They were seen walking together and driving together. He demurred, but she insisted. "I will not accept such a sacrifice," he said, but she overruled him by her reply: "It is not a sacrifice; it is a vindication of myself, that you cannot oppose." But he knew that there was more in it than what she called vindication of herself; there was the fighting friendship of a comrade.

During these days, Isabel met cold faces. She found herself a fresh target for criticism, a further source of misunderstanding. And there was fresh suffering, too, which no one could have foreseen. Late one twilight when she and Rowan were driving, they passed Marguerite driving also, she being still a guest at the Merediths', and getting well. Each carriage was driving slowly, and the road was not wide, and the wheels almost locked, and there was time enough for everything to be seen. And the next day, Marguerite went home from the Merediths' and passed into a second long illness.

The day came for Isabel to leave—she was going away to remain a long time, a year, two years. They had had their last drive and twilight was falling when they returned to the Hardages'. She was standing on the steps as she gave him both her hands.

"Good-by," she said, in the voice of one who had finished her work. "I hardly know what to say—I have said everything. Perhaps I ought to tell you my last feeling is, that you will make life a success, that nothing will pull you down. I suppose that the life of each of us, if it is worth while, is not made up of one great effort and of one failure or of one success, but of many efforts, many failures, partial successes. But I am afraid we all try at first to realize our dreams. Good-by!"

"Marry me," he said, tightening his grasp on her hands and speaking as though he had the right.

She stepped quickly back from him. She felt a shock, a delicate wound, and she said with a proud tear: "I did not think you would so misjudge me in all that I have been trying to do."

She went quickly in.



VII

It was a morning in the middle of October when Dent and Pansy were married.

The night before had been cool and clear after a rain and a long-speared frost had fallen. Even before the sun lifted itself above the white land, a full red rose of the sky behind the rotting barn, those early abroad foresaw what the day would be. Nature had taken personal interest in this union of her two children, who worshipped her in their work and guarded her laws in their characters, and had arranged that she herself should be present in bridal livery.

The two prim little evergreens which grew one on each side of the door-step waited at respectful attention like heavily powdered festal lackeys. The scraggy aged cedars of the yard stood about in green velvet and brocade incrusted with gems. The doorsteps themselves were softly piled with the white flowers of the frost, and the bricks of the pavement strewn with multitudinous shells and stars of dew and air. Every poor stub of grass, so economically cropped by the geese, wore something to make it shine. In the back yard a clothes-line stretched between a damson and a peach tree, and on it hung forgotten some of Pansy's father's underclothes; but Nature did what she could to make the toiler's raiment look like diamonded banners, flung bravely to the breeze in honor of his new son-in-law. Everything—the duck troughs, the roof of the stable, the cart shafts, the dry-goods box used as a kennel—had ugliness hidden away under that prodigal revelling ermine of decoration. The sun itself had not long risen before Nature even drew over that a bridal veil of silver mist, so that the whole earth was left wrapped in whiteness that became holiness.

Pansy had said that she desired a quiet wedding, so that she herself had shut up the ducks that they might not get to Mrs. Meredith. And then she had made the rounds and fed everything; and now a certain lethargy and stupor of food quieted all creatures and gave to the valley the dignity of a vocal solitude.

The botanist bride was not in the least abashed during the ceremony. Nor proud: Mrs. Meredith more gratefully noticed this. And she watched closely and discovered with relief that Pansy did not once glance at her with uneasiness or for approval. The mother looked at Dent with eyes growing dim. "She will never seem to be the wife of my son," she said, "but she will make her children look like his children."

And so it was all over and they were gone—slipped away through the hiding white mists without a doubt of themselves, without a doubt of each other, mating as naturally as the wild creatures who never know the problems of human selection, or the problems that civilization leaves to be settled after selection has been made.

Mrs. Meredith and Rowan and the clergyman were left with the father and the children, and with an unexampled wedding collation—one of Pansy's underived masterpieces. The clergyman frightened the younger children; they had never seen his like either with respect to his professional robes or his superhuman clerical voice—their imaginations balancing unsteadily between the impossibility of his being a man in a nightgown and the impossibility of his being a woman with a mustache.

After his departure their fright and apprehensions settled on Mrs. Meredith. They ranged themselves on chairs side by side against a wall, and sat confronting her like a class in the public school fated to be examined in deadly branches. None moved except when she spoke, and then all writhed together but each in a different way; the most comforting word from her produced a family spasm with individual proclivities. Rowan tried to talk with the father about crops: they were frankly embarrassed. What can a young man with two thousand acres of the best land say to an old man with fifty of the poorest?

The mother and son drove home in silence. She drew one of his hands into her lap and held it with close pressure. They did not look at each other.

As the carriage rolled easily over the curved driveway, through the noble forest trees they caught glimpses of the house now standing clear in afternoon sunshine. Each had the same thought of how empty it waited there without Dent—henceforth less than a son, yet how much more; more than brother, but how much less. How a brief ceremony can bind separated lives and tear bound ones apart!

"Rowan," she said, as they walked slowly from the carriage to the porch, she having clasped his arm more intimately, "there is something I have wanted to do and have been trying to do for a long time. It must not be put off any longer. We must go over the house this afternoon. There are a great many things that I wish to show you and speak to you about—things that have to be divided between you and Dent."

"Not to-day! not to-day!" he cried, turning to her with quick appeal. But she shook her head slowly, with brave cheerfulness.

"Yes; to-day. Now; and then we shall be over with it. Wait for me here." She passed down the long hall to her bedroom, and as she disappeared he rushed into the parlors and threw himself on a couch with his hands before his face; then he sprang up and came out into the hall again and waited with a quiet face.

When she returned, smiling, she brought with her a large bunch of keys, and she took his arm dependently as they went up the wide staircase. She led him to the upper bedrooms first—in earlier years so crowded and gay with guests, but unused during later ones. The shutters were closed, and the afternoon sun shot yellow shafts against floors and walls. There was a perfume of lavender, of rose leaves.

"Somewhere in one of these closets there is a roll of linen." She opened one after another, looking into each. "No; it is not here. Then it must be in there. Yes; here it is. This linen was spun and woven from flax grown on your great-great-grandfather's land. Look at it! It is beautifully made. Each generation of the family has inherited part and left the rest for generations yet to come. Half of it is yours, half is Dent's. When it has been divided until there is no longer enough to divide, that will be the last of the home-made linen of the old time. It was a good time, Rowan; it produced masterful men and masterful women, not mannish women. Perhaps the golden age of our nation will some day prove to have been the period of the home-spun Americans."

As they passed on she spoke to him with an increasing, almost unnatural gayety. He had a new appreciation of what her charm must have been when she was a girl. The rooms were full of memories to her; many of the articles that she caressed with her fingers, and lingered over with reluctant eyes, connected themselves with days and nights of revelry and the joy of living; also with prides and deeds which ennobled her recollection.

"You and Dent know that your father divided equally all that he had. But everything in the house is mine, and I have made no will and shall not make any. What is mine belongs to you two alike. Still, I have made a list of things that I think he would rather have, and a list of things for you—merely because I wish to give something to each of you directly."

In a room on a lower floor she unlocked a closet, the walls of which were lined with shelves. She peeped in; then she withdrew her head and started to lock the door again; but she changed her mind and laughed.

"Do you know what these things are?" She touched a large box, and he carried it over to the bed and she lifted the top off, exposing the contents. "Did you ever see anything so black? This was the clerical robe in which one of your ancestors used to read his sermons. He is the one who wrote the treatise on 'God Properly and Unproperly Understood.' He was the great seminarian in your father's family—the portrait in the hall, you know. I shall not decide whether you or Dent must inherit this; decide for yourselves; I imagine you will end it in the quarrel. How black it is, and what black sermons flew out of it—ravens, instead of white doves, of the Holy Spirit. He was the friend of Jonathan Edwards." She made a wry face as he put the box back into the closet; and she laughed again as she locked it in.

"Here are some things from my side of the family." And she drew open a long drawer and spoke with proud reticence. They stood looking down at part of the uniform of an officer of the Revolution. She lifted one corner of it and disclosed a sword beneath. She lifted another corner of the coat and exposed a roll of parchment. "I suppose I should have had this parchment framed and hung up downstairs, so that it would be the first thing seen by any one entering the front door; and this sword should have been suspended over the fireplace, or have been exposed under a glass case in the parlors; and the uniform should have been fitted on a tailor's manikin; and we should have lectured to our guests on our worship of our ancestors—in the new American way, in the Chino-American way. But I'm afraid we go to the other extreme, Rowan; perhaps we are proud of the fact that we are not boastful. Instead of concerning ourselves with those who shed glory on us, we have concerned ourselves with the question whether we are shedding glory on them. Still, I wonder whether our ancestors may not possibly be offended that we say so little about them!"

She led him up and down halls and from floor to floor.

"Of course you know this room—the nursery. Here is where you began to be a bad boy; and you began before you can remember. Did you never see these things before? They were your first soldiers—I have left them to Dent. And here are some of Dent's things that I have left to you. For one thing, his castanets. His father and I never knew why he cried for castanets. He said that Dent by all the laws of spiritual inheritance from his side should be wanting the timbrel and harp—Biblical influence, you understand; but that my influence interfered and turned timbrel and harp into castanets. Do you remember the day when you ran away with Dent and took him to a prize fight? After that you wanted boxing-gloves, and Dent was crazy for a sponge. You fought him, and he sponged you. Here is the sponge; I do not know where the gloves are. And here are some things that belong to both of you; they are mine; they go with me." She laid her hand on a little box wrapped and tied, then quickly shut the closet.

In a room especially fragrant with lavender she opened a press in the wall and turned her face away from him for a moment.

"This is my bridal dress. This was my bridal veil; it has been the bridal veil of girls in my family for a good many generations. These were my slippers; you see I had a large foot; but it was well shaped—it was a woman's foot. That was my vanity—not to have a little foot. I leave these things to you both. I hope each of you may have a daughter to wear the dress and the veil." For the first time she dashed some tears from her eyes. "I look to my sons for sons and daughters."

It was near sunset when they stood again at the foot of the staircase. She was white and tired, but her spirit refused to be conquered.

"I think I shall He down now," she said, "so I shall say good night to you here, Rowan. Fix the tray for me yourself, pour me out some tea, and butter me a roll." They stood looking into each other's eyes. She saw things in his which caused her suddenly to draw his forehead over and press her lips to one and then to the other, again and again.

The sun streamed through the windows, level and red, lighting up the darkened hall, lighting up the head and shoulders of his mother.

An hour later he sat at the head of his table alone—a table arranged for two instead of three. At the back of his chair waited the aged servitor of the household, gray-haired, discreet, knowing many things about earlier days on which rested the seal of incorruptible silence. A younger servant performed the duties.

He sat at the head of his table and excused the absence of his mother and forced himself with the pride and dignity of his race to give no sign of what had passed that day. His mother's maid entered, bringing him in a crystal vase a dark red flower for his coat. She had always given him that same dark red flower after he had turned into manhood. "It is your kind," she said; "I understand."

He arranged the tray for her, pouring out her tea, buttering the rolls. Then he forced himself to eat his supper as usual. From old candlesticks on the table a silver radiance was shed on the massive silver, on the gem-like glass. Candelabra on the mantelpiece and the sideboard lighted up the browned oak of the walls.

He left the table at last, giving and hearing a good night. The servants efficiently ended their duties and put out the lights. In the front hall lamps were left burning; there were lamps and candles in the library. He went off to a room on the ground floor in one ell of the house; it was his sitting room, smoking room, the lounging place of his friends. In one corner stood a large desk, holding old family papers; here also were articles that he himself had lately been engaged on—topics relating to scientific agriculture, soils, and stock-raising. It was the road by which some of the country gentlemen who had been his forefathers passed into a larger life of practical affairs—going into the Legislature of the state or into the Senate; and he had thought of this as a future for himself. For an hour or two he looked through family papers.

Then he put them aside and squarely faced the meaning of the day. His thoughts traversed the whole track of Dent's life—one straight track upward. No deviations, no pitfalls there, no rising and falling. And now early marriage and safety from so many problems; with work and honors and wifely love and children: work and rest and duty to the end. Dent had called him into his room that morning after he was dressed for his wedding and had started to thank him for his love and care and guardianship and then had broken down and they had locked their arms around each other, trying not to say what could not be said.

He lived again through that long afternoon with his mother. What had the whole day been to her and how she had risen to meet with nobility all its sadnesses! Her smile lived before him; and her eyes, shining with increasing brightness as she dwelt upon things that meant fading sunlight: she fondling the playthings of his infancy, keeping some of them to be folded away with her at last; touching her bridal dress and speaking her reliance on her sons for sons and daughters; at the close of the long trying day standing at the foot of the staircase white with weariness and pain, but so brave, so sweet, so unconquerable. He knew that she was not sleeping now, that she was thinking of him, that she had borne everything and would bear everything not only because it was due to herself, but because it was due to him.

He turned out the lights and sat at a window opening upon the night. The voices of the land came in to him, the voices of the vanished life of its strong men.

He remembered the kind of day it was when he first saw through its autumn trees the scattered buildings of his university. What impressions it had made upon him as it awaited him there, gray with stateliness, hoary with its honors, pervaded with the very breath and spirit of his country. He recalled his meeting with his professors, the choosing of his studies, the selection of a place in which to live. Then had followed what had been the great spectacle and experience of his life—the assembling of picked young men, all eager like greyhounds at the slips to show what was in them, of what stuff they were made, what strength and hardihood and robust virtues, and gifts and grace for manly intercourse. He had been caught up and swept off his feet by that influence. Looking back as he did to that great plateau which was his home, for the first time he had felt that he was not only a youth of an American commonwealth, but a youth of his whole country. They were all American youths there, as opposed to English youths and German youths and Russian youths. There flamed up in him the fierce passion, which he believed to be burning in them all, to show his mettle—the mettle of his state, the mettle of his nation. To him, newly come into this camp of young men, it lay around the walls of the university like a white spiritual host, chosen youths to be made into chosen men. And he remembered how little he then knew that about this white host hung the red host of those camp-followers, who beleaguer in outer darkness every army of men.

Then had followed warfare, double warfare: the ardent attack on work and study; athletic play, good fellowship, visits late at night to the chambers of new friends—chambers rich in furniture and pictures, friends richer in old names and fine manners and beautiful boyish gallant ways; his club and his secret society, and the whole bewildering maddening enchantment of student life, where work and duty and lights and wine and poverty and want and flesh and spirit strive together each for its own. At this point he put these memories away, locked them from himself in their long silence.

Near midnight he made his way quietly back into the main hall. He turned out the lamps and lighted his bedroom candle and started toward the stairway, holding it in front of him a little above his head, a low-moving star through the gloom. As he passed between two portraits, he paused with sudden impulse and, going over to one, held his candle up before the face and studied it once more. A man, black-browed, black-robed, black-bearded, looked down into his eyes as one who had authority to speak. He looked far down upon his offspring, and he said to him: "You may be one of those who through the flesh are chosen to be damned. But if He chooses to damn you, then be damned, but do not question His mercy or His justice: it is not for you to alter the fixed and the eternal."

He crossed with his candle to the opposite wall and held it up before another face: a man full of red blood out to the skin; full-lipped, red-lipped; audacious about the forehead and brows, and beautiful over his thick careless hair through which a girl's fingers seemed lately to have wandered. He looked level out at his offspring as though he still stood throbbing on the earth and he spoke to him: "I am not alive to speak to you with my voice, but I have spoken to you through my blood. When the cup of life is filled, drain it deep. Why does nature fill it if not to have you empty it?"

He blew his candle out in the eyes of that passionate face, and holding it in his hand, a smoking torch, walked slowly backward and forward in the darkness of the hall with only a little pale moonlight struggling in through a window here and there.

Then with a second impulse he went over and stood close to the dark image who had descended into him through the mysteries of nature. "You," he said, "who helped to make me what I am, you had the conscience and not the temptation. And you," he said, turning to the hidden face across the hall, "who helped to make me what I am, you had the temptation and not the conscience. What does either of you know of me who had both?

"And what do I know about either of you," he went on, taking up again the lonely vigil of his walk and questioning; "you who preached against the Scarlet Woman, how do I know you were not the scarlet man? I may have derived both from you—both conscience and sin—without hypocrisy. All those years during which your face was hardening, your one sincere prayer to God may have been that He would send you to your appointed place before you were found out by men on earth. And you with your fresh red face, you may have lain down beside the wife of your youth, and have lived with her all your years, as chaste as she."

He resumed his walk, back and forth, back and forth; and his thoughts changed:

"What right have I to question them, or judge them, or bring them forward in my life as being responsible for my nature? If I roll back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers? and had not their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?"

How silent the night was, how silent the great house! Only his slow footsteps sounded there like the beating of a heavy heart resolved not to fail.

At last they died away from the front of the house, passing inward down a long hallway and growing more muffled; then the sound of them ceased altogether: he stood noiselessly before his mother's door.

He stood there, listening if he might hear in the intense stillness a sleeper's breathing. "Disappointed mother," he said as silently as a spirit might speak to a spirit.

Then he came back and slowly began to mount the staircase.

"Is it then wrong for a man to do right? Is it ever right to do wrong?" he said finally. "Should I have had my fling and never have cared and never have spoken? Is there a true place for deception in the world? May our hypocrisy with each other be a virtue? If you have done evil, shall you live the whited sepulchre? Ah, Isabel, how easily I could have deceived you! Does a woman care what a man may have done, if he be not found out? Is not her highest ideal for him a profitable reputation, not a spotless character? No, I will not wrong you by these thoughts. It was you who said to me that you once loved all that you saw in me, and believed that you saw everything. All that you asked of me was truthfulness that had no sorrow."

He reached the top of the stairs and began to feel his way toward his room.

"To have one chance in life, in eternity, for a white name, and to lose it!"



VIII

Autumn and winter had passed. Another spring was nearly gone. One Monday morning of that May, the month of new growths and of old growths with new starting-points on them, Ambrose Webb was walking to and fro across the fresh oilcloth in his short hall; the front door and the back door stood wide open, as though to indicate the receptivity of his nature in opposite directions; all the windows were wide open, as though to bring out of doors into his house: he was much more used to the former; during married life the open had been more friendly than the interior. But he was now also master of the interior and had been for nearly a year.

Some men succeed best as partial automata, as dogs for instance that can be highly trained to pull little domestic carts. Ambrose had grown used to pulling his cart: he had expected to pull it for the rest of his days; and now the cart had suddenly broken down behind him and he was left standing in the middle of the long life-road. But liberty was too large a destiny for a mind of that order; the rod of empire does not fit such hands; it was intolerable to Ambrose that he was in a world where he could do as he pleased.

On this courageous Monday, therefore,—whatsoever he was to do during the week he always decided on Mondays,—after months of irresolution he finally determined to make a second dash for slavery. But he meant to be canny; this time he would choose a woman who, if she ruled him, would not misrule him; what he could stand was a sovereign, not a despot, and he believed that he had found this exceptionally gifted and exceptionally moderated being: it was Miss Anna Hardage.

From the day of Miss Anna's discovery that Ambrose had a dominating consort, she had been, she had declared she should be, much kinder to him. When his wife died, Miss Anna had been kinder still. Affliction present, affliction past, her sympathy had not failed him.

He had fallen into the habit of lingering a little whenever he took his dairy products around to the side porch. Every true man yearns for the eyes of some woman; and Ambrose developed the feeling that he should like to live with Miss Anna's. He had no gift for judging human conduct except by common human standards; and so at bottom he believed that Miss Anna in her own way had been telling him that if the time ever came, she could be counted on to do the right thing by him.

So Ambrose paced the sticky oilcloth this morning as a man who has reached the hill of decision. He had bought him a new buggy and new harness. Hitched to the one and wearing the other was his favorite roan mare with a Roman nose and a white eye, now dozing at the stiles in the front yard. He had curried her and had combed her mane and tail and had had her newly shod, and altogether she may have felt too comfortable to keep awake. He himself seemed to have received a coating of the same varnish as his buggy. Had you pinned a young beetle in the back of his coat or on either leg of his trousers, as a mere study in shades of blackness, it must have been lost to view at the distance of a few yards through sheer harmony with its background. Under his Adam's apple there was a green tie—the bough to the fruit. His eyes sparkled as though they had lately been reset and polished by a jeweller.

What now delayed and excited him at this last moment before setting out was uncertainty as to the offering he should bear Miss Anna. Fundamental instincts vaguely warned him that love's altar must be approached with gifts. He knew that some brought fortune, some warlike deeds, some fame, some the beauty of their strength and youth. He had none of these to offer; but he was a plain farmer, and he could give her what he had so often sold her—a pound of butter.

He had awaited the result of the morning churning; but the butter had tasted of turnips, and Ambrose did not think that the taste of turnips represented the flavor of his emotion. Nevertheless, there was one thing that she preferred even to butter; he would ensnare her in her own weakness, catch her in her own net: he would take her a jar of cream.

Miss Anna was in her usual high spirits that morning. She was trying a new recipe for some dinner comfort for Professor Hardage, when her old cook, who also answered the doorbell, returned to the kitchen with word that Mr. Webb was in the parlor.

"Why, I paid him for his milk," exclaimed Miss Anna, without ceasing to beat and stir. "And what is he doing in the parlor? Why didn't he come around to the side door? I'll be back in a moment." She took off her apron from an old habit of doing so whenever she entered the parlor.

She gave her dairyman the customary hearty greeting, hurried back to get him a glass of water, inquired dispassionately about grass, inundated him with a bounteous overflow of her impersonal humanity. But he did not state his business, and she grew impatient to return to her confection.

"Do I owe you for anything, Mr. Webb?" she suddenly asked, groping for some clew to this lengthening labyrinthine visit.

He rose and going to the piano raked heavily off of the top of it a glass jar and brought it over to her and resumed his seat with a speaking countenance.

"Cream!" cried Miss Anna, delighted, running her practised eye downward along the bottle to discover where the contents usually began to get blue: it was yellow to the bottom. "How much is it? I'm afraid we are too poor to buy so much cream all at once."

"It has no price; it is above price."

"How much is it, Mr. Webb?" she insisted with impatience.

"It is a free gift."

"Oh, what a beautiful present!" exclaimed Miss Anna, holding it up to the light admiringly. "How can I ever thank you."

"Don't thank me: you could have the dairy! You could have the cows, the farm."

"O dear, no!" cried Miss Anna, "that would be altogether too much! One bottle goes far beyond all that I ever hoped for."

"I wish ail women were like you."

"O dear, no! that would not do at all! I am an old maid, and women must marry, must, must! What would become of the world?"

"You need not be an old maid unless you wish."

"Now, I had never thought of that!" observed Miss Anna, in a very peculiar tone. "But we'll not talk about myself; let us talk about yourself. You are looking extremely well—now aren't you?"

"No one has a better right. It is due you to let you know this. There's good timber in me yet."

"Due me! I am not interested in timber."

"Anna," he said, throwing his arms around one of his knees, "our hour has come—we need not wait any longer."

"Wait for what?" inquired Miss Anna, bending toward him with the scrutiny of a near-sighted person trying to make out some looming horror.

"Our marriage."

Miss Anna rose as by an inward explosion.

"Go, buzzard!"

He kept his seat and stared at her with a dropped jaw. Habit was powerful in him; and there was something in her anger, in that complete sweeping of him out other way, that recalled the domestic usages of former years and brought to his lips an involuntary time-worn expression:

"I meant nothing offensive."

"I do not know what you meant, and I do not care: go!"

He rose and stood before her, and with a flash of sincere anger he spoke his honest mind: "It was you who put the notion in my head. You encouraged me, encouraged me systematically; and now you are pretending. You are a bad woman."

"I think I am a bad woman after what has happened to me this morning," said Miss Anna, dazed and ready to break down.

He hesitated when he reached the door, smarting with his honest hurt; and he paused there and made a request.

"At least I hope that you will never mention this; it might injure me." He did not explain how, but he seemed to know.

"Do you suppose I'd tell my Maker if He did not already know it?" She swept past him into the kitchen.

"As soon as you have done your work, go clean the parlor," she said to the cook. "Give it a good airing. And throw that cream away, throw the bottle away."

A few moments later she hurried with her bowl into the pantry; there she left it unfinished and crept noiselessly up the backstairs to her room.

That evening as Professor Hardage sat opposite to her, reading, while she was doing some needlework, he laid his book down with the idea of asking her some question. But he caught sight of her expression and studied it a few moments. It was so ludicrous a commingling of mortification and rage that he laughed outright.

"Why, Anna, what on earth is the matter?"

At the first sound of his voice she burst into hysterical sobs.

He came over and tried to draw her fingers away from her eyes. "Tell me all about it."

She shook her head frantically.

"Yes, tell me," he urged. "Is there anything in all these years that you have not told me?"

"I cannot," she sobbed excitedly. "I am disgraced."

He laughed. "What has disgraced you?"

"A man."

"Good heavens!" he cried, "has somebody been making love to you?"

"Yes."

His face flushed. "Come," he said seriously, "what is the meaning of this, Anna?"

She told him.

"Why aren't you angry with him?" she complained, drying her eyes. "You sit there and don't say a word!"

"Do you expect me to be angry with any soul for loving you and wishing to be loved by you? He cast his mite into the treasury, Anna."

"I didn't mind the mite," she replied. "But he said I encouraged him, that I encouraged him systematically."

"Did you expect him to be a philosopher?"

"I did not expect him to be a—" She hesitated at the harsh word.

"I'm afraid you expected him to be a philosopher. Haven't you been kind to him?"

"Why, of course."

"Systematically kind?"

"Why, of course."

"Did you have any motive?"

"You know I had no motive—aren't you ashamed!"

"But did you expect him to be genius enough to understand that? Did you suppose that he could understand such a thing as kindness without a motive? Don't be harsh with him, Anna, don't be hard on him: he is an ordinary man and judged you by the ordinary standard. You broke your alabaster box at his feet, and he secretly suspected that you were working for something more valuable than the box of ointment. The world is full of people who are kind without a motive; but few of those to whom they are kind believe this."

Before Miss Anna fell asleep that night, she had resolved to tell Harriet. Every proposal of marriage is known at least to three people. The distinction in Miss Anna's conduct was not in telling, but in not telling until she had actually been asked.

Two mornings later Ambrose was again walking through his hall. There is one compensation for us all in the large miseries of life—we no longer feel the little ones. His experience in his suit for Miss Anna's hand already seemed a trifle to Ambrose, who had grown used to bearing worse things from womankind. Miss Anna was not the only woman in the world, he averred, by way of swift indemnification. Indeed, in the very act of deciding upon her, he had been thinking of some one else. The road of life had divided equally before him: he had chosen Miss Anna as a traveller chooses the right fork; the left fork remained and he was now preparing to follow that: it led to Miss Harriet Crane.

As Ambrose now paced his hallway, revolving certain details connected with his next venture and adventure, the noise of an approaching carriage fell upon his ear, and going to the front door he recognized the brougham of Mrs. Conyers. But it was Miss Harriet Crane who leaned forward at the window and bowed smilingly to him as he hurried out.

"How do you do, Mr. Webb?" she said, putting out her hand and shaking his cordially, at the same time giving him a glance of new-born interest. "You know I have been threatening to come out for a long time. I must owe you an enormous bill for pasturage," she picked up her purse as she spoke, "and I have come to pay my debts. And then I wish to see my calf," and she looked into his eyes very pleasantly.

"You don't owe me anything," replied Ambrose. "What is grass? What do I care for grass? My mind is set on other things."

He noticed gratefully how gentle and mild she looked; there was such a beautiful softness about her and he had had hardness enough. He liked her ringlets: they were a novelty; and there hung around her, in the interior of the carriage, a perfume that was unusual to his sense and that impressed him as a reminder of her high social position. But Ambrose reasoned that if a daughter of his neighbor could wed a Meredith, surely he ought to be able to marry a Crane.

"If you want to see the calf," he said, but very reluctantly, "I'll saddle my horse and we'll go over to the back pasture."

"Don't saddle your horse," objected Harriet, opening the carriage door and moving over to the far cushion, "ride with me."

He had never ridden in a brougham, and as he got in very nervously and awkwardly, he reversed his figure and tried to sit on the little front seat on which lay Harriet's handkerchief and parasol.

"Don't ride backwards, Mr. Webb," suggested Harriet. "Unless you are used to it, you are apt to have a headache," and she tapped the cushion beside her as an invitation to him. "Now tell me about my calf," she said after they were seated side by side.

As she introduced this subject, Ambrose suddenly looked out of the window. She caught sight of his uneasy profile.

"Now, don't tell me that there's any bad hews about it!" she cried. "It is the only pet I have."

"Miss Harriet," he said, turning his face farther away, "you forget how long your calf has been out here; it isn't a calf any longer: it has had a calf."

He spoke so sternly that Harriet, who all her life had winced before sternness, felt herself in some wise to be blamed. And coolness was settling down upon them when she desired only a melting and radiant warmth.

"Well," she objected apologetically, "isn't it customary? What's the trouble? What's the objection? This is a free country! Whatever is natural is right! Why are you so displeased?"

About the same hour the next Monday morning Ambrose was again pacing his hallway and thinking of Harriet. At least she was no tyrant: the image of her softness rose before him again. "I make no mistake this time."

His uncertainty at the present moment was concerned solely with the problem of what his offering should be in this case: under what image should love present itself? The right thought came to him by and by; and taking from his storeroom an ornamental basket with a top to it, he went out to his pigeon house and selected two blue squabs. They were tender and soft and round; without harshness, cruelty, or deception. Whatever they seemed to be, that they were; and all that they were was good.

But as Ambrose walked back to the house, he lifted the top of the basket and could but admit that they did look bare. Might they not, as a love token, be—unrefined? He crossed to a flower bed, and, pulling a few rose-geranium leaves, tucked them here and there about the youngsters.

It was not his intention to present these to Harriet in person: he had accompanied the cream—he would follow the birds; they should precede him twenty-four hours and the amative poison would have a chance to work.

During that forenoon his shining buggy drawn by his roan mare, herself symbolic of softness, drew up before the entrance of the Conyers homestead. Ambrose alighted; he lifted the top of the basket—all was well.

"These pets are for your Miss Harriet," he said to the maid who answered his ring.

As the maid took the basket through the hall after having watched him drive away, incredulous as to her senses, she met Mrs. Conyers, who had entered the hall from a rear veranda.

"Who rang?" she asked; "and what is that?"

The maid delivered her instructions. Mrs. Conyers took the basket and looked in.

"Have them broiled for my supper," she said with a little click of the teeth, and handing the basket to the maid, passed on into her bedroom.

Harriet had been spending the day away from home. She returned late. The maid met her at the front door and a few moments of conversation followed. She hurried into the supper room; Mrs. Conyers sat alone.

"Mother," exclaimed Harriet with horror, "have you eaten my squabs?"

Mrs. Conyers stabbed at a little pile of bones on the side plate. "This is what is left of them," she said, touching a napkin to her gustatory lips. "There are your leaves," she added, pointing to a little vase in front of Harriet's plate. "When is he going to send you some more? But tell him we have geraniums."

The next day Ambrose received a note:

"Dear Mr. Webb: I have been thinking how pleasant my visit to you was that morning. It has not been possible for me to get the carriage since or I should have been out to thank you for your beautiful present. The squabs appealed to me. A man who loves them must have tender feeling; and that is what all my life I have been saying: Give me a man with a heart! Sometime when you are in town, I may meet you on the street somewhere and then I can thank you more fully than I do now. I shall always cherish the memory of your kind deed. You must give me the chance to thank you very soon, or I shall fear that you do not care for my thanks. I take a walk about eleven o'clock.

"Sincerely yours,

"HARRIET CRANE."

Ambrose must have received the note. A few weeks later Miss Anna one morning received one herself delivered by a boy who had ridden in from the farm; the boy waited with a large basket while she read:

"Dearest Anna: It is a matter of very little importance to mention to you of course, but I am married. My husband and I were married at ——— yesterday afternoon. He met me at an appointed place and we drove quietly out of town. What I want you to do at once is, send me some clothes, for I left all the Conyers apparel where it belonged. Send me something of everything. And as soon as I am pinned in, I shall invite you out. Of course I shall now give orders for whatever I desire; and then I shall return to Mrs. Conyers the things I used on my bridal trip.

"This is a very hurried note, and of course I have not very much to say as yet about my new life. As for my husband, I can at least declare with perfect sincerity that he is mine. I have made one discovery already, Anna: he cannot be bent except where he has already been broken. I am discovering the broken places and shall govern him accordingly.

"Do try to marry, Anna! You have no idea how a married woman feels toward one of her sex who is single.

"I want you to be sure to stand at the windows about five o'clock this afternoon and see the Conyers' cows all come travelling home: they graze no more these heavenly pastures. It will be the first intimation that Mrs. Conyers receives that I am no longer the unredeemed daughter of her household. Her curiosity will, of course, bring her out here as fast as the horse can travel. But, oh, Anna, my day has come at last! At last she shall realize that I am strong, strong! I shall receive her with the front door locked and talk to her out of the window; and I expect to talk to her a long, long time. I shall have the flowers moved from the porch to keep them from freezing during that interview.

"As soon as I am settled, as one has so much more time in the country than in town, I may, after all, take up that course of reading: would you object?

"It's a wise saying that every new experience brings some new trouble: I longed for youth before I married; but to marry after you are old—that, Anna, is sorrow indeed.

"Your devoted friend,

"HARRIET CRANE WEBB.

"P.S. Don't send any but the plainest things; for I remember, noble friend, how it pains you to see me overdressed."



IX

It was raining steadily and the night was cold. Miss Anna came hurriedly down into the library soon after supper. She had on an old waterproof; and in one hand she carried a man's cotton umbrella—her own—and in the other a pair of rubbers. As she sat down and drew these over her coarse walking shoes, she talked in the cheery tone of one who has on hand some congenial business.

"I may get back late and I may not get back at all; it depends upon how the child is. But I wish it would not rain when poor little children are sick at night—it is the one thing that gives me the blues. And I wish infants could speak out and tell their symptoms. When I see grown people getting well as soon as they can minutely narrate to you all their ailments, my heart goes out to babies. Think how they would crow and gurgle, if they could only say what it is all about. But I don't see why people at large should not be licensed to bring in a bill when their friends insist upon describing their maladies to them: doctors do. But I must be going. Good night."

She rose and stamped her feet into the rubbers to make them fit securely; and then she came across to the lamp-lit table beside which he sat watching her fondly—his book dropped the while upon his lap. He grasped her large strong hand in his large strong hand; and she leaned her side against his shoulder and put her arm around his neck.

"You are getting younger, Anna," he said, looking up into her face and drawing her closer.

"Why not?" she answered with a voice of splendid joy. "Harriet is married; what troubles have I, then? And she patronizes—or matronizes—me and tyrannizes over Ambrose: so the world is really succeeding at last. But I wish her husband had not asked me first; that is her thorn."

"And the thorn will grow!"

"Now, don't sit up late!" she pleaded. "I turned your bed down and arranged the pillows wrong end out as you will have them; and I put out your favorite night-shirt—the one with the sleeves torn off above the elbows and the ravellings hanging down just as you require. Aren't you tired of books yet? Are you never going to get tired? And the same books! Why, I get fresh babies every few years—a complete change."

"How many generations of babies do you suppose there have been since this immortal infant was born?" he asked, laying his hand reverently over the book on his lap as if upon the head of a divine child.

"I don't know and I don't care," she replied. "I wish the immortal infant would let you alone." She stooped and kissed his brow, and wrung his hand silently, and went out into the storm. He heard her close the street door and heard the rusty click of her cotton umbrella as she raised it. Then he turned to the table at his elbow and kindled his deep-bowled pipe and drew over his legs the skirts of his long gown, coarse, austere, sombre.

He looked comfortable. A rainy night may depress a woman nursing a sick child that is not her own—a child already fighting for its feeble, unclaimed, repudiated life, in a world of weeping clouds; but such a night diffuses cheer when the raindrops are heard tapping the roof above beloved bookshelves, tapping the window-panes; when there is low music in the gutter on the back porch; when a student lamp, throwing its shadow over the ceiling and the walls, reserves its exclusive lustre for lustrous pages—pages over which men for centuries have gladly burnt out the oil of their brief lamps, their iron and bronze, their silver and gold and jewelled lamps—many-colored eyes of the nights of ages.

It was now middle September of another year and Professor Hardage had entered upon the work of another session. The interval had left no outward mark on him. The mind stays young a long time when nourished by a body such as his; and the body stays young a long time when mastered by such a mind. Day by day faithfully to do one's work and to be restless for no more; without bitterness to accept obscurity for ambition; to possess all vital passions and to govern them; to stand on the world's thoroughfare and see the young generations hurrying by, and to put into the hands of a youth here and there a light which will burn long after our own personal taper is extinguished; to look back upon the years already gone as not without usefulness and honor, and forward to what may remain as safe at least from failure or any form of shame, and thus for one's self to feel the humility of the part before the greatness of the whole of life, and yet the privileges and duties of the individual to the race—this brings blessedness if it does not always bring happiness, and it had brought both to him.

He sat at peace beside his lamp. The interval had brought changes to his towns-people. As he had walked home this afternoon, he had paused and looked across at some windows of the second story of a familiar corner. The green shutters, tightly closed, were gray with cobweb and with dust. One sagged from a loosened hinge and flapped in the rising autumn wind, showing inside a window sash also dust-covered and with a newspaper crammed through a broken pane. Where did Ravenel Morris live now? Did he live at all?

Accustomed as he was to look through the distances of human history, to traverse the areas of its religions and see how its great conflicting faiths have each claimed the unique name of revelation for itself, he could not anywhere discover what to him was clear proof either of the separate existence of the soul or of its immortal life hereafter. The security of that belief was denied him. He had wished for it, had tried to make it his. But while it never became a conviction, it remained a force. Under all that reason could affirm or could deny, there dwelt unaccountable confidence that the light of human life, leaping from headland to headland,—the long transmitted radiance of thought,—was not to go out with the inevitable physical extinction of the species on this planet. Somewhere in the universe he expected to meet his own, all whom he had loved, and to see this friend. Meantime, he accepted the fact of death in the world with that uncomplaining submission to nature which is in the strength and sanity of genius. As acquaintances left him, one after another, memory but kindled another lamp; hope but disclosed another white flower on its mysterious stem.

He sat at peace. The walls of the library showed their changes. There were valuable maps on Caesar's campaigns which had been sent him from Berlin; there were other maps from Athens; there was something from the city of Hannibal, and something from Tiber. Indeed, there were not many places in Isabel's wandering from which she had not sent home to him some proof that he was remembered. And always she sent letters which were more than maps or books, being in themselves charts to the movements of her spirit. They were regular; they were frank; they assured him how increasingly she needed his friendship. When she returned, she declared she would settle down to be near him for the rest of life. Few names were mentioned in these letters: never Rowan's; never Mrs. Osborn's—that lifelong friendship having been broken; and in truth since last March young Mrs. Osborn's eyes had been sealed to the reading of all letters. But beneath everything else, he could always trace the presence of one unspoken certainty—that she was passing through the deeps without herself knowing what height or what heath her feet would reach at last, there to abide.

As he had walked homeward this afternoon through the dust, something else had drawn his attention: he was passing the Conyers homestead, and already lights were beginning to twinkle in the many windows; there was to be a ball that night, and he thought of the unconquerable woman ruling within, apparently gaining still in vitality and youth. "Unjailed malefactors often attain great ages," he said to himself, as he turned away and thought of the lives she had helped to blight and shorten.

As the night advanced, he fell under the influence of his book, was drawn out of his poor house, away from his obscure town, his unknown college, quitted his country and his age, passing backward until there fell around him the glorious dawn of the race before the sunrise of written history: the immortal still trod the earth; the human soldier could look away from his earthly battle-field and see, standing on a mountain crest, the figure and the authority of his Divine Commander. Once more it was the flower-dyed plain, blood-dyed as well; the ships drawn up by the gray, the wrinkled sea; over on the other side, well-built Troy; and the crisis of the long struggle was coming. Hector, of the glancing plume, had come back to the city for the last time, mindful of his end.

He read once more through the old scene that is never old, and then put his book aside and sat thoughtful. "I know not if the gods will not overthrow me. . . . I have very sore shame if, like a coward, I shrink away from battle; moreover mine own soul forbiddeth me. . . . Destiny . . . no man hast escaped, be he coward or be he valiant, when once he hath been born."

His eyes had never rested on any spot in human history, however separated in time and place, where the force of those words did not seem to reign. Whatsoever the names under which men have conceived and worshipped their gods or their God, however much they have believed that it was these or it was He who overthrew them and made their destinies inescapable, after all, it is the high compulsion of the soul itself, the final mystery of personal choice, that sends us forth at last to our struggles and to our peace: "mine own soul forbiddeth me"—there for each is right and wrong, the eternal beauty of virtue.

He did not notice the sound of approaching wheels, and that the sound ceased at his door.

A moment later and Isabel with light footsteps stood before him. He sprang up with a cry and put his arms around her and held her.

"You shall never go away again."

"No, I am never going away again; I have come back to marry Rowan."

These were her first words to him as they sat face to face. And she quickly went on:

"How is he?"

He shook his head reproachfully at her: "When I saw him at least he seemed better than you seem."

"I knew he was not well—I have known it for a long time. But you saw him—in town—on the street—with his friends—attending to business?"

"Yes—in town—on the street—with his friends—attending to business."

"May I stay here? I ordered my luggage to be sent here."

"Your room is ready and has always been ready and waiting since the day you left. I think Anna has been putting fresh flowers in it all autumn. You will find some there to-night. She has insisted of late that you would soon be coming home."

An hour later she came down into the library again. She had removed the traces of travel, and she had travelled slowly and was not tired. All this enabled him to see how changed she was; and without looking older, how strangely oldened and grown how quiet of spirit. She had now indeed become sister for him to those images of beauty that were always haunting him—those far, dim images of the girlhood of her sex, with their faces turned away from the sun and their eyes looking downward, pensive in shadow, too freighted with thoughts of their brief fate and their immortality.

"I must have a long talk with you before I try to sleep. I must empty my heart to you once."

He knew that she needed the relief, and that what she asked of him during these hours would be silence.

"I have tried everything, and everything has failed. I have tried absence, but absence has not separated me from him. I have tried silence, but through the silence I have never ceased speaking to him. Nothing has really ever separated us; nothing ever can. It is more than will or purpose, it is my life. It is more than life to me, it is love."

She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress very far from the beginning. After every start, she soon came back to that one beginning.

"It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it: I tried that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes. You must not think that I am acting now from a sense of duty to him or to myself. Duty does not enter into my feeling: it is love; all that I am forbids me to do anything else."

But after a while she went back and bared before him in a way the history of her heart. "The morning after he told me, I went to church. I remember the lessons of the day and the hymns, and how I left the church before the sermon, because everything seemed to be on his side, and no one was on mine. He had done wrong and was guilty; and I had been wrong and was innocent; and the church comforted him and overlooked me; and I was angry and walked out of it.

"And do you remember the day I came to see you and you proposed everything to me, and I rejected everything? You told me to go away for a while, to throw myself into the pleasures of other people; you reminded me of prayer and of the duty of forgiveness; you told me to try to put myself in his place, and reminded me of self-sacrifice, and then said at last that I must leave it to time, which sooner or later settles everything. I rejected everything that you suggested. But I have accepted everything since, and have learned a lesson and a service from each: the meaning of prayer and of forgiveness and of self-sacrifice; and what the lapse of time can do to bring us to ourselves and show us what we wish. I say, I have lived through all these, and I have gotten something out of them all; but however much they may mean, they never constitute love; and it is my love that brings me back to him now."

Later on she recurred to the idea of self-sacrifice: much other deepest feeling seemed to gather about that.

"I am afraid that you do not realize what it means to a woman when a principle like this is involved. Can any man ever know? Does he dream what it means to us women to sacrifice ourselves as they often require us to do? I have been travelling in old lands—so old that the history of each goes back until we can follow it with our eyes no longer. But as far as we can see, we see this sorrow—the sorrow of women who have wished to be first in the love of the men they have loved. You, who read everything! Cannot you see them standing all through history, the sad figures of girls who have only asked for what they gave, love in its purity and its singleness—have only asked that there should have been no other before them? And cannot you see what a girl feels when she consents to accept anything less,—that she is lowered to herself from that time on,—has lost her own ideal of herself, as well as her ideal of the man she loves? And cannot you see how she lowers herself in his eyes also and ceases to be his ideal, through her willingness to live with him on a lower plane? That is our wound. That is our trouble and our sorrow: I have found it wherever I have gone."

Long before she said this to him, she had questioned him closely about Rowan. He withheld from her knowledge of some things which he thought she could better bear to learn later and by degrees.

"I knew he was not well," she said; "I feared it might be worse. Let me tell you this: no one knows him as I do. I must speak plainly. First, there was his trouble; that shadowed for him one ideal in his life. Then this drove him to a kind of self-concealment; and that wounded another ideal—his love of candor. Then he asked me to marry him, and he told me the truth about himself and I turned him off. Then came the scandals that tried to take away his good name, and I suppose have taken it away. And then, through all this, were the sufferings he was causing others around him, and the loss of his mother. I have lived through all these things with him while I have been away, and I understand; they sap life. I am going up to write to him now, and will you post the letter to-night? I wish him to come to see me at once, and our marriage must take place as soon as possible—here—very quietly."

Rowan came the next afternoon. She was in the library; and he went in and shut the door, and they were left alone.

Professor Hardage and Miss Anna sat in an upper room. He had no book and she had no work; they were thinking only of the two downstairs. And they spoke to each other in undertones, breaking the silence with brief sentences, as persons speak when awaiting news from sick-rooms.

Daylight faded. Outside the lamplighter passed, torching the grimy lamps. Miss Anna spoke almost in a whisper: "Shall I have some light sent in?"

"No, Anna."

"Did you tell him what the doctors have said about his health?"

"No; there was bad news enough without that for one day. And then happiness might bring back health to him. The trouble that threatens him will have to be put down as one of the consequences of all that has occurred to him—as part of what he is and of what he has done. The origin of disease may lie in our troubles—our nervous shocks, our remorses, and better strivings."

The supper hour came.

"I do not wish any supper, Anna."

"Nor I. How long they stay together!"

"They have a great deal to say to each other, Anna."

"I know, I know. Poor children!"

"I believe he is only twenty-five."

"When Isabel comes up, do you think I ought to go to her room and see whether she wants anything?"

"No, Anna."

"And she must not know that we have been sitting up, as though we felt sorry for them and could not go on with our own work."

"I met Marguerite and Barbee this afternoon walking together. I suppose she will come back to him at last. But she has had her storm, and he knows it, and he knows there will never be any storm for him. She is another one of those girls of mine—not sad, but with half the sun shining on them. But half a sun shining steadily, as it will always shine on her, is a great deal."

"Hush!" said Miss Anna, in a whisper, "he is gone! Isabel is coming up the steps."

They heard her and then they did not hear her, and then again and then not again.

Miss Anna started up:

"She needs me!"

He held her back:

"No, Anna! Not to help is to help."



X

One afternoon late in the autumn of the following year, when a waiting stillness lay on the land and shimmering sunlight opened up the lonely spaces of woods and fields, the Reaper who comes to all men and reaps what they have sown, approached the home of the Merediths and announced his arrival to the young master of the house: he would await his pleasure.

Rowan had been sitting up, propped by his pillows. It was the room of his grandfather as it had been that of the man preceding; the bed had been their bed; and the first to place it where it stood may have had in mind a large window, through which as he woke from his nightly sleep he might look far out upon the land, upon rolling stately acres.

Rowan looked out now: past the evergreens just outside to the shining lawn beyond; and farther away, upon fields of brown shocks—guiltless harvest; then toward a pasture on the horizon. He could see his cattle winding slowly along the edge of a russet woodland on which the slanting sunlight fell. Against the blue sky in the silvery air a few crows were flying: all went in the same direction but each went without companions. He watched their wings curiously with lonely, following eyes. Whither home passed they? And by whose summons? And with what guidance?

A deep yearning stirred him, and he summoned his wife and the nurse with his infant son. He greeted her; then raising himself on one elbow and leaning over the edge of the bed, he looked a long time at the boy slumbering on the nurse's lap.

The lesson of his brief span of years gathered into his gaze.

"Life of my life," he said, with that lesson on his lips, "sign of my love, of what was best in me, this is my prayer for you: may you find one to love you such as your father found; when you come to ask her to unite her life with yours, may you be prepared to tell her the truth about yourself, and have nothing to tell that would break her heart and break the hearts of others. May it be said of you that you are a better man than your father."

He had the child lifted and he kissed his forehead and his eyes. "By the purity of your own life guard the purity of your sons for the long honor of our manhood." Then he made a sign that the nurse should withdraw.

When she had withdrawn, he put his face down on the edge of the pillow where his wife knelt, her face hidden. His hair fell over and mingled with her hair. He passed his arm around her neck and held her close.

"All your troubles came to you because you were true to the highest. You asked only the highest from me, and the highest was more than I could give. But be kind to my memory. Try to forget what is best forgotten, but remember what is worth remembering. Judge me for what I was; but judge me also for what I wished to be. Teach my son to honor my name; and when he is old enough to understand, tell him the truth about his father. Tell him what it was that saddened our lives. As he looks into his mother's face, it will steady him."

He put both arms around her neck.

"I am tired of it all," he said. "I want rest. Love has been more cruel to me than death."

A few days later, an afternoon of the same autumnal stillness, they bore him across his threshold with that gentleness which so often comes too late—slowly through his many-colored woods, some leaves drifting down upon the sable plumes and lodging in them—-along the turnpike lined with dusty thistles—through the watching town, a long procession, to the place of the unreturning.

They laid him along with his fathers.

THE END