Perhaps he did not know it, but Lockhaven shadows seemed deeper than they really were because Mercer was only twelve miles from Lois Howe. Not that that could mean anything more than just the pleasure of seeing her sometimes. Gifford told himself he had no hope. He searched her occasional letters in vain for the faintest hint that she would be glad to see him. "If there were the slightest chance of it," he said, with a sigh, "of course I'd know it. She promised. I suppose she was awfully attached to that puppy."

However, in spite of hopelessness, he went to Mercer, and soon it became a matter of course that he should drop in at the rectory every Sunday, spending the evening with Helen after Dr. Howe and Lois had gone to church.

Helen never went. "I cannot," she said to Gifford once; "the service is beautiful and stately, and full of pleasant associations, but it is outside of my life. If I had ever been intensely religious, it would be different, I suppose,—I should care for it as a sacred past; but it was never more than pleasant. What I called my spiritual life had no reality to me. And now, surely, I cannot go, when I have no faith at all."

"I think you will go, some day, Helen," Gifford said thoughtfully; "the pendulum has to swing very far away from the extreme which you have seen before the perfect balance comes. And I think you make a mistake when you say you have no faith. Perhaps you have no creed, but faith, it seems to me, is not the holding of certain dogmas; it is simply openness and readiness of heart to believe any truth which God may show."

They were sitting on the porch at the rectory; the fragrant dusk of the garden was beginning to melt into trembling light as the moon rose, and the last flush of sunset faded behind the hills. Helen had a soft white wrap over her black dress, but Gifford had thought it was cool enough to throw a gray shawl across her feet; he himself was bareheaded, and sat on the steps, clasping his knees with his hands.

"Perhaps so," Helen said, "but I think I am like a person who walks along in the dark, yet looks toward the east. I will not comfort myself with little candles of memory or desire, and say, 'This is light!' Perhaps light will never come to my eyes, but I will wait, for I believe there is light somewhere."

It was much for Helen to say this. No one had guessed what was behind her reserve on such subjects; perhaps no one had very greatly cared.

"Gifford!" she said suddenly. He looked up, surprised at her tone.

"Yes, Helen?"

"I wish," she said, "I wish you were as happy as you deserve to be."

He knew what she meant, and would not repay her confidence by pretending not to understand. "Well, I'm not as happy as I desire, perhaps, but no doubt I'm as happy as I deserve."

"No," she answered, "you are not. And oh, Gifford, there is so much sorrow in the world, the only thing which makes life possible is love, because that is the only thing which does not change."

"I am afraid it can never be for me," he said, after a moment's silence, "except the joy of giving love."

"Why?" she asked gently.

Gifford did not speak; he rose, and began to pace up and down in front of the porch, crossing and recrossing the square of light which fell from the open hall door. "I ought not to talk about it," he said at last. "I've got it down at the very bottom of my life, a sort of foundation stone on which to build noble things. Your words make it spring up into a whole palace of beauty; but it is in the air,—it is in the air! You know what I mean: it must always be giving with me; she will never care. She never could, having loved once. And it is curious, Helen, but in a certain paradoxical way I'm content she shouldn't. She would not be the woman she is, if she could love twice."

Helen smiled in the darkness. "Gifford"—she began.

But he interrupted her, flinging his head back, in impatient despair. "No, it cannot be, or it would have been, don't you see? Don't encourage me, Helen; the kindest thing you can do is to kill any hope the instant it shows its head. There was a time, I was fool enough to think—it was just after the engagement was broken. But I soon saw from her letters there was no chance for me."

"But Gifford,"—Helen almost forgot to protect Lois, in her anxiety to help him,—"you must not think that. They were never engaged."

Gifford stood still and looked at her; then he said something in a low voice, which she could not hear.

"I must not say another word," she said hurriedly. "I've no right even to speak as I did. But oh, Gifford, I could not see you lose a chance of happiness. Life is so short, and there is so much sorrow! I even selfishly wanted the happiness of your joy, for my own sake."

Still Gifford did not speak; he turned sharply on his heel, and began his restless walk. His silence was getting unbearable, when he stopped, and said gently, "I thank you, Helen. I do not understand it all, but that's no matter. Only, don't you see, it doesn't make any difference? If she had been going to care, I should have known it long ago."

This was very vague to Helen; she wondered if Lois had refused him again. But Gifford began to talk quietly of his life in Mercer, and she did not venture to say anything more. "After all, they must work out their own salvation," she thought. "No one can help them, when they both know the facts."

She listened a little absently to Gifford, who was speaking of the lack of any chance for advancement in Mercer. "But really," he added, "I ought not to go too far away from my aunts, now; and I believe that the highest development of character can come from the most commonplace necessities of life." Helen sighed; she wondered if this commonplace of Ashurst were her necessity? For again she was searching for her place in the world,—the place that needed her, and was to give her the happiness of usefulness; and she had even thought vaguely that she might find some work in Lockhaven, among John's people, and for them. They both fell into the silence of their own thoughts, until the rector and his daughter came back from church, and Gifford went home.

That next week was a thoughtful one with Gifford Woodhouse; Helen's words had stirred those buried hopes, and it was hard to settle back into a life of renunciation. He was strangely absent-minded in his office. One day Willie Denner, who had come to read law, and was aspiring to be his clerk, found him staring out of the window, with a new client's papers lying untouched before him. After all, he thought, would it be wrong, would it trouble Lois (he had said he should never trouble her), if he just told her how the thought of her helped him, how she was a continual inspiration in his life? "If I saw it bothered her, I could stop," he argued.

And so, reasoning with himself, he rode over from Mercer late that Saturday night. The little ladies were, as usual, delighted to see him. These weekly visits were charming; their nephew could be admired and fussed over to their hearts' content, but was off again before they had time to feel their small resources at an end. The next morning he dutifully went to church with them. Sunday was a proud day for the Misses Woodhouse; each took an arm of the young man, whose very size made him imposing, and walked in a stately way to the door of St. Michael's. They would gladly have been supported by him to their pew, but it would have been, Miss Deborah said, really flaunting their nephew in the faces of less fortunate families, for Ashurst could not boast of another young man.

Miss Ruth wore her new bonnet that day in honor of his presence. She had taken it from the bandbox and carefully removed its wrapping of tissue paper, looking anxiously at the clouds as she smoothed the lavender strings and pinched the white asters on the side, before she decided that it was safe to wear it.

Gifford looked up the rectory lane as they drew near the church, and Miss Deborah noticed it. "Giff, dear," she asked, "did you observe, last Sunday, how ill poor little Lois looked?"

"No," he said, somewhat startled.

"Ah, yes," said Miss Ruth, nodding her head so that the white asters trembled, "she has never really gotten over that disappointment about young Forsythe."

"But she was not engaged to him," responded Gifford boldly.

"Not engaged," Miss Deborah admitted, "but she fully expected to be. He did not treat her honorably; there is no doubt of that. But her affections were unalterably his."

"How do you know that?" demanded her nephew.

"Why, my dear child," said Miss Ruth, "there is no doubt of it. Adele Dale told dear Deborah the whole story. Of course she had it from Lois."

"Not that it makes the slightest difference in my position," Gifford thought, as he sat crowding down the pain of it, and looking at Lois, sitting in the rosy light of the window of the left transept. "I am just where I was before, and I'll tell her, if it does not seem to bother her."

After church, there was the usual subdued gossip about the door, and while Gifford waited for his aunts, who had something to say to the rector, he listened to Mrs. Dale, who said in her incisive voice, "Isn't it too bad Helen isn't here? I should think, whether she wanted to or not, she'd come for her husband's sake." Even the apology of death had not made Mrs. Dale pardon John Ward.

But Mr. Dale mildly interjected,—"She would stay away for his sake, if she did not really want to come."

To which Mrs. Dale responded, "Fudge!"

Miss Deborah also spoke of her absence to Lois. "Sorry dear Helen is not here, but of course Gifford will see her to-night. He does so enjoy his evenings with her. Well, they are both young—and I have my thoughts!"

So, with the utmost innocence, Miss Deborah had planted the seeds of hopelessness and jealousy in the hearts of both these young people. Gifford spent the rest of the long, still Sunday wandering restlessly through the house, and changing his mind about speaking to Lois every few minutes. Lois was very distant that evening at the rectory, so Gifford talked mostly to Helen. There was no chance to say what he had intended, and he made none.

"Well," he said to himself as he went home, not caring to stay and talk to Helen when Lois had gone to church,—"well, it is all a muddle. I don't understand about there being no engagement, but I cannot help remembering that she cared, though I have no business to. And she cares yet. Oh, what a confounded idiot I am!"

He told his aunts he was going to make an early start the next morning. "I shall be off before you are up. I guess Sarah will give me something to eat. And, aunt Deborah, I don't know that I can get over next week."

The little ladies protested, but they were secretly very proud that his business should occupy him so much.

There was a silver mist across the hills, when Gifford led his horse out of the barn the next morning, and the little sharp paving-stones in the stable-yard, with thin lines of grass between them, were shining with dew. The morning-glories about the kitchen porch had flung their rosy horns toward the east, as though to greet the sunrise. Sarah stood under them, surveying the young man regretfully. "Your aunts won't half like it, Mr. Gifford," she said, "that you wouldn't eat a proper breakfast."

But he put his foot in the stirrup, and flung himself into his saddle. He was too much absorbed in his own concerns to reflect that Miss Deborah would be distressed if her Scotch collops were slighted, and that was not like Gifford. However, he was young and a man, so his grief did not prevent him from lighting a cigarette. The reins fell on the horse's neck as he climbed East Hill, and Gifford turned, with one hand on the bay's broad flanks, to look down at Ashurst. The valley was still full of mist, that flushed and trembled into gold before it disappeared at the touch of the sun. There was a flutter of birds' wings in the bushes along the road, and the light wind made the birch leaves flicker and dance; but there was hardly another sound, for his horse walked deliberately in the grass beside the road, until suddenly a dog barked. Gifford drew his rein sharply. "That was Max!" he said, and looked about for him, even rising a little in his stirrups, "How fond she is of the old fellow!" he thought.

In another moment the dog ran across the road, his red coat marked with dew; then the bushes were pushed aside, and his mistress followed him.

"Why, Gifford!" she said.

"Why, Lois!" he exclaimed with her, and then they looked at each other.

The young man threw away his cigarette, and, springing from his horse, slipped the reins over his arm, and walked beside her.

"Are you going away?" Lois asked. "But it is so early!"

She had her little basket in her hand, and she was holding her blue print gown up over a white petticoat, to keep it from the wet grass. Her broad hat was on the back of her head, and the wind had blown the curls around her face into a sunny tangle, and made her cheeks as fresh as a wild rose.

"You are the early one, it seems to me," he answered, smiling.

"I've come to get mushrooms for father," she explained. "It is best to get them early, while the dew is on them. There are a good many around that little old ruin further up the road, you know."

"Yes, I know," he said. (He felt himself suddenly in a tumult of uncertainty. "It would be no harm just to say a word," he thought. "Why shouldn't she know—no matter if she can never care herself—that I care? It would not trouble her. No, I am a fool to think of it,—I won't.") "But it is so early for you to be out alone," he said. "Do you take care of her, Max?"

"Max is a most constant friend," Lois replied; "he never leaves me." Then she blushed, lest Gifford should think that she had thought he was not constant.

But Gifford's thoughts were never so complicated. With him, it was either, "She loves me," or, "She does not;" he never tormented himself, after the fashion of women, by wondering what this look meant, or that inflection, and fearing that the innermost recesses of his mind might be guessed from a calm and indifferent face.

"You see the old chimney?" Lois said, as they drew near the small ruin. "Some mushrooms grow right in on the hearth."

It was rather the suggestion of a ruin, for the walls were not standing; only this stone chimney with the wide, blackened fireplace, and the flat doorstones before what was once the threshold. Grass and brambles covered the foundations; lilacs, with spikes of brown dead blossoms, grew tall and thick around it, and roses, gone back to wild singleness, blossomed near the steps and along a path, which was only a memory, the grass had tangled so above it.

Max kept his nose under Lois's hand, and the horse stumbled once over a stone that had rolled from the broken foundation and hidden itself beneath a dock. The mushrooms had opened their little shining brown umbrellas, as Lois had said, on the very hearth, and she stooped down to gather them and put them in her basket of sweet grass. From the bushes at one side came the sudden note of a bob-white; Max pricked his ears.

"Lois," Gifford said abruptly, still telling himself that he was a fool,—but then, it was all so commonplace, so free from sentiment, so public, with Max, and the horse, and the bob-white, it could not trouble her just to—"Lois, I'd like—I'd like to tell you something, if you don't mind."

"What?" she said pleasantly; her basket was full, and they began to walk back to the road again.

Gifford stopped to let his horse crop the thick wet grass about a fallen gate-post. He threw his arm over the bay's neck, and Lois leaned her elbows on the other post, swinging her basket lightly while she waited for him to speak. The mist had quite gone by this time, and the sky was a fresh, clear blue. "Well," he began, suddenly realizing that this was a great deal harder than he had supposed ("She'll think I'm going to bother her with a proposal," he thought),—"well, the fact is, Lois, there's something I want you to know. Perhaps it doesn't really interest you, in one way; I mean, it is only a—a happiness of my own, and it won't make any difference in our friendship, but I wanted you to know it."

In a moment Miss Deborah's suggestion was a certainty to Lois. She clasped her hands tight around the handle of her grass basket; Gifford should not see them tremble. "I'm sure I'll be glad to hear anything that makes you happy."

Her voice had a dull sound in her own ears.

"Helen put it into my head to tell you," Gifford went on nervously. "I hope you won't feel that I am not keeping my word"—

She held her white chin a little higher. "I don't know of any 'word,' as you call it, that there is for you to keep, Gifford."

"Why, that I would not trouble you, you know, Lois," he faltered. "Have you forgotten?"

"What!" Lois exclaimed, with a start, and a thrill in her voice.

"But I am sure," he said hurriedly, "it won't make you unhappy just to know that it is still an inspiration in my life, and that it always will be, and that love, no matter if"—

"Oh, wait a minute, Giff!" Lois cried, her eyes shining like stars through sudden tears, and her breath quick. "I—I—why, don't you know, I was to—don't you remember—my promise?"

"Lois!" he said, almost in a whisper. He dropped the bay's rein, and came and took her hand, his own trembling.

"I know what you were going to say," she began, her face turned away so that he could only see the blush which had crept up to her temple, "but I"—He waited, but she did not go on. Then he suddenly took her in his arms and kissed her without a word; and Max, and the horse, and the bob-white looked on with no surprise, for after all it was only part of the morning, and the sunrise, and Nature herself.

"And to think that it's I!" Lois said a minute afterward.

"Why, who else could it be?" cried Gifford rapturously.

But Lois shook her head; even in her joy she was ashamed of herself. "I won't even remember it," she thought.

Of course there were many explanations. Each was astonished at the other for not having understood; but Lois's confession of her promise to Mrs. Forsythe made all quite clear, though it left a look that was almost stern behind the joy in Gifford's eyes.

"You know I couldn't help it, Giff," she ended.

But he did not speak.

"It wasn't wrong," she said. "You see how it was,—you don't think it was wrong?"

"Yes, I do, Lois," he answered.

"Oh!" she cried; and then, "But you made me!"

"I?" he exclaimed, bewildered.

And then she told him how his acknowledgment of her fault drove her into a desire for atonement. "You know, you think I'm wrong pretty often," she added shyly; and then they mutually forgave each other.

"I suppose I did find a good deal of fault," Gifford admitted, humbly, "but it was always because I loved you."

"Oh!" said Lois.

But there was so much to say they might have talked until noon, except that, as they had neither of them breakfasted, and happiness and morning air are the best sort of tonics, they began to think of going to the rectory. Gifford had quite forgotten the business in Mercer which needed him so early.

"Father won't have mushrooms with his steak to-day," Lois commented, looking ruefully at the little basket, which she still held in her hand.

They stopped at the roadside, walking hand in hand like two children, and looked back at the ruin. "It was a home once," Gifford said, "and there was love there; and so it begins over again for us,—love, and happiness, and all of life."

"Oh, Giff," the girl said softly, "I don't deserve"—

But that, of course, he would not hear. When they came to the rectory gate,—and never did it take so long to walk from East Hill to the rectory,—Gifford said, "Now let's go and tell Helen; we've kept her out of our joy too long." They met her in the cool, dusky hall, and Gifford, taking her hand, said gently, "Be glad, too, Helen!"

Lois had put her arms about her cousin, and without further words Helen knew.

* * * * *

And so Helen Ward's duty came to her, the blessedness and helpfulness of being needed; when Lois went to her new home, Helen would be necessary to her uncle, and to be necessary would save her life from hardness. There need be no thought of occupation now. When Mr. Dale heard the news, he said his congratulations were not only for Lois and Gifford, but for Helen, and after that for Ashurst.

* * * * *

A genuine Ashurst engagement was a great thing, and the friends of the young people received it in their several ways. Dr. Howe was surprised, but disposed to make the best of it. "This is always the way," he said, with his big, jolly laugh: "a man brings up his girls, and then, just as soon as they get old enough to amount to something and be a comfort to him, some other man comes along and carries them off. What? Mind, now, Gifford, don't you go further away than Mercer!"

As for Mrs. Dale, she was delighted. "It is what I have always wanted; it is the one thing I've tried to bring about; and if Lois will do as I tell her, and be guided by a wiser head than her own, I have no doubt she will be very reasonably happy."

"Doesn't a woman expect to be guided by her husband?" Mr. Dale asked.

"When he has sense enough," responded his wife significantly.

Miss Deborah and Miss Ruth were greatly pleased. "Of course they are very young," said Miss Deborah, "but I'll have an eye to the housekeeping until Lois gets older. Fortunately, they'll be so far away from dear Adele, she cannot interfere much. Even with the best intentions in the world, a girl's relations shouldn't meddle."

"They seem very much in love, sister," said Miss Ruth thoughtfully.

"Well, really, dear Ruth," replied her sister, "you are hardly capable of judging of that; but you happen to be right; they are as much attached as one can expect young people to be."

But Miss Ruth, as she stood that night before her cherry-wood dressing-table, its brass rings glimmering in the candle-light, opened Mr. Denner's daguerreotype, and, looking wistfully at the youthful face behind the misty glass, said softly to herself, "Ah, well, it's good to be young."

THE END.