say, "Letty is one of those women men never think of as a bride."

"But why?" Dove would demand then, loyally. "She is the very woman to find real happiness in loving and self-sacrifice. Adversity would never daunt her, and yet," my wife would say with scorn rising in her voice, "the very men who need such help and comprehension and comradeship in their careers, would pass her by, and for a chit of girl who would never be happy sharing their struggles—but only their success!"

"My dear," father would reply, sagely, "a man glories in his power to hand a woman something she cannot reach herself. Letty Primrose has too long an arm."

"But if a man once married Letitia—" Dove would protest, and father would chuckle then.

"Ah, yes, my dear, if one only would! But there's the rub. Doubtless he would find Letitia much like other women, quite willing he should reach things down to her from the highest shelf. But he must be a wise man to suspect just that—to guess what lies beneath our Letty's apparent self-sufficiency."

"An older man might," Dove once suggested. "A general, or a great professor, or a minister plenipotentiary."

"Doubtless," he answered, "but our Grassy Ford is a narrow world, my dear. The young sprigs in it are only silly lads, and the elder bachelors are very musty ones, I fear—and not an ambassador among them. I doubt very much if Letitia will ever meet him—that man you mean, who might choose Letty's love through wisdom, and whose wisdom she might choose through love."

Dove's answer was a sigh.

"Bertram," she said, "you must make some real nice, elderly bachelor doctor friends, and we'll ask them to visit us."

It seemed a likely plan, but nothing came of it, and the silly lads and the musty ones alike left our Letitia more and more to friendships beyond her years. From being so much in the company of her elders, she grew in time to be more like them. Her modesty became reserve; reserve, in turn, a certain awkwardness or shy aloofness in the presence of the other sex—primness, it was called. She had not forgotten how to smile; her talk was blithe enough with those she knew, and was still colored by her love for poetry, but it fast grew quainter and less colloquial; there was a certain old-fashioned care and subtlety about it, a rare completeness in its phrases not at all like the crude, half-finished ones with which our Grassy Ford belles were content. It added to her charm, I think, but to the evidence as well of that maturity and self-complacency which all men seemed to fear and shun, not one suspecting that the glow beneath meant youth—youth preserved through time and trial to be a light to her, or to Love belated.

Her brown hair turned to gray, her gray to white, and she still came down to us smiling good-morning; still worshipped Keats, still scorned the upstart who made her look; taught on, year after year, in the red brick school-house, wearing the wild flowers farm-boys gathered in the hills. Her life flowed on like a stream in summer, softly in shadow and in sun. She seemed content—no bitter note in her low voice, no glance of envy, malice, or chagrin in those kind gray eyes of hers, which beamed so gently upon others' loves; we used to wonder how they might have shone upon her own.

One day in August—it was again that anniversary birthday around which half my memories of her seem to cling—she gave me a copy ofIn Memoriam, and bought for herself the linen for another reticule. Neatly, and in the fashion of our grandmothers' day, she worked upon it her initials, L. and P., in Old-English letters, old-rose and gold.

"What," I asked, "is the figure meant for?"

"The figure? Where?"

"In the background there—the figure seven, in the lighter gold."

She bent to study it.

"Thereisa seven there," she said. "I must have used a lighter silk."

"Then shall you alter it?" I asked.

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