It had been proved that the only key in existence, not counting that kept by the president, was in the possession of Wood, who was filling, for a few days, the place of the cashier—the president's brother—in his absence. It had been shown that Wood was met, at one o'clock of the night in question, crossing the fields toward his home, from the direction of the bank, with a large wicker basket slung over his shoulders, returning, as he had said, from eel-spearing in Harlow's Creek; and there was other circumstantial evidence.

Mr. Clark, the president of the bank, had won the sympathy of every one by the modest way in which, with eye-glasses in hand, he had testified to the particulars of the loss which had left him penniless, and had ruined others whose little all was in his hands. And then, in reply to the formal question, he had testified, amid roars of laughter from the court-room, that it was not he who robbed the safe. At this, even the judge and Wood's lawyer had not restrained a smile.

This had left the guilt with Wood. His lawyer, an inexperienced young attorney—who had done more or less business for the bank, and would hardly have ventured to defend this case but that the president had kindly expressed his entire willingness that he should do so—had, of course, not thought it worthwhile to cross-examine Mr. Clark, and had directed his whole argument against the theory that the safe had been opened with a key, and not by strangers. But he had felt all through that, as a man politely remarked to him when he finished, he was only butting his "head ag'in a stone wall."

And while he was arguing, a jolly-looking old lawyer had written, in the fly-leaf of a law-book on his knee, and passed with a wink to a young man near him who had that very morning been admitted to the bar, these lines:

"When callow Blackstones soar too high, Quit common-sense, and reckless fly, Soon, Icarus-like, they headlong fall, And down come client, case, and all."

The district-attorney had not thought it worth while to expend much strength upon his closing argument; but being a jovial stump-speaker, of a wide reputation within narrow limits, he had not been able to refrain from making merry over Wood's statement that the basket which he had been seen bearing home, on the eventful night, was a basket of eels.

"Fine eels those, gentlemen! We have seen gold-fish and silver-fish, but golden eels are first discovered by this defendant. The apostle, in Holy Writ, caught a fish with a coin in its mouth; but this man leaves the apostle in the dim distance when he finds eels that are all money. No storied fisherman of Bagdad, catching enchanted princes disguised as fishes in the sea, ever hooked such a treasure as this defendant hooked when he hooked that basket of eels! [Rustling appreciation of the pun among the jury.] If a squirming, twisting, winding, wriggling eel, gentlemen, can be said at any given moment to have a back, we may distinguish this new-found species as the green-back eel. It is a common saying that no man can hold an eel and remain a Christian. I should like to have viewed the pious equanimity of this church-member when he laid his hands on that whole bed of eels. In happy, barefoot boyhood, gentlemen, we used to find mud-turtles marked with initials or devices cut in their shells; but what must have been our friend's surprise to find, in the muddy bed of Harlow's Creek, eels marked with a steel-engraving of the landing of Columbus, and the signature of the Register of the Treasury! I hear that a corporation is now being formed by the title of The Harlow's Creek Greenback National Bank-bill Eel-fishing Company, to follow up, with seines and spears, our worthy friend's discovery! I learn that the news of this rich placer has spread to the golden mountains of the West, and that the exhausted intellects which have been reduced to such names for their mines as 'The Tombstone,' 'The Red Dog,' the 'Mrs. E. J. Parkhurst,' are likely now to flood us with prospectuses of the 'Eel Mine,' 'The Flat Eel,' 'The Double Eel,' and then, when they get ready to burst upon confiding friends, 'The Consolidated Eels.'"

It takes but little to make a school or a court-room laugh, and the speech had appeared to give a good deal of amusement to the listeners.

To all?

Did it amuse that man who sat, with folded arms, harsh and rigid, at the dock? Did it divert that white-faced woman, cowering in a corner, listening as in a dream?

* * * * *

The judge now charged the jury briefly. It was unnecessary for him, he said, to recapitulate evidence of so simple a character. The chief question for the jury was as to the credibility of the witnesses. If the witnesses for the prosecution were truthful and were not mistaken, the inference of guilt seemed inevitable; this the defendant's counsel had conceded. The defendant had proved a good reputation; upon that point there was only this to be said: that, while such evidence was entitled to weight, yet, on the other hand, crimes involving a breach of trust could, from their very nature, be committed only by persons whose good reputations secured them positions of trust.

* * * * *

The jury-room had evidently not been furnished by a ring. There was a long table for debate, twelve hard chairs for repose, twelve spittoons for luxury, and a clock.

The jury sat in silence for a few moments, as old Captain Nourse, who had them in his keeping, and eyed them as if he was afraid that he might lose one of them in a crack and be held accountable on his bond, rattled away at the unruly lock. Looking at them then, you would have seen faces all of a New England cast but one. There was a tall, powerful negro called George Washington, a man well known in this county town, to which he had come, as driftwood from the storm of war, in '65. Some of the "boys" had heard him, in a great prayer-meeting in Washington—a city which he always spoke of as his "namesake"—at the time of the great review, say, in his strong voice, with that pathetic quaver in it: "Like as de parched an' weary traveller hangs his harp upon de winder, an' sighs for oysters in de desert, so I longs to res' my soul an' my foot in Mass'chusetts;" and they were so delighted with him that they invited him on the spot to go home with them, and took up a collection to pay his fare, and so he was a public character. As for his occupation—when the census-taker, with a wink to the boys in the store, had asked him what it was, he had said, in that same odd tone: "Putties up glass a little—white-washes a little—" and, when the man had made a show of writing all that down, "preaches a little." He might have said "preaches a big," for you could hear him half a mile away.

The foreman was a retired sea-captain. "Good cap'n—Cap'n Thomas," one of his neighbors had said of him. "Allers gits good ships—never hez to go huntin' 'round for a vessel. But it is astonishin' what differences they is! Now there's Cap'n A. K. P. Bassett, down to the West Harbor. You let it git 'round that Cap'n A. K. P. is goin' off on a Chiny voyage, and you'll see half a dozen old shays to onct, hitched all along his fence of an arternoon, and wimmen inside the house, to git Cap'n A. K. P. to take their boys. But you let Cap'n Thomas give out that he wants boys, and he hez to glean 'em—from the poor-house, and from step-mothers, and where he can: the wimmen knows! Still," he added, "Cap'n Thomas's a good cap'n. I've nothin' to say ag'in him. He's smart!"

* * * * *

"Gentlemen," said the foreman, when the officer, at last, had securely locked them in, "shall we go through the formality of a ballot? If the case were a less serious one, we might have rendered a verdict in our seats."

"What's the use foolin' 'round ballotin'?" said a thick-set butcher. "Ain't we all o' one mind?"

"It is for you to say, gentlemen," said the foreman. "I shouldn't want to have it go abroad that we had not acted formally, if there was any one disposed to cavil."

"Mr. Speaker," said George Washington, rising and standing in the attitude of Webster, "I rises to appoint to order. We took ballast in de prior cases, and why make flesh of one man an' a fowl of another?"

"Very well," said the foreman, a trifle sharply. "'The longest way round is the shortest way home.'"

Twelve slips of paper were handed out, to be indorsed guilty, "for form." They were collected in a hat and the foreman told them over—"just for form." "'Guilty,' 'guilty,' 'guilty,' 'guilty';—wait a minute," he said, "here is a mistake. Here is one 'not guilty'—whose is this?"

There was a pause.

"Whose is it?" said the foreman, sharply.

Eli turned a little red.

"It's mine," he said.

"Do you mean it?" said the foreman.

"Of course I mean it," he answered.

"Whew!" whistled the foreman. "Very well, sir; we'll have an understanding, then. This case is proved to the satisfaction of every man who heard it, I may safely say, but one. Will that one please state the grounds of his opinion?"

"I ain't no talker," said Eli, "but I ain't satisfied he's guilty—that's all."

"Don't you believe the witnesses?"

"Mostly."

"Which one don't you believe?"

"I can't say. I don't believe he's guilty."

"Is there one that you think lied?"

No answer.

"Now it seems to me——" said a third juryman.

"One thing at a time, gentlemen," said the foreman. "Let us wait for an answer from Mr. Smith. Is there any one that you think lied? We will wait, gentlemen, for an answer."

There was a long pause. The trial seemed to Eli Smith to have shifted from the court to this shabby room, and he was now the culprit.

All waited for him; all eyes were fixed upon him.

The clock ticked loud! Eli counted the seconds. He knew the determination of the foreman.

The silence became intense.

"I want to say my say," said a short man in a pea-jacket—a retired San Francisco pilot, named Eldridge. "I entertain no doubt the man is guilty. At the same time, I allow for differences of opinion. I don't know this man that's voted 'not guilty,' but he seems to be a well-meaning man. I don't know his reasons; probably he don't understand the case. I should like to have the foreman tell the evidence over, so as if he don't see it clear, he can ask questions, and we can explain."

"I second de motion," said George Washington.

There was a general rustle of approval.

"I move it," said the pilot, encouraged.

"Very well, Mr. Eldridge," said the foreman. "If there is no objection, I will state the evidence, and if there is any loop-hole, I will trouble Mr. Smith to suggest it as I go along," and he proceeded to give a summary of the testimony, with homely force.

"Now, sir?" he said, when he had finished.

"I move for another ballot," said Mr. Eldridge.

The result was the same. Eli had voted "not guilty."

"Mr. Smith," said the foreman, "this must be settled in some way. This is no child's play. You can't keep eleven men here, trifling with them, giving no pretence of a reason."

"I haven't any reasons, only that I don't believe he's guilty," said Eli. "I'm not goin' to vote a man into states-prison, when I don't believe he done it," and he rose and walked to the window, and looked out. It was low tide. There was a broad stretch of mud in the distance, covered with boats lying over disconsolate. A driving storm had emptied the streets. He beat upon the rain-dashed glass a moment with his fingers, and then he sat down again.

"Well, sir," said the foreman, "this is singular conduct. What do you propose to do?"

Silence.

"I suppose you realize that the rest of us are pretty rapidly forming a conclusion on this matter," said the foreman.

"Come! come!" said Mr. Eldridge; "don't be quite so hard on him, Captain. Now, Mr. Smith," he said, standing up with his hands in his coat-pockets, and looking at Eli, "we know that there often is crooked sticks on juries, that hold out alone—that's to be expected; but they always argue, and stand to it the rest are fools, and all that. Now, all is, we don't see why you don't sort of argue, if you've got reasons satisfactory to you. Come, now," he added, walking up to Eli, and resting one foot on the seat of his chair, "why don't you tell it over? and if we're wrong, I'm ready to join you."

Eli looked up at him.

"Didn't you ever know," he said, "of a man's takin' a cat off, to lose, that his little girl didn't want drownded, and leavin' him ashore, twenty or thirty miles, bee-line, from home, and that cat's bein' back again the next day, purrin' 'round 's if nothin' had happened?"

"Yes," said Mr. Eldridge—"knew of just such a case."

"Very well," said Eli; "how does he find his way home?"

"Don't know," said Mr. Eldridge; "always has been a standing mystery to me."

"Well," said Eli, "mark my words. There's such a thing as arguin', and there's such a thing as knowin' outright; and when you'll tell me how that cat inquires his way home, I'll tell you how I know John Wood ain't guilty."

This made a certain sensation, and Eli's stock went up.

An old, withered man rapped on the table.

"That's so!" he said; "and there's other sing'lar things! How is it that a sea-farin' man, that's dyin' to home, will allers die on the ebb-tide? It never fails, but how does it happen? Tell me that! And there's more ways than one of knowin' things, too!"

"I know that man ain't guilty," said Eli.

"Hark ye!" said a dark old man with a troubled face, rising and pointing his finger toward Eli. "Know, you say? I knew, wunst. I knew that my girl, my only child, was good. One night she went off with a married man that worked in my store, and stole my money—and where is she now?" And then he added, "What I know is, that every man hes his price. I hev mine, and you hev yourn!"

The impugnment of Eli's motives was evident to all.

"'Xcuse me, Mr. Speaker," said George Washington, rising with his hand in his bosom; "as de question is befo' us, I wish to say that de las' bro' mus' have spoken under 'xcitement. Every man don' have his price! An' I hope de bro' will recant—like as de Psalmist goes out o' his way to say 'In my haste I said, All men are liars.' He was a very busy man, de Psalmist—writin' down hymns all day, sharpen'n' his lead-pencil, bossin' 'roun' de choir—callin' Selah! Well, bro'n an' sisters"—both arms going out, and his voice going up—"one day, seems like, he was in gre't haste—got to finish a psalm for a monthly concert, or such—and some man incorrupted him, and lied; and bein' in gre't haste—and a little old Adam in him—he says, right off, quick: 'All men are liars!' But see—when he gets a little time to set back and meditate, he says: 'Dis won' do—dere's Moses, an' Job, an' Paul—dey ain't liars!' An' den he don' sneak out, and 'low he said, 'All men is lions,' or such. No! de Psalmist ain't no such man; but he owns up, an' 'xplains: 'In my haste,' he says, 'I said it.'"

The foreman rose and rapped.

"I await a motion," said he, "if our friend will allow me the privilege of speaking."

Mr. Washington calmly bowed.

Then the foreman, when nobody seemed disposed to move, speaking slowly, at first, and piece-meal, alternating language with smoke, gradually edged into the current of the evidence, and ended by going all over it again, with fresh force and point. His cigar glowed and chilled in the darkening room as he talked.

"Now," he said, when he had drawn all the threads together to the point of guilt, "what are we going to do upon this evidence?"

"I'll tell you something," said Eli. "I didn't want to say it because I know what you'll all think, but I'll tell you, all the same."

"Ah!" said the foreman.

Eli stood up and faced the others.

"'Most all o' you know what our Bar is in a south-east gale. They ain't a man here that 'uld dare to try and cross it when the sea's breakin' on it. The man that says he would, lies!" And he looked at the foreman, and waited a moment.

"When my wife took sick, and I stopped goin' to sea, two year ago, and took up boat-fishin', I didn't know half as much about the coast as the young boys do, and one afternoon it was blowin' a gale, and we was all hands comin' in, and passin' along the Bar to go sheer 'round it to the west'ard, and Captain Fred Cook—he's short-sighted—got on to the Bar before he knew it, and then he had to go ahead, whether or no; and I was right after him, and I s'posed he knew, and I followed him. Well, he was floated over, as luck was, all right; but when I'd just got on the Bar, a roller dropped back and let my bowsprit down into the sand, and then come up quicker'n lightnin' and shouldered the boat over, t'other end first, and slung me into the water; and when I come up, I see somethin' black, and there was John Wood's boat runnin' by me before the wind with a rush—and 'fore I knew an'thing he had me by the hair by one hand and in his boat, and we was over the Bar. Now, I tell you, a man that looks the way I saw him look when I come over the gunwale, face up, don't go 'round breakin' in and hookin' things. He hadn't one chance in five, and he was a married man, too, with small children. And what's more," he added, incautiously, "he didn't stop there. When he found out, this last spring, that I was goin' to lose my place, he lent me money enough to pay the interest that was overdue on the mortgage, of his own acord."

And he stopped suddenly.

"You have certainly explained yourself," said the foreman. "I think we understand you distinctly."

"There isn't one word of truth in that idea," said Eli, flushing up, "and you know it. I've paid him back every cent. I know him better'n any of you, that's all, and when I know he ain't guilty, I won't say he is; and I can set here as long as any other man."

"Lively times some folks'll hev, when they go home," said a spare tin-peddler, stroking his long yellow goatee. "Go into the store: nobody speak to you; go to cattle-show: everybody follow you 'round; go to the wharf: nobody weigh your fish; go to buy seed-cakes at the cart: baker won't give no tick."

"How much does it cost, Mr. Foreman," said the butcher, "for a man 't's obliged to leave town, to move a family out West? I only ask for information. I have known a case where a man had to leave—couldn't live there no longer—wa'n't wanted."

There was a knock. An officer, sent by the judge, inquired whether the jury were likely soon to agree.

"It rests with you, sir," said the foreman, looking at Eli.

But Eli sat doggedly with his hands in his pockets, and did not look up or speak.

"Say to the judge that I cannot tell," said the foreman.

It was eight o'clock when the officer returned, with orders to take the jury across the street to the hotel, to supper. They went out in pairs, except that the juryman who was left to fall in with Eli made three with the file ahead, and left Eli to walk alone. This was noticed by the by standers. At the hotel, Eli could not eat a mouthful. He was seated at one end of the table, and was left entirely out of the conversation. When the jury were escorted back to the court house, rumors had evidently begun to arise from his having walked alone, for there was quite a little crowd at the hotel-door, to see them. They went as before: four pairs, a file of three, and Eli alone. Then the spectators understood it.

* * * * *

When the jury were locked into their room again for the night, Mr. Eldridge sat down by Eli, and lit his pipe.

"I understand," he said, "just how you feel. Now, between you and me, there was a good-hearted fellow that kept me out of a bad mess once. I've never told anybody just what it was, and I don't mean to tell you now, but it brought my blood up standing, to find how near I'd come to putting a fine steamer and two hundred and forty passengers under water. Well, one day, a year or so after that, this man had a chance to get a good ship, only there was some talk against him, that he drank a little. Well, the owners told him they wanted to see me, and he come to me, and says he, 'Mr. Eldridge, I hope you'll speak a good word for me; if you do, I'll get the ship, but if they refuse me this one, I'm dished everywhere.' Well, the owners put me the square question, and I had to tell 'em. Well, I met him that afternoon on Sacramento Street, as white as a sheet, and he wouldn't speak to me, but passed right by, and that night he went and shipped before the mast. That's the last I ever heard of him. But I had to do it.

"Now," he added, "this man's been good to you; but the case is proved, and you ought to vote with the rest of us."

"It ain't proved," said Eli. "The judge said that if any man had a reasonable doubt, he ought to hold out. Now, I ain't convinced."

"Well, that's easy said," replied Mr. Eldridge, a little hotly, and he arose, and left him.

The jurymen broke up into little knots, tilted their chairs back, and settled into the easiest positions that their cramped quarters allowed. Most of them lit their pipes; the captain, and one or two whom he honored, smoked fragrant cigars, and the room was soon filled with a dense cloud.

Eli sat alone by the window.

"Sometimes sell two at one house," said a lank book-agent, arousing himself from a reverie; "once sold three."

"I think the Early Rose is about as profitable as any," said a little farmer, with a large circular beard. "I used to favor Jacobs's Seedling, but they haven't done so well with me of late years."

"Sometimes," said the book-agent, picking his teeth with a quill, "you'll go to a house, and they'll say they can't be induced to buy a book of any kind, historical, fictitious, or religious; but you just keep on talking, and show the pictures—'Grant in Boyhood,' 'Grant a Tanner,' 'Grant at Head-quarters,' 'Grant in the White House,' 'Grant before Queen Victoria,' and they warm up, I tell you, and not infrequently buy."

"Do you sell de 'Illustrated Bible,'" asked Washington, "wid de Hypocrypha?"

"No; I have a more popular treatise—the 'Illustrated History of the Bible.' Greater variety. Brings in the surrounding nations, in costume. Cloth, three dollars; sheep, three-fifty; half calf, five-seventy-five, full morocco, gilt edges, seven-fifty. Six hundred and seven illustrations on wood and steel. Three different engravings of Abraham alone. Four of Noah—'Noah before the Flood,' 'Noah Building the Ark,' 'Noah Welcoming the Dove,' 'Noah on Ararat.' Steel engraving of Ezekiel's Wheel, explaining prophecy. Jonah under the gourd, Nineveh in the distance."

Mr. Eldridge and Captain Thomas had drifted into a discussion of harbors, and the captain had drawn his chair up to the table, and, with a cigar in his mouth, was explaining an ingeniously constructed foreign harbor. He was making a rough sketch, with a pen.

"Here is north," he said; "here is the coast-line; here are the flats; here are the sluice-gates; they store the water here, in——"

Some of the younger men had their heads together, in a corner, about the tin-peddler, who was telling stories of people he had met in his journeys, which brought out repeated bursts of laughter.

In the corner farthest from Eli, a delicate-looking man began to tell the butcher about Eli's wife.

"Twelve years ago this fall," he said, "I taught district-school in the parish where she lived. She was about fourteen then. Her father was a poor farmer, without any faculty. Her mother was dead, and she kept house. I stayed there one week, boarding 'round."

"Prob'ly didn't git not much of any fresh meat that week," suggested the butcher.

"She never said much, but it used to divert me to see her order around her big brothers, just as if she was their mother. She and I got to be great friends; but she was a queer piece. One day at school, the girls in her row were communicating, and annoying me, while the third class was reciting in 'First Steps in Numbers,' and I was so incensed that I called Lizzie—that's her name—right out, and had her stand up for twenty minutes. She was a shy little thing, and set great store by perfect marks. I saw that she was troubled a good deal, to have all of them looking and laughing at her. But she stood there, with her hands folded behind her, and not a smile or a word."

"Look out for a sullen cow," said the butcher.

"I felt afraid I had been too hasty with her, and I was rather sorry I had been so decided—although, to be sure, she didn't pretend to deny that she had been communicating."

"Of course," said the butcher: "no use lyin' when you're caught in the act."

"Well, after school, she stayed at her desk, fixing her dinner-pail, and putting her books in a strap, and all that, till all the rest had gone, and then she came up to my desk, where I was correcting compositions."

"Now for music!" said the butcher.

"She had been crying a little. Well, she looked straight in my face, and said she, 'Mr. Pollard, I just wanted to say to you that I wasn't doing anything at all when you called me up;' and off she went. Now, that was just like her—too proud to say a word before the school."

But here his listener's attention was diverted by the voice of the book-agent:

"The very best Bible for teachers, of course, is the limp-cover, protected edges, full Levant morocco, Oxford, silk-sewed, kid-lined, Bishop's Divinity Circuit, with concordance, maps of the Holy Land, weights, measures, and money-tables of the Jews. Nothing like having a really——"

"And so," said the captain, moving back his chair, "they let on the whole head of water, and scour out the channel to a T."

And then he rapped upon the table.

"Gentlemen," he said, "please draw your chairs up, and let us take another ballot."

The count resulted as before. The foreman muttered something which had a scriptural sound.

In a few moments, he drew Mr. Eldridge and two others aside. "Gentlemen," he said to them, "I shall quietly divide the jury into watches, under your charge: ten can sleep, while one wakes to keep Mr. Smith discussing the question. I don't propose to have the night wasted."

And, by one man or another, Eli was kept awake.

* * * * *

"I don't see," said the book-agent, "why you should feel obliged to stick it out any longer. Of course, you are under obligations. But you've done more than enough already, so as that he can't complain of you, and if you give in now, everybody'll give you credit for trying to save your friend, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, for giving in to the evidence. So you'll get credit both ways."

An hour later, the tin-peddler came on duty. He had not followed closely the story about John Wood's loan, and had got it a little awry.

"Now, how foolish you be," he said, in a confidential tone. "Can't you see that if you cave in now, after stan'in' out nine hours"—and he looked at a silver watch with a brass chain, and stroked his goatee—"nine hours and twenty-seven minutes—that you've made jest rumpus enough so as't he won't dare to foreclose on you, for fear they'll say you went back on a trade. On t'other hand, if you hold clear out, he'll turn you out-o'-doors to-morrow, for a blind, so 's to look as if there wa'n't no trade between you. Once he gits off, he won't know Joseph, you bet! That's what I'd do," he added, with a sly laugh. "Take your uncle's advice."

"The only trouble with that," said Eli, shortly, "is that I don't owe him anything."

"Oh," said the peddler; "that makes a difference. I understood you did."

Three o'clock came, and brought Mr. Eldridge. He found Eli worn out with excitement.

"Now I don't judge you the way the others do," said Mr. Eldridge, in a low tone, with his hand on Eli's knee. "I know, as I told you, just the way you feel. But we can't help such things. Suppose, now, that I had kept dark, and allowed to the owners that that man was always sober, and I had heard, six months after, of thirty or forty men going to the bottom because the captain was a little off his base; and then to think of their wives and children at home. We have to do some hard things; but I say, do the square thing, and let her slide."

"But I can't believe he's guilty," said Eli.

"But don't you allow," said Mr. Eldridge, "that eleven men are more sure to hit it right than one man?"

"Yes," said Eli, reluctantly, "as a general thing."

"Well, there's always got to be some give to a jury, just as in everything else, and you ought to lay right down on the rest of us. It isn't as if we were at all squirmish. Now, you know that if you hold out, he'll be tried again."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Got to be—no other way," said Mr Eldridge. "Now, the next time, there won't be anybody like you to stand out, and the judge'll know of this scrape, and he'll just sock it to him."

Eli turned uneasily in his chair.

"And then it won't be understood in your place, and folks'll turn against you every way, and, what's worse, let you alone."

"I can stand it," said Eli, angrily. "Let 'em do as they like. They can't kill me."

"They can kill your wife and break down your children," said Mr. Eldridge. "Women and children can't stand it. Now there's that man they were speaking of; he lived down my way. He sued a poor, shiftless fellow that had come from Pennsylvania to his daughter's funeral, and had him arrested and taken off, crying, just before the funeral begun—after they'd even set the flowers on the coffin; and nobody'd speak to him after that—they just let him alone; and after a while his wife took sick of it—she was a nice, kindly woman—and she had sort of hysterics, and, finally, he moved off West. And 'twasn't long before the woman died. Now, you can't undertake to do different from everybody else."

"Well," said Eli; "I know I wish it was done with."

Mr. Eldridge stretched his arms and yawned. Then he began to walk up and down, and hum, out of tune. Then he stopped at Captain Thomas's chair.

"Suppose we try a ballot," he said. "He seems to give a little."

In a moment the foreman rapped.

"It is time we were taking another ballot, gentlemen," he said.

The sleepers rose, grumbling, from uneasy dreams.

"I will write 'guilty' on twelve ballots," said the foreman, "and if any one desires to write in 'not,' of course he can."

When the hat came to Eli, he took one of the ballots and held it in his hand a moment; and then he laid it on the table. There was a general murmur. The picture which Mr. Eldridge had drawn loomed up before him. But with a hasty hand he wrote in "not," dropped in the ballot, and going back to his chair by the window, sat down.

There was a cold wave of silence.

Then Eli suddenly walked up to the foreman and faced him.

"Now," he said, "we'll stop. The very next turn breaks ground. If you, or any other man that you set on, tries to talk to me when I don't want to hear, to worry me to death—look out!"

How the long hours wore on! How easy, sometimes, to resist an open pressure, and how hard, with the resistance gone, to fight, as one that beats the air! How the prospect of a whole hostile town loomed up, in a mirage, before Eli! And then the picture rose before him of a long, stately bark, now building, whose owner had asked him yesterday to be first mate. And if his wife were only well, and he were only free from this night's trouble, how soon, upon the long, green waves, he could begin to redeem his little home!

And then came Mr. Eldridge, kind and friendly, to have another little chat.

* * * * *

Morning came, cold and drizzly. An officer knocked at the door, and called out, "Breakfast." And, in a moment, unwashed, and all uncombed, except the tin-peddler, who always carried a beard-comb in his pocket, they were marched across the street to the hotel.

There were a number of men on the piazza waiting to see them—jurymen, witnesses, and the accused himself, for he was on bail. He had seen the procession the night before, and, like the others, had read its meaning.

"Eli knows I wouldn't do it," he had said to himself, "and he's going to hang out, sure."

The jury began to turn from the court-house door. Everybody looked. A file of two men, another file, another, another; would there come three men, and then one? No; Eli no longer walked alone.

Everybody looked at Wood; he turned sharply away.

But this time the order of march in fact showed nothing, one way or the other. It only meant that the judge, who had happened to see the jury the night before returning from their supper, had sent for the high sheriff in some temper—for judges are human—and had vigorously intimated that if that statesman did not look after his fool of a deputy, who let a jury parade secrets to the public view, he would——!

* * * * *

The jury were in their room again. At nine o'clock came a rap, and a summons from the court.

The prosecuting attorney was speaking with the judge when they went in. In a moment he took his seat.

"John Wood!" called out the clerk, and the defendant arose. His attorney was not there.

"Mr. Foreman!" said the judge, rising. The jury arose. The silence of the crowded court-room was intense.

"Before the clerk asks you for a verdict, gentlemen," said the judge, "I have something of the first importance to say to you, which has but this moment come to my knowledge."

Eli changed color, and the whole court-room looked at him.

"There were some most singular rumors, after the case was given to you, gentlemen, to the effect that there had been in this cause a criminal abuse of justice. It is painful to suspect, and shocking to know, that courts and juries are liable ever to suffer by such unprincipled practices. After ten years upon the bench, I never witness a conviction of crime without pain; but that pain is light, compared with the distress of knowing of a wilful perversion of justice. It is a relief to me to be able to say to you that such instances are, in my judgment, exceedingly rare, and—so keen is the awful searching power of truth—are almost invariably discovered."

The foreman touched his neighbor with his elbow. Eli folded his arms.

"As I said," continued the judge, "there were most singular rumors. During the evening and the night, rumor, as is often the case, led to evidence, and evidence has led to confession and to certainty. And the district attorney now desires me to say to you that the chief officer of the bank—who held the second key to the safe—is now under arrest for a heavy defalcation, which a sham robbery was to conceal, and that you may find the prisoner at the bar—not guilty. I congratulate you, gentlemen, that you had not rendered an adverse verdict."

"Your Honor!" said Eli; and he cleared his throat; "I desire it to be known that, even as the case stood last night, this jury had not agreed to convict, and never would have!"

There was a hush, while a loud scratching pen indorsed the record of acquittal. Then Wood walked down to the jury-box and took Eli's hand.

"Just what I told my wife all through," he said. "I knew you'd hang out!"

* * * * *

Eli's jury was excused for the rest of the day, and by noon he was in his own village, relieved, too, of his most pressing burden: for George Cahoon had met him on the road, and told him that he was not going to the West, after all, for the present, and should not need his money. But, as he turned the bend of the road and neared his house, he felt a rising fear that some disturbing rumor might have reached his wife about his action on the jury. And, to his distress and amazement, there she was, sitting in a chair at the door.

"Lizzie!" he said, "what does this mean? Are you crazy?"

"I'll tell you what it means," she said, as she stood up with a little smile and clasped her hands behind her. "This morning, it got around and came to me that you was standing out all alone for John Wood, and that the talk was that they'd be down on you, and drive you out of town, and that everybody pitied me—pitied me! And when I heard that, I thought I'd see! And my strength seemed to come all back, and I got right up, and dressed myself. And what's more, I'm going to get well now!"

And she did.



YOUNG STRONG OF "THE CLARION."

BY MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN.

Overland Monthly, September, 1884.

If you had asked any resident of Green's Ferry some eight years ago—say, in '76—who were the leading men of his town, he would doubtless have begun:

"Well, there's Judge Garvey, of course. Then there's Uncle Billy Green, who built the first shanty there in '49, and young Strong of 'The Clarion'—"

However he might continue his enumeration, it would certainly have been as above for the first three names. One you would have recognized, if you had been following State politics closely for some years; for Judge Garvey was very regularly chosen State senator in his district, and had held the barren honor of presidential elector the last time his party carried the State. In '76, some of the papers were urging his nomination for Congress, and politicians thought his chance of such a nomination increasing. It has not turned out so; his name has quite dropped out of the papers, and it is said he does not certainly control his own county now; but at that time he was the most potent political influence in three counties. What he influenced them to, I never clearly understood, for I cannot recall that I ever heard his name mentioned in connection with any measure or opinion.

A file of "The Clarion" during the four years that young Strong was editor would doubtless throw light on the matter. "The Clarion" was at this time a sort of voice crying in the wilderness about Reform, which was a very new idea, indeed, to its readers. Garvey did not like the paper, and young Strong disliked Garvey very much; but the two men had kept on fairly good terms—not so rigid good terms, of course, as to forbid their expressing to third parties the frankest contempt for each other. The Judge had here the advantage, for Strong despised him indignantly, as a knave, while he despised Strong—or said he did—pityingly, as a fool. He must, however, have at bottom honored the young fellow with some serious antipathy; for it was after all no laughing matter that a boy of twenty-five should come into "his Gaul, which he had conquered by arms," and filch away his home paper from under his very eyes. Moreover, though people read the editorials, laughed, and voted with the Judge just the same—they still did read them. However, Judge Garvey certainly was more civil to Strong than Strong was to him.

As for Uncle Billy Green, his rank was due not only to his connection with the "first shanty" (a house of entertainment at the point where a trail turned from the river toward the mines), but to his having remained steadily on the spot ever since, putting up a larger building at intervals as the settlement gathered around him, until now he was proprietor of the American Eagle Hotel, a house of goodly dimensions and generous equipment—billiard-room, bowling alley, shooting-gallery. Nor did Uncle Billy Green own and conduct this house in a purely business spirit; a more modest one would have been more profitable; he liked to "do that much for the town." A man by the name of Gulliver had established the old rope-ferry, before the day of bridges, but it was naturally called Green's Ferry, being a ferry at Green's place. He had been of an undoubted valor in the Indian fights of early days, was full of reminiscences, had no personal objections to anybody or anything, and had long given over to Judge Garvey the trouble of forming his opinions.

Judge Garvey and young Strong were pretty sure to be put upon such boards or committees as the local affairs of the small town demanded; and in local matters they proved to pull together fairly well, however at odds they were politically. But in the end it was not over politics, but over the district school, that they fell out squarely. They were both trustees, and as Green was the third, the board seemed in little danger from any too radical reforming tendencies young Strong might be guilty of, and the Judge had no thought of danger as he walked down to "The Clarion" office, a breathless September afternoon, a couple of days before the school should open.

He found young Strong in his editorial room. This was a corner of the printing-office, fenced off by a great screen pasted over with old exchanges. Behind this, Strong sat at his table, correcting proof energetically. It was evident that he took the editing of this little four-page weekly rather seriously—but, then, a man must needs be business-like to produce even four pages weekly with one assistant, and Strong had to economize time enough from strictly editorial functions to do a goodly share of type-setting and the rest of the mechanics of the office.

"I beg your pardon for interrupting you, Mr. Strong," said the Judge. "I perceive you are arduously occupied. But it becomes necessary to confer with you with regard to the school-teacher."

The Judge was a tall and vigorously built man—a little red-faced, but good-looking, if one did not insist on too fine a definiteness of outline. He spoke habitually with a certain inflation of manner, and tried to form himself upon a Southern type that was pretty abundant in our politics some years earlier. He was, however, a native of rural New York, early transplanted to California.

Strong turned in his chair, and sitting sidewise, rested his elbow on the proof-sheets, holding the pencil still in his fingers.

"Well?" he said. "I thought everything was settled."

"Assuredly." Judge Garvey rested his folded arms upon the pile of books stacked at the rear of the table, and leaned over them in a friendly way. "Mr. Coakley is to arrive Sunday evening, and will begin the term on Monday morning, to the great satisfaction, I can guarantee, of all concerned. A slight and merely temporary embarrassment has arisen, with respect to which a few words will make it all right. In point of fact, the young woman with whom we previously held correspondence—who, you will remember, broke her engagement with us to take a more advantageous position—is here."

The Judge stopped for question or comment, but as Strong waited for explanation, he went on:

"She has, it appears, failed after all to secure that, and come here expecting to fall back upon our school, not having heard that it was engaged."

"Well, that's unfortunate for her," said Strong, "but you can't ship Coakley now."

"Your views coincide exactly with my own, my dear sir." The Judge straightened up with some relief. "I have only to ask, then, for a note to the lady to that effect, that my own explanation already given may be corroborated."

Strong began to look alert and suspicious at this.

"Views coincide?" he said. "What two views could there be? What does she say brought her here?"

"She's got an idea that she's got first claim on the place," said the Judge, plumping suddenly into colloquial diction. He had a trick of doing so when he got down to business. It would have had something the effect of candid confession, produced by a maiden's plain-hair days alternated with her waved-hair days, had not the grandiloquence of tone and manner become so far second nature that it ran through both his dialects, and lessened the contrast. "You can't always make a woman see sense."

Strong looked suspiciously at him a few seconds. "Well, I'll go see her this evening," he said. "Where's she staying?"

"That is a totally superfluous tax on your time, my dear Strong," said the Judge, leaning persuasively across the books again. "I have here a mere formal line, stating that Coakley is the regularly engaged teacher of the school, and will begin next Monday; your signature to it—Green's and mine are already there—will be all that is necessary." He pushed pen and ink toward Strong with his exaggerated air of courtesy.

"Oh, I'm not going to sign things that way, you know. I'll go see her." He turned and drew his proof-sheets to him with an air of dismissal.

The Judge stood up very straight, expanded his chest, and folded his arms according to his conception of the Virginian manner. "Am I to understand, sir, that you question my veracity?"

"I don't question anything," said the young man, impatiently. "I'll know what I'm talking about when I've seen her."

"Permit me to suggest, sir"—the Judge was approaching his platform manner—"permit me to suggest, sir, that Mr. Green and myself constitute a majority of the board, and Mr. Green, sir—Uncle Billy Green—has confidence in my honor, and will sustain my action, whatever line you may be persuaded to adopt."

"Oh, as to that," said Strong, exaggerating his crispness of manner in protest against the Judge's staginess, "I'm clerk of the board, and you can't hold a legal meeting nor pay a salary without me. What's the reason you don't want me to see her?"

Judge Garvey unfolded his arms, fell back a step, and dropped easily into the sonorous declamation that made the stalwart Judge no inconspicuous figure on the floor of the Legislature. The newspapers, of course, were responsible for his language—as for the rest of his education; but such as it was, he used it fluently, and the declamatory manner was, to his constituency, quite an essential of eloquence—the prime difference, in fact, between oratory and plain talking.

"You cast aspersions upon my honor, sir. Through me you insult the people of Green's Ferry—of this county—of this district—the enlightened and honorable constituency who it is my proud honor to represent. I sco-r-n to answer your insinuations, sir. They will be hurled back upon yourself by the united voice and righteous indignation of my justly aroused fellow-townsmen, by the voters of this noble district—I may say, by the whole State of California—to which I am not unknown, sir."

Half-a-dozen of the justly aroused fellow-townsmen were straggling in from the street, for in Green's Ferry a sprinkling of the citizens spend the warm afternoons sitting in absolute tranquillity on boxes and barrels here and there, under the awnings of the several business blocks; and the knowledge that a row was at last on between Judge Garvey and young Strong reached them at the first peal. The Judge, alive to the increase of his audience, raised his voice a shade, and went on with a curious mixture of complacency and genuine wrath.

"Is it lack of confidence that has sent me to represent my honorable constituency in the legislative halls of California, Mr. Strong? Have I received that proud token of esteem only to be insulted by one whose obscurity is his only shield; who, with unknown record, with no recommendation save his own overwhelming self-esteem, comes among us to sow dissent in peaceful counsels, and draw scorn and contempt upon his own head by impotent and futile attacks upon those whom he is powerless to harm?"

This rounded the climax well, so the Judge only added: "The call you propose, sir, I shall regard as a direct insult to myself," and strode dramatically from the room.

The papered screen went crashing to the floor behind him. The justly aroused fellow-townsmen looked after him, laughing but admiring.

"Laid you out, didn't he, Strong?"

"That's the way he does it at Sacramento. Oh, the Judge is a real orator—there's no doubt of that."

"He don't have to make his speech up before-hand. No, sir, right where he is, any time of day, he just turns the faucet, and there it comes."

"What was the row, anyway, Strong?"

"I don't know myself; something about a teacher—he began to bluster all of a sudden." Strong walked over to the screen, picked it up, set it straight along a crack with intense precision, and went back to his seat. "Drunk, isn't he? I haven't heard him take the stump that way since election. He's always made rather a point of not quarrelling with me, too."

"Oh, he's no drunker'n usual," answered with candor a fellow-townsman. "The Judge ain't really himself until he's a little off. He didn't blow so without some reason; don't you fool yourself—not if I know the man."

"Well, if he's got any game he must have come to his last chance in it, to try bullying on me," said Strong; and then another of the group asked:

"What row could there be about a teacher, Strong? Thought you'd given him his man."

The pencil rolled from the edge of the table across the floor at Strong's movement of attention. "Coakley?—what of him?"

The man began to laugh, and one or two others joined in. One of them said a little offensively: "Pretty good on you, youngster! You took too big a contract for your age when you undertook to keep up with Judge Garvey. He'll give you odds and take you in, every time."

Strong reddened a little, but waited to be answered with very fair composure.

"Didn't you really know, Strong? The Judge scored one on you that time, then. Why, he's been Garvey's man in Sierra Township one or two elections now. Used to be a Millerite preacher, before your day, but he broke down at that. Good hand in county politics, but he's always completely out of business between times. Why you remember him, Strong—he was round with the Judge election times—cross-eyed fellow, with black siders."

"That fellow? Why, he can't spell straight! The way of it was, Judge Garvey told us only Tuesday that the teacher we'd got—first-rate certificates—had backed out; and we couldn't put off beginning school any longer, nor hear of any teacher to be had; so when he produced this man, we had really no choice. I suppose I needn't ask where he got his certificates."

"No—Garvey's solid with this county board and superintendent."

"Disgraceful!" said Strong; whereat all laughed, except one who had lost a ranch a few years before during business dealings with the Judge.

"Oh, he's a scamp—I wouldn't trust him out of sight with his baby's silver mug," said this man, with feeling. The rest laughed again. In Green's Ferry a certain easy-going good-heartedness is required by the public conscience, rather than decalogue virtues. Garvey liked sharp practice—all right; if you were yourself hurt, you would naturally begin to vote against him; otherwise, it was none of your business, except as successful rascality had a claim on your admiration. Young Strong liked to write furious reform editorials—all right; if you were the one hit, you would swear at Strong and stop your subscription until a hit on some one else made you renew it; otherwise, it was none of your business and lively reading. They leaned against the wall and desk, and began with perfect good-nature to tell stories of the Judge. "R'member the time he got that Mexican ranch? Fellow thought it was a bill of sale for thirty acres he was signing, and it was three hundred."

"Best thing was when he made old man Meeker believe he was dying, and deed over a good fifty thousand dollars in stock to his daughter—and married the girl, sir, before the old fellow found he was good for twenty years more. He made the air smell of brimstone the rest of his life if you mentioned Garvey to him! Drowned in a ford a winter or two later, after all. Used to live in a little shanty up Indian Crick and raise potatoes—and Garvey sent him a cow—cheekiest thing!"

Strong turned sharply away from the laugh that followed, and went on with his work, while they slowly dispersed. He worked on savagely with brows drawn together. "It isn't so much the existence of scoundrels like Garvey that gets me," he was saying to himself, "as the way the whole crowd of them take him." He stopped to read over the words he was correcting—they were editorial:

"Was ever folly greater than this of our community, in dropping everything else to run after money. For what do you expect to do with it when you get it? Better eating, and drinking, and the privilege of being toadied to by those who want to make something out of you—what more can you get out of money, if you have never made anything of yourself? Just as a pig, if he might take his choice whether he would be turned into a man or would be moved into a cosier sty, with more unbounded swill, would doubtless choose the sty!"

"My broom against the ocean," he said; but he went on correcting doggedly.

And, not to conceal from you what was in reality the most significant fact about Will Strong—the key to about everything he thought and did—he was mentally submitting this editorial, as he had submitted every other he had written, to the test of the probable opinion of a young woman he had not seen nor heard from for two years, but who nevertheless constituted to his mind the chief motive for existence—if not the chief and sufficient explanation of the human race's having been created at all. You must realize, before trying to understand his story, that Will Strong was really a very romantic young man indeed, though he pretended to Green's Ferry that he was not.

Outside the screen, the strips of sun through the western window and open door lengthened across the meagre collection of dusty fonts of type, the small press, the piles of papers. The black-fingered, red-haired boy setting type among them reflected that it must be nearly dinner-time, and turned to see how far in the hot strips had crept—turned, and stood staring; for he met squarely the inquiring look of a pair of clear eyes, and became aware of a lady in the door-way.

It is probable that Jim had never dreamed in his life of any other social distinction than that between rich and poor, notorious and obscure, nor was he a lad of perceptions; yet he knew at once that this was a very unusual sort of lady for Green's Ferry. If he had been a man of the social world he would have known that she was a gentlewoman of notably high-bred appearance. She glanced, not without dismay, about the shabby work-room, as if she felt herself where she had no business to be. Nevertheless, she came forward frankly, and asked in the friendly way of one whose station needs no asserting:

"Mr. Strong?—one of the school-board?—Is he here?"

"Yes'm." The boy made no motion, but stood blankly staring.

"May I see him, please?"

"Lady to see you, Mr. Strong," shouted Jim, standing still.

In the few seconds before Strong emerged, the lady stood her ground in the middle of the floor, with some appearance of anxiety. She was certainly a very noticeable person, and came nearer to warranting that strong word "beautiful" than falls often to the lot of woman. It was a matter of outline more than color, however, for she had not much of that about her—brown hair, blue-gray eyes, skin of a warm paleness. All this low coloring, however, was so perfect of its sort, that it gave something the effect of a fine etching—a rich distinctness attained by shades, not colors. Instead of being outshone by more brilliant-hued women, Miss Northrop had always had the effect of making them look chromo-like. So, too, a certain nobility and self-forgetfulness of manner made the more elaborate manners of others seem the crude device of inferiority. It was a good deal due to her eyes; she had most wonderful eyes, and I doubt if any man or many women ever met them in a full look without feeling a little stir of pulse—whether it was in the lashes, or in the sweet straightforwardness of look, utterly devoid of coquetry, or in the depth of the gray, or in what; certain it is that no one ever saw Miss Northrop without talking of her beautiful eyes.

"A lady to see him?" The word in Green's Ferry defined only the sex. Some one with a notice of a flock of sheep for sale, which she wanted to get in as a local; or with an ill-spelled poem; or—by George, yes—that school-mistress. Lucky she had not met Garvey there—poor girl! Strong laid his pencil down, and came out from behind the screen good-naturedly enough—and stopped short. What a thing to happen to a man, that he should live and move and have his being for a dozen years in the thought of one woman, should count a world worth living in because she was somewhere on it, and a pitiful human race worth working for because they were her fellow-creatures—and should come out from behind his screen, and see her before his eyes—on his dingy work-room floor—out of her four thousand miles' distance!

They had been four years schoolmates in a New England High School. Will was a farmer's lad, from an outlying, rocky village, who worked for his board while he went to school. He came of an unschooled, hard-working, God-fearing yeoman race. Winifred could look up every line of her descent, through vista of governors, college-presidents, and ministers, back to Colonial aristocracy and gentry beyond sea. Her great-grandfathers had carried swords in Revolutionary battles, where Will's had followed with muskets. Winifred herself was one of those flowers into which excellent family trees break occasionally—flowers so lovely that no excellence of the tree seems enough to account for them. If she had any core of aristocratic coldness, it was so overlaid by a sweet humaneness, a frank generosity of impulse, that no one would have known it. If she had been a man, to have a valet, she would have been a hero to him.

Even in the democracy of school, Will Strong knew well enough the difference between his shy awkwardness and her pleasant frankness; and knew that though he could meet school requirements about as well as she, yet his mental range was crude and narrow beside hers; and any one could see that in the town where he was an unknown boy she was an important young lady. These things would not have counted for much had not some mediaeval follower of some exiled king dropped down into the boy's temperament that passion of self-abasing loyalty that is rather an anachronism in our democratic days. They had been on terms of friendliness rather than friendship in school, but that was due more to his shyness than anything else. She had really given to him more opportunities than to most of her schoolmates; she liked his integrity and earnestness.

He had looked to college as the natural door between his world and hers; after four years at New Haven he might seek her acquaintance without audacity. To that end he had laboriously accumulated money, and had even passed his matriculation, when his father's death made him indispensable on the poor little farm. Since then he had doggedly plodded alone through the college curriculum, but without finding in it the mysterious pass-word that he had expected into the intellectual aristocracy. Some two years before, his mother's death and the growing up of younger brothers had left him free to seek his fortune in California. At twenty-seven he had lost his fresh look and boyish shyness; he looked older than he was, but he was really very youthful, and believed in all sorts of abstractions beginning with capitals. His mental furniture, being obtained from books, not people, was not quite in the style of the present decade, and he read Carlyle and Emerson more than Herbert Spencer. His creed had, therefore, quite transcendentalism enough to accommodate without incongruity his little private deification.

Once in every year or two, as opportunity took him near her home, he had called on her, and had multiplied each call mightily by thinking of it before and after. He had also kept up a stupid correspondence with a schoolmate who had lived in the same town with her, for the chance of her name being mentioned. Within a couple of years, however, she had lost her father and gone to relatives in New York, so he had lost exact knowledge even of her whereabouts.

She spoke before he had found his voice—without an instant's hesitation, indeed. "Oh, Will Strong!" she cried, stepping quickly toward him and holding out her hand. "I hoped it was you!"

He took the offered hand, and said to himself that his own was consecrated by the touch to clean deeds forever. He would not have known how to address her, but he followed her leading.

"It is Winifred Northrop!" he said. "What is it? Can I do something for you?"

"You are school-committee man, are you not?" Anxiety, relief, and trust mingled in her voice.

"Trustee—yes. Why," he cried, "it isn't possible that you are the lady!"

She laughed. "I suppose the lady must be I."

He did not smile. He even lost color with wrath. "Garvey has dared to play you some trick!—I did not dream—" he went on, eagerly, "Garvey kept the letters in his hands, and bungled over the name, so I did not once fairly catch it."

He turned back to his corner, and put the remaining bit of proof into his pocket. New heavens and new earth had come into existence since the last pencil mark on it.

"Jim," he said, "I'm called off on school-business. You get as much of that set up as you can before dinner, and then lock up; and I'll come down and make the corrections in the editorials before I go to bed. Now—Winifred—if I may walk home with you, we'll get to the bottom of Garvey's tricks. Villain!"

The epithet was so fervent, and so entirely without humorous intent, that Miss Northrop laughed again as they walked out into the dull, hot September afternoon sun. The board sidewalk was uneven and full of projecting nails and splinters, and she held her thin, blue-gray dress prettily aside from them; Will noted the gesture with admiration as intense as unreasonable. It seemed to him peculiarly admirable that she should draw her hat a little forward to shade her eyes, and should take just the length of step that she did; the absolutely right step for a lady was thenceforth settled; since then, he has insisted unreasonably upon a certain shade as the only right thing in gray, as if he held in his own mind some positive standard beyond the realm of variable taste.

The two or three business blocks—rows of slight frame-buildings, more of them saloons than would seem possible—were very quiet; Green's Ferry is the shipping point of a wide stock-raising district, and all its activity centres about the railroad station at stated times daily. The justly aroused fellow-townsmen were all back under the awnings—leaning against the wall by the post-office, sitting on boxes by the grocery; some indolently telling stories and chaffing; some looking sleepily before them in absolute repose; some in various stages of inert drunkenness. All stared curiously at young Strong and the strange lady, and prepared to talk them over afterward, but no one addressed him.

They turned aside soon into a broad cross street with no sidewalk, where the coarse dust was in places ankle deep. Behind them, beyond the main street, a few groups of yellowing cottonwoods on bare banks of reddish clay marked the course of the Sacramento; before them the street faded into a limitless expanse of gravel, thinly dotted in the distance with dull green oaks, and bounded by long knolls, like wrinkles in the plain, dark with oaks against the smoky sky of September—a sky dull blue above, dull gray near the horizon.

Along either side of the street the flimsy wooden houses were set back, each in its yard, and surrounded by oleanders; sometimes there would be a few parched roses, a trellis of Madeira-vine, a patch of carefully nursed grass, often a row of China trees, whose fallen black seeds stippled the dust—but always the great rosy clumps of oleanders, glorying in the heat and drought. Every evening after dinner the owners come out, and stand watering these gardens with hose and sprinkler, till all along the street there is a murmur like rain and a smell of damp earth, and here and there through the warm twilight a glimpse of the white sprays of water; while the families sit on the porches and doorstep, and gossip and laugh. At this hour, however, the little gardens and splendid oleanders lay hot and deserted in the dusty afternoon.

"I haven't till now had time to spare from being anxious to be interested," Miss Northrop said. "I was rather panic-stricken this morning, and things were awful, instead of interesting, in proportion to their newness."

This bit of pathos stiffened Will's manner with the awkwardness of over-feeling, as he asked: "Now, what can I do for you—Winifred?"

The awkwardness made him more like the school-boy Will; and then, a familiar face four thousand miles from home seems more familiar than it really is. Miss Northrop answered confidingly: "I will tell you all about it, and then you will know what to do. I wrote to Judge Garvey—some one referred me to him at Sacramento—and asked if I might teach the school. He wrote back that I might, fixed the day, and directed me to a boarding-place that he had engaged for me. So I came by yesterday evening's train, and sent word that I was here. This morning he called and told me—with most oppressive civility—that as I had not answered his last letter, the place had been given to some one else. He said 'professional etiquette' here demands an answer in such a case, and failure to answer is equivalent to a withdrawal of the application."

"He lied," said Will, parenthetically, walking along with his eyes on the ground; she, on the contrary, looked at him often, with frank directness.

"He did not impress me," she said, "as the soul of candor. I said as little as possible to him, but when he was gone I asked about the rest of the committee, and as soon as I heard your name I hoped it was you; I knew you were somewhere in California. This afternoon I received his letter written to prevent my coming. It had followed me up here by the same train that I came on." She held the letter in her hand, and Will quietly took it and kept it. "I would not raise any controversy about such a thing," she went on, "if I had any idea in the world where else to go or what to do." Her voice sharpened a little again, with a note of pathos.

Will did not know how to answer without seeming to question or comment, so there came a pause; then he said:

"This Coakley was an electioneering agent of Garvey's, and doesn't know enough to teach babies. He seems to have turned up suddenly wanting help, and the Judge is willing enough to keep him on hand and under obligations until next election."

Miss Northrop stopped short and looked at him with brows a little raised, and her bearing became impalpably more distant.

"But I cannot enter into contest with—these men for permission to teach school here," she said.

She was right, in her quick feeling that Will Strong's training could not have made work and discomfort and contact with vulgarity seem outside the sphere of women. If it had been one of his own sisters he would have said: "Oh, well, we have to take the world as we find it. Brace up, little girl; I'll put you safe through, and you'll find it's not so bad, after all."

But what he said to Winifred Northrop was: "It is outrageous! Such brutes as Garvey have no business to look at a lady! If you really prefer not to take the school," he went on, with some embarrassment, "I hope you will call on me to help you in any other way; but if you want the school you shall have it, and no annoyance with it that I can help."

Miss Northrop repented that she had repented her confidence. "I remembered that you were kind of old, Will"—and her manner was irresistibly winning when she said such a thing—"but you are so very kind now that you make me ashamed. I only meant to ask you what I must do. Yes, I must take this position if I can, for I have no alternative."

"There is nothing for you to do," he said. "It is my place, as an officer of the school, to see that its rightful teacher is not defrauded."

"So it is," she said, relieved. "But I am none the less grateful."

"It is a pleasure to me to be able to do anything for you," he said, gravely, somewhat stiffly—from his tone you would not have suspected much more truth than usual in the formula.

She only said: "You are very kind," and then he lifted his hat, and left her at Mrs. Stutt's gate.

He deliberately and literally believed, as he walked down the street—directly to Green's—that he was the happiest man in the world. For that matter, it is not impossible that he was. He was absolutely innocent of conscious hyperbole in saying, "It would be worth a life-time of trouble only to have seen her; and I know her and am able to do her a service!"

He scored one advantage in having seen Miss Northrop early; he saw Green before Garvey had talked with him. The report of the quarrel had by no means failed to reach "The American Eagle," and when Strong came in Uncle Billy Green was just expressing himself with regard to Coakley:

"Of course the Judge'll provide for his man when he gets a chance. That's where he's sharp. And if Coakley is smart enough to suit Judge Garvey, he's smart enough to teach my children—that's what I say."

A private audience with him would have been merely postponing the hour of general discussion, so Strong made a brief exposition of his case—gently enough, but with considerable force—then and there, displaying the letter he carried by way of proof. He hardly expected to elicit anything but the usual laugh and comment on the Judge's smartness. But there was a marked seriousness of tone in the remarks when he ended.

"Well, that is pretty rough."

"Yes, sir, that's going too far. The Judge ought to know where to stop. I don't stand by no man when it comes to a shabby trick on an unprotected school-marm."

"A real lady, too—I could see that when she went by with you, Strong."

Even Green said, uneasily, "No, I shouldn't think the Judge ought to do that, quite."

It was evident that Green's Ferry drew its lines as much as any other town. The moral support it offered Strong was mainly negative, however, and Green, after several alternate conversations with his two fellow trustees during this Saturday evening, went off early Sunday morning to visit his married daughter at the old Meeker place, leaving word that they must fix it between them. Judge Garvey closed the somewhat stormy conference of Saturday evening with a promise to break down Miss Northrop's school in a week, and Strong's paper in a month. "Do you flatter yourself I should not have had your contemptible sheet in powder under my feet, sir, before this, if I had thought it worth the attention?" Nevertheless, as there was nothing on which the Judge prided himself more than on his invariable civility to ladies ("the courtly Judge" was his favorite phrase in writing up a local notice of any affair at which he had been present), Strong, having possession of the school-house key, was able to put Miss Northrop into possession on Monday morning without opposition. The Judge even visited her during the day and addressed the school with extreme suavity.

He was, however, very seriously affronted, and had not passed his Sunday without diligent preparation among parents and children to make Miss Northrop's position untenable. It would have been no difficult task, either, but for an altogether unprecedented obstacle—a factor that he had not dreamed of in his calculations, and that Strong himself had underestimated. The children, who had gone to school Monday morning primed for mutiny, surrendered their hearts in a body to Miss Northrop by night; three days later, Uncle Billy Green's niece, who taught the primary school, gave in adoring allegiance; by the end of the week everybody who had seen her was her advocate. It was certainly an unprecedented thing that Judge Garvey's best exertions should come to naught, because of a woman's way of smiling and speaking; but Miss Northrop's tenure of the school was secure. It was not entirely speech and smile, however. Miss Northrop was interested in everything, and consequently had common ground with everybody; and she met each one on that ground, not so much ignoring as temporarily forgetting differences.

The year wore on from gray to gray; the parching north wind poured down the plain and darkened the air with gritty dust; the sky, though cloudless, grew murkier every day. Then the wind shifted to the south, and the sky grew darker yet with surging heaps of clouds, and at last down came the late November rain; and next morning Miss Northrop could see, like a miraculous creation of the night, up and down every east-and-west street, a range of azure mountains along either horizon, snow-crowned, clear-cut, against an exquisite blue sky. Every two or three weeks the surge of clouds would come rolling up with the south wind, and the rain would come down in torrents for days, till the Sacramento, yellow with mud, roared level with its banks; and then the storm would break away, and there would be a week or two of blue sky and brilliant air and green earth.

One Sunday in March, between the early and the latter rains, Miss Northrop and Will Strong walked out together several miles over the plain. The gravel had long disappeared under green burclover and filaria, thickly dotted with the little yellow clover blossoms, the lilac ones of the filaria, and with small blue gilias. The flocks and herds had been driven down from the mountains where they spend their summers and autumns, and the air was full of the bleating of lambs. Up and down either horizon, converging toward the north, were the long ranks of the Sierras and Coast Range, deep blue, ruggedly tipped with white peaks of all shapes—the Lassen Buttes, the Yallo Balleys, and many a lesser one. Northward, in the interval between the ranges, miles and miles away, the solitary peak of Shasta rose above the dark oak-knolls, sharp-white from base to tip, against a stainless sky. They sat down on the warm clover, beside a noisy yellow stream that ran full to its banks on its way to the Sacramento. Winifred pushed back her hat, dropped her hands in her lap, and let her senses be played upon by the delicious air, the blue and white of mountains and sky and clouds, the luminous green, the rushing of water close by, and the bleating of flocks in the distance. It gave Will a good chance to watch her face—the sweetness of the mouth; the nobility of the level brows; the frankness of the eyes; the soft wave of her hair. There was a marked sadness in her face in repose; to wonder why, was to transgress the code of loyal humility that Will set himself; he had not even considered it due chivalry to speculate, much less ask, as to the reason of so amazing a phenomenon as her presence in California at all, and the incongruity of her school-teaching. Her pose was perfect, and yet nothing could be more unconscious. Was that marvellous spontaneity, that simple dignity, the regular thing among the men and women Winifred belonged with? It made him feel left very far out to think so. How incapable of effort for admiration she was, yet how invariably admirable!

She caught him looking at her, in time. "What is it?" she said, simply.

He colored with some confusion, but confessed a piece of his thought. "I was wondering if you really do not care at all for admiration. Most people would think they got the good of their living in being praised a fraction as much as you've been. If that's impertinent I beg your pardon; you asked me."

The portion of aristocrat's pride that was in Winifred was largely concentrated in an objection to talking of herself or letting other people do it; so she looked a little annoyed. She began with some constraint:

"Yes—I care—at first—when it is the right one that praises. But there is always a reaction of self-distrust. It seems humiliating," she went on more frankly, "to have been praised for having done some common thing—solved a problem, or written a poem, or handled a piano—a little more or less cleverly, when one comes to think what education and art are. And personal admiration—that always seems a contemptible sort of folly, if you think of what great things there are to do and be in the world, and the lives the great lonely souls have lived."

"Your achievement seems little to you," said Will, with some gloom, "because, I suppose, more always opens to you. To me, who have made none—"

"Why, Will," she cried, with the most genuine dissent. "You have done more than almost any one I know. Do you call it nothing to do a college curriculum alone and under all sorts of hindrances? And I know that it was done well and thoroughly."

"Oh, yes," he said, indifferently, tossing bits of clover into the stream, "I could have passed an A. B. fast enough. But you know better than I do, Winifred, that that's the least of a college course. I've seen fellows that had to work their way through and had no spare time or energy, and they always lacked a great deal of the college flavor; the education didn't permeate 'em. Then there are other things—music, art, social opportunities, capacity of expression—that are no slight things to miss; they make up more of first-class living than Greek optatives or the equation of a surface. It isn't really possible for a man, not backed by circumstances, to get himself into a position that some are born to." He let the clover be and looked up. "Oh, I'm not growling, Winifred," he said, hastily, smiling, as he saw her about to speak eagerly. "I'm only making philosophical observations, and using myself as an illustration. Why in the world should I growl to find myself stranded half way up, when there is a townful of people behind us clear down at the bottom, and no more their fault than mine? Why should I mind that I am left out from the best chances, any more than that a thousand other fellows are? 'What Act of Legislature was there that' I should be cultured?"

She was leaning forward with her irresistible eyes full on his, and face and voice vivified with that sympathetic expressiveness that makes speech count for far more than the words.

"Will, that is true," she cried, "but it is only part of the truth. 'Close thy' Carlyle; 'open thy' Emerson. It's true, you have missed some things that you deserved to have and that many of your inferiors have for nothing. But your life is only begun, and your ability and pluck can do so much that you needn't waste regret on anything they may fail to do. Even if circumstances be unconquerable that stand between you and some good things, are the things you have gained instead of less value?—your courage and patience, your self-reliance and trustworthiness and helpfulness? Why, Will, character is worth more than knowledge of art, or familiarity with good society; just to live bravely is worth more than all the rest. Do you suppose I would exchange your companionship for that of a dozen 'cultured' people who could talk to me about 'sincere furniture'"—this was in the last decade, remember—"and Rauss's heads, as you can't, and who never showed me one spark of genuine feeling about the great things of life, as you can?"

Will was overwhelmed. Winifred had talked of his affairs much, following them with unvarying interest, but of himself or herself, never; and it was actually a new idea to the young fellow that she could have any very high opinion of him. Moreover, it was the first time he had heard her speak with unveiled and ardent feeling.

"You do not mean"—and he formed his words with difficulty—"that I could meet on equal ground people that—such people as your associates."

"No; you would meet most of them on higher ground. If they didn't know it, that would be their discredit. I should think you could see that," she added, in a quick, parenthetic averse way, "from their associate. If you want to get a higher opinion of the value of your life, compare it with an ordinary, foolish, useless one—like mine." She gave him no chance to answer that, but was the next moment on her feet, suggesting that they walk on, and wishing they were not to stop short of the Lassen Buttes, whose apparent nearness, scores of miles distant as they were, was still a perpetual surprise to her eastern eyes.

When everything has been made ready for it, a few sentences may easily make or mark an era in life; and it is probable that if Miss Northrop had not in effect told young Strong he was quite good enough for her, he might have remained her contented vassal for years. Six months of being her nearest friend worked their result, to be sure; but the humility they were gnawing at was of mediaevally tough fibre, and of twice six years' growth. His depreciation of himself, however, had only meant sense of distance from her; therefore, his sense of the significance of her speech was enormous. He felt his relation to her changed; he was shaken from all his moorings, and thrown into a mighty agitation that possessed him night and day, and only grew with time. For this was what it all came to: Was the distance between Winifred and himself greater than the distance between her and any other man? And when he had once thought that, the gate was open, and the besieging host marched in and took possession of every corner of him with longing and desire and a madness of tenderness.

He thought of nothing else. He wrote his editorials and set type under an unceasing sense of it, as people have done brain-work and finger-work to an accompaniment of unceasing physical pain. For there was nothing joyous about it to him; it was all a bitter pain of mad desire to be something to her—to secure her, somehow, before this great, dark future swept her away from him. And yet the latter rains came and went, the green faded from the ground, the mountains grew dimmer and duller, and at last disappeared in the summer murk, before he took in his own mind the next step—from lover to suitor, as before from vassal to lover.

He did so simply because he could not stand it any longer. It stood to reason that there must be a way out of such active torments. And, after all, why not he as well as any other man? It was absurd to suppose that Winifred could ever be in love with any man, as a man would be with her. It occurred to Will that the thing to do was natural enough, after all—not to ask Winifred's love, but to offer her his. And he walked down to Mrs. Stutt's to do it, one August evening, a little before school opened after vacation. He was in good spirits, too; to come to action and to speech, after so long repression, was an inestimable relief. And she had been doubly friendly to him all this time.

Mrs. Stutt was in her little strip of grass and oleanders. "That you, Mr. Strong?" she called out cheerily as he lifted the gate-latch. "Well, Miss Northrop's in the sitting-room, I s'pose. You go right in, and I'll come in when I've done my watering."

"Thank you," said Will, absently, and walked on into the house. Winifred was not in the dark little sitting-room. He walked to the open window and stood there, expecting her to come in presently. There were veils of Madeira vine over the window, just opening their whitish tassels of bloom, and the air was full of the smell of them. Mrs. Stutt began to water the grass outside, and the shower of water from her hose glimmered through the Madeira vine; the noise of the water came to him, and the crying of crickets, and the smell of the freshly wet earth. Then he heard a step on the porch, and saw Winifred go down the short path to the gate. He could see by her white dress that she stood still there; so he went out, too, to join her. Mrs. Stutt was watering at the other side of the house now, and the two were alone.

Will stopped a moment in the darkness and faint odor of a great oleander, a few feet from the motionless girl at the gate, to realize well the grace of her dim white figure, and her unconscious attitude. She stood in a weary way, with her head a little fallen back, and her hands hanging loosely clasped before her. There was so much and so incomprehensible emotion in the attitude, that Will felt vaguely thrust out into another world from that where her interests lay. She had not heard him approach, for the train from the south was just coming to a stand at the station, not a stone's throw off, and there was a great noise of jarring cars, and shouting men, and escaping steam, and ringing bell. He waited till the noise should be quite over. Some one came walking rapidly from the station; Will, glancing at the dark figure, thought it had, even in this dimness, an unfamiliar look. It paused close by the gate.

"Winifred!"

Will did not know the voice; the tone turned him blind and dizzy.

Winifred started violently, and turned; she clasped her hands tightly, and lifted them to her breast in a frightened way, as she fell back a step.

"Oh, my God!" she cried, under her breath. There was a rattle of the gate-latch, a sharp flying open of the gate, and the stranger held her in his arms.

"My darling, my darling!" he said, with an infinite tenderness. "Did you think you could hide anywhere in all this wide world where I should not find you?"

For just an instant she yielded to his clasp—then she drew back. "You must not," she said, softly, with unmistakable pain in her voice. "You know that. I thought if I was utterly out of sight or hearing, you would forget me, and I might—forget myself."

He broke in before she had fairly spoken. "You were mistaken, Winifred; there was no one between us. O my foolish little hot-head! if you had not been so headlong in your self-sacrifice—if you had only waited till I came back—I could have showed you in ten minutes that there was no place for it. Mollie is married to John Gates and is very happy. And you and I—my little girl, how nearly our two lives have been spoiled! Sweetheart," he said, laughing with a shaky voice, "I think I shall never dare let go of you again"—and he drew her back to him.

She hesitated—surrendered—clung to him with a long sobbing breath. "Oh, I have wanted you so, I have wanted you so!" she cried. "Oh, don't be a dream and melt away this time!"

Will Strong, standing close in the darkness of the oleander, acquiring a life-long association with smell of Madeira vine and oleander and wet earth, cry of crickets and noise of sprinkling water, gathered himself together enough to creep away. He was going to realize it pretty soon, he thought; he did not yet; it seemed likely to be beyond endurance when he did. As he passed the door some one opened it, and the lamp-light streamed about him; Winifred looked around and saw his face for an instant, and then he had slipped away through a side gate.

He walked out from town across miles of dark plain, until he came to the empty channel of the stream by which they had sat in March. Underfoot not a blade of grass or green thing; no stranger would have believed that living thing had ever grown there. The flocks and herds had long since gone to the mountain pastures. The dry channel between shelvy banks of gravel showed white in the unclouded yet dull starlight. The air was lifeless, and faintly tainted with smoke from forest fires in the mountains.

Will threw himself down on his face, clutching with his fingers at the gritty dirt. He knew as surely then, looking forward to his life, as he will know at the end looking back, that this would never be an out-lived romance. Nor could he creep back into that temple of dreams from which Winifred's own hand had lured him—it had crumbled to dust behind him. Nor was he like one who, losing a woman, loses only his best pleasure and best ambition; she was the vital condition to every pleasure, every ambition; losing her, he lost all. The realization clutched him by this time like a tiger. There was not a living creature within miles; a man might go down to primal depths, might drop even the restraint of the human in outcries and struggles as free as a tortured beast's. It may be that solitude sees more such scenes than a decently decorous world would like to think.

Yet there was a sense upon him of some moral demand, some decision to be made; and in time he began to try to collect himself for it. It would seem as if there could hardly be a position that left less for him to decide. There was no question of renouncing—he had never had anything to renounce. Nevertheless, his instinct was correct in urging him to a moral conflict and a momentous decision. The question was simply whether he could pick up his life again, could find faith that anything was worth living for; or whether life was to be a hollow going through the forms—frustrated, purposeless, full of brooding regret and jealousy, shame, and sense of wrong. But he could not drag his bruised mind up to the question; he could not even think what it was. He lifted himself up, stepped down into the dry channel, and knelt on the white stones, obeying old association with the attitude; laid his arms and head on a shelf of the bank, and let the stunned and nerveless will lie passive, while the accumulated forces of years—of generations—passion and pain and despair and love, shame and bitterness and loyalty—trampled back and forth over him, fighting out for him his battle.

It was deathly, aggressively still; not an insect to chirp, not a tree to rustle; only bare earth and sodden air. After a long time Will raised his head and threw it back, looking up at the dull stars, while his outstretched hands lay clasped before him; he began to breathe more deeply. Not many minutes later he rose and walked homeward across the dim, wide waste.

It was afternoon of the next day when he stood at Mrs. Stutt's door again. Mrs. Stutt looked at him with the embarrassment of conscious pity as she admitted him. People had been looking at him all day, on the street and in the office, with the same embarrassment and pity. Miss Northrop was packing, the good woman said; and, in an answer to her call, Winifred came out from her room into the little sitting-room. She, too, was evidently under agitation and embarrassment. Will had no doubt, from his first sight of her face, that she had seen and understood his haggard flight the evening before. He was himself entirely calm, as he held out his hand with a grave smile in silence.

Winifred tried to speak naturally.

"I had just sent a note to you, Will," she said, as they sat down.

"About the school, I suppose," he answered, quietly. "You are going away at once?"

"Yes." There she stopped, with her eyes downcast. She looked up to his face and caught her breath to speak, stopped, and began again.

"You have been very good to me all this year—" there she hesitated. Her difficulty was to choose her words so as to ignore his secret, and yet not part from him in a cold or inadequate way.

He rose, and crossed over to her.

"Winifred," he said gently, "you are distressed on my account; and so it is better that I should speak of what otherwise it would be better to ignore. I want you to know that you have not harmed me."

She rose quickly at that, and they stood near together, with their eyes fixed on each other's; the fulness of expression in her face seemed to take the place of answer. He went on steadily, speaking low:

"I have thought it all over, and I find these two things stronger than any pain that may have come to me. Winifred, I cannot do you this wrong, to make you the instrument of evil to me. That is one of the two things. And the other is that there is nothing to reproach any one with; no one has done wrong; there is no cause for shame, or resentment, or bitterness—only for clean pain. Pain is no great evil, Winifred, when it is clean, no matter how sharp."

He smiled at her tranquilly enough as he spoke. In truth, he was not unhappy at the moment. It is not during but after the parting interview that the pinch comes. She answered him only with her deeply attentive look, and he went on:

"I did not come to those convictions; they came to me; or rather, they were in me, and bore down all the other feelings. All the noisy passions dropped away before them, and left just those clear voices in my soul. They made all my love and loyalty work together, instead of tearing me in opposite directions. For, see, Winifred, hasn't it been our moral faith for years that to do spiritual harm to another is the greatest evil that can befall one, and to do him spiritual benefit, the greatest good? All these years since we were in school together, I have been proud to think that it could be only a good to you to have me think of you as I have thought, because it was only a good to me. And I will not be so disloyal now as to let my life be spoiled because of you."

Winifred looked at him aghast. "All these years!" It was a revelation intolerable at first shock to a woman that was no coquette.

"I think it was all the time dimly in my mind what your last year had been; at last I went out of my life and into yours. I want you to understand that I do not think of it with bitterness, because I entered so little into it; I realize, Winifred"—his voice broke from its steadiness—"that you have been good, good in it all. If you had not been—if you had trifled with me—I think I should be at the bottom of the river to-day. But since no one has wronged me," he went on more quietly, "since nothing monstrous or unnatural has befallen me, everything I believed in has the same claim on me as ever.

"And I want you to know that you need not mind my love, Winifred." She dropped her eyes and stood mute. "It is something you may be willing and glad to have without troubling yourself because you cannot return it. For any pain that has happened, do not trouble yourself about that either—if I don't mind it, you needn't," he said, smiling a little, with a certain manly sweetness quite new to him. "I find one gains something in having no longer to struggle with pain and try to keep her at arm's length."

She looked up then, and cried out passionately. "O Will, Will, if only there was anything in all this world I could do to make it up to you!"

"There is nothing to make up," he said. "I would rather have pain from you than pleasure from any one else. But there is something that you can do; this: not to feel my love a burden laid upon you, an annoyance or trespass, an anxiety or self-reproach—or anything that will make you want to get rid of it," he finished, smiling again; "and to let me give you all I wish, on the condition that I ask no return. And if, in a few years, I should ask to come and live near you, and be good friends—may I? It would be hard," he urged, less quietly, "that I should have to lose your friendship, when I ask nothing more. Would you take away the crumbs from me, just because I have lost the loaf?"

"Is that best, Will?" she began, anxious and hesitating. "Oh, I mean for you. It isn't possible that you can always—think of me—so. There is no reason. If you do not see me—somebody else—"

"Have I been seeing you these dozen years?" he said, very gently. "You may trust me to know what is best for me. Why think—think a moment, dear friend, and you will understand. You, of all people, can understand the plane I want you to take me on."

Winifred's eyes kindled and her face flushed. "I see. I do understand. I can meet you on your own plane, and I can trust your friendship and you. I am not afraid to have you come—after a year or two."

"Thank you," he said, shaken as he had not been.

"It is because you are very noble that any good can come out of this harm," she went on, with an eloquent tremor in her voice. "I can see that before very long I shall be, as you said, willing—glad—for so great a gift—only always sorry for your sake. I am very grateful now—I cannot tell you how great a thing I think it is—from such a man as you."