He paused abruptly as he concluded the recital of his speech, and wiped his face with the back of his hand. "I wisht ye could hev hearn them men cheer. They jes' hollered tharse'fs hoarse. They shuck hands till they mighty nigh yanked my arm out'n its socket." With the recollection, he rubbed his right arm with a gesture of pain.

Something there was in the account of this ovation that smote upon the younger brother's sense of values, and he hastened to take possession of it.

"Oh, I knowed I war powerful pop'lar in the Sycamore Gap deestric'," he said, dropping his lowering manner, that had somehow been perceptible in the darkness, and wagging his head from side to side with a gesture of great security in the affections of Sycamore Gap. "Sycamore Gap's all right, I know; I'll poll a big majority thar, sure."

"I reckon ye will; but I warn't so sure o' that at fust," replied the elder. "They 'peared ter me at fust ter be sorter set ag'in us—leastwise me, though arter a while I could hardly git away from 'em, they war so durned friendly."

Walter cast a keen look upon him; but he evidently spoke from his simple heart, and was all unaware that he was personally the source of this sudden popularity in Sycamore Gap—his magnetism, his unconscious eloquence, and his character as shown in the simple and forlorn annals of "Fambly." And yet he was not crudely unthinking. He perceived the incongruity of his brother's successive standpoints.

"I dunno how ye kin purtend ter be so all-fired sure o' Sycamore Gap," he said suddenly. "'T ain't five minutes sence ye war 'lowin' ez pore folks couldn't git 'lected ter office, an' ye wished ye hed hed nothin' ter do with sech, an' 't war me ez bed jes' pushed an' boosted ye inter it."

The resources of subterfuge are well-nigh limitless. Walter Hoxon was an adept in utilizing them. He had seen a warning in the skies, and it had struck terror and discouragement to his heart; but not to his political prospects had he felt its application. Other schemes, deeper, treacherous, secret, seemed menaced, and his conscience, or that endowment to quake with the fear of requital that answers for conscience in some ill-developed souls, was set astir. Nevertheless, the election might suffice as scapegoat.

"Look a-yander, Justus," he said suddenly, pointing with the muzzle of his gun at the brilliant wayfarer of the skies, as if he might in another moment essay a shot. "That thar critter means mischief, sure ez ye air born."

The other stepped back a pace or two, and lifted his head to look.

"The comic?" he demanded. Walter's silence seemed assent. "Laws-a-massy, ye tomfool," Justus cried, "let it be a sign ter them ez run ag'in' ye! Count the comic in like a qualified voter—it kem hyar on account o' the incumbent's incompetence in office. Signs! Rolf Quigley is sign enough,—if ye want signs in 'lections,—with money, an' frien's, an' a term of office, an' the reg'lar nominee o' the party, an' ye jes' an independent candidate. No star a-waggin' a tale aroun' the sky air haffen ez dangerous ter yer 'lection ez him. An' he ain't lookin' at no comic! He looked this evenin' like he'd put his finger in his mouth in one more minute, plumb 'shamed ter his boot-sole o' the things Markham hed said. An' Markham he kem up ter me before a crowd o' fellers, an' says, says he: 'Mr. Hoxon, I meant no reflections on yer fambly in alludin' ter its poverty, an' I honor ye fur yer lifelong exertions in its behalf. I take pride, sir, in makin' this apology.' An' I says: 'I be a' illit'rate, humble man, Mr. Markham; but I will venture the liberty to tell ye ez ye mought take mo' pride in givin' no occasion fur apologies ter poverty.' Them fellers standin' aroun' jes' laffed. I knowed he didn't mean a word he said then, but war jes' slickin' over the things he hed said on Quigley's account, kase the crowd seemed ter favor me. I say, comic! Let Rolf Quigley take the comic fur a sign."

It is easy to pluck up fears that have no root. "Oh, I be goin' ter 'lectioneer all the same ez ever. Whar 's the nex' place we air bound fur?"

Walter put his hand on his brother's shoulder as he asked the question, and in the eager unfolding of plans and possibilities the two, as Justus talked, made their way along the deer-path beside the salt lick, leaving the stars coldly glittering on the ripples, with that wonderful streak of white fire reflected among them; leaving, too, the vaguely whispering woods, communing with the wind as it came and went; reaching the slope of the mountain at last, where was perched, amid sterile fields and humble garden-patch, the little cabin in which "Fambly" had struggled through its forlorn youth to better days.

* * * * *

The door was closed after this. A padlock knocked against it when the wind blew, as if spuriously announcing a visitor. The deceit failed of effect, for there was no inmate left, and the freakish gust could only twirl the lock anew, and go swirling down the road with a rout of dust in a witches' dance behind it. The passers-by took note of the deserted aspect of things, and knew that the brothers were absent electioneering, and wondered vaguely what the chances might be. This passing was somewhat more frequent than was normal along the road; for when the mists that had hung about the mountains persistently during a warm, clammy, wet season had withdrawn suddenly, and one night revealed for the first time the comet fairly ablaze in the sky, a desire to hear what was said and known about it at the Cross-Roads and the settlement and the blacksmith shop took possession of the denizens of the region, and the coteries of amateur astronomers at these centres were added to daily. Some remembered a comet or two in past times, and if the deponent were advanced in years his hearers were given to understand that the present luminary couldn't hold a tallow dip to the incandescent terrors he recollected. There were utilitarian souls who were disquieted about the crops, and anxiously examined growing ears of corn, expecting to find the comet's influence tucked away in the husks. Some looked for the end of the world; those most obviously and determinedly pious took, it might seem, a certain unfraternal joy in the contrast of their superior forethought, in being prepared for the day of doom, with the uncovenanted estate of the non-professor. A revival broke out at New Bethel; the number of mourners grew in proportion as the comet got bigger night by night. Small wonder that as evening drew slowly on, and the flaring, assertive, red west gradually paled, and the ranges began to lose semblance and symmetry in the dusk, and the river gloomed benighted in the vague circuit of its course, and a lonely star slipped into the sky, darkening, too, till, rank after rank, and phalanx after phalanx, all the splendid armament of night had mustered, with that great, glamourous guidon in the midst—small wonder that the ignorant mountaineer looked up at the unaccustomed thing to mark it there, and fear smote his heart.

At these times certain of the little sequestered households far among the wooded ranges got them within their doors, as if to place between them and the uncanny invader of the night, and the threatening influences rife in the very atmosphere, all the simple habitudes of home. The hearthstone seemed safest, the door a barrier, the home circle a guard. Others spent the nocturnal hours in the dooryard or on the porch, marking the march of the constellations, and filling the time with vague speculations, or retailing dreadful rumors of strange happenings in the neighboring coves, and wild stories of turmoil and misfortune that comets had wrought years ago.

It was at one of these makeshift observatories that Justus Hoxon stopped the first evening after his electioneering tour in the interest of his brother. The weather had turned hot and fair; a drought, a set-off to the surplusage of recent rain, was in progress; the dooryard on the high slope of the mountain, apart from its availability for the surveillance of any eccentric doings of the comet, was an acceptable lounging-place for the sake of the air, the dew, the hope of a vagrant breeze, and, more than all, the ample "elbow-room" which it offered the rest of the family while he talked with Theodosia Blakely. The rest of the family—unwelcome wights!—were not disposed to make their existence obtrusive; on the contrary, they did much to further his wishes, even to the sacrifice of personal predilection. Mrs. Blakely, her arms befloured, her hands in the dough, had observed him at the gate, while she stood at the biscuit-block in the shed-room, and although pining to rush forth and ask the latest news from the settlement and the comet, she only called out in a husky undertone: "'Dosia, 'Dosia, yander's Justus a-kemin' in the gate! Put on yer white apern, chile."

Because she had been adjured to put on her white apron, Theodosia did not put it on. She advanced to the window, about which grew, with its graceful habit, a hop-vine. A little slanting roof was above the lintel, a mere board or so, with a few warped shingles; but it made a gentle shadow, and Theodosia thought few men besides the one at the gate would have failed to see her there. He lingered a little, turning back to glance over the landscape, and then he deflected his course toward a rough bench that was placed in a corner of the rail fence, threw himself upon it, and fanned himself with his broad-brimmed hat.

"The insurance o' the critter! I'm a mind ter leave ye a-settin' thar by yerse'f till ye be wore out waitin'," she muttered.

She hesitated a moment, then took her sunbonnet and went out to meet him.

The scene was like some great painting, with this corner in the foreground left unfinished, so minute was the detail of the distance, so elaborate and perfect the coloring of the curves of purple, and amethyst, and blue mountains afar off, rising in tiers about the cup-shaped valley. Above it hung a tawny tissue of haze, surcharged with a deeply red, vinous splendor, as if spilled from the stirrup-cup of the departing sun. He was already out of sight, spurring along unknown ways. The sky was yellow here and amber there, and a pearly flake, its only cloud, glittered white in the midst. Up the hither slope the various green of the pine and the poplar, the sycamore and the sweet-gum, was keenly differentiated, but where the rail fence drew the line of demarkation, Art seemed to fail.

A crude wash of ochre had apparently sufficed for the dooryard; no weed grew here, no twig. It was tramped firm and hard by the feet of cow, and horse, and the peripatetic children, and poultry. The cabin was drawn in with careless angles and lines by a mere stroke or two; and surely no painter, no builder save the utilitarian backwoodsman, would have left it with no relief of trees behind it, no vineyard, no garden, no orchard, no background, naught; in its gaunt simplicity and ugliness it stood against its own ill-tended fields flattening away in the rear.

Such as it was, however, it satisfied all of Justus Hoxon's sense of the appropriate and the picturesque when Theodosia Blakely stepped out from the door and came slowly to meet him. The painter's art, if she were to be esteemed part of the foreground, might have seemed redeemed in her. Her dress was of light blue homespun; her sunbonnet of deep red calico, pushed back, showed her dark brown hair waving upward in heavy undulations from her brow, her large blue eyes with their thick black lashes, her rich brunette complexion, her delicate red lips cut in fine lines, and the gleam of her teeth as she smiled. She had a string of opaque white, wax-like beads around the neck of her dress, and the contrast of the pearly whiteness of the bauble with the creamy whiteness and softness of her throat was marked with much finish. Her figure was hardly of medium height, and, despite the suppleness of youth, as "plump as a partridge," according to the familiar saying. The clear iris of her eyes gave an impression of quick shifting, and by them one could see her mood change as she approached.

She looked at him intently, speculatively, a sort of doubtful curiosity furtively suggested in her expression; but there was naught subtle or covert in the gaze that met hers—naught but the frankest pleasure and happiness. He did not move, as she advanced, nor offer formal greeting; he only smiled, secure, content, restful, as she came up and sat down on the end of the bench. The children, playing noisily in the back yard on the wood-pile, paused for a moment to gaze with callow interest at them; but the spectacle of "The'dosia's sweetheart" was too familiar to be of more than fleeting diversion, and they resorted once more to their pastime. Mrs. Blakely too, who with rolling-pin in her hand had turned to gaze out of the window, went back to rolling out the dough vigorously, with only the muttered comment, "Wish The'dosia didn't know how much I'd like that man fur a son-in-law, then she'd be willin' ter like him better herse'f."

He was unconscious of them all, as he leaned his elbow on the projecting rails of the fence at their intersection close at hand.

"Hev ye hed yer health, The'dosia?" he said.

"Don't I look like it?" she replied laughingly.

There was something both of cordiality and coquetry in her manner. Her large eyes narrowed as she laughed, and albeit they glittered between their closing lids, the expression was not pleasant. Levity did not become her.

"Yes, ye do," he said seriously. "Ye 'pear ter be real thrivin' an' peart an' healthy."

His look, his words, were charged with no sort of recognition or value of her beauty: clearly her challenge had fallen to the ground unnoticed.

"He'd like me jes' ez well ef I war all pitted up with the smallpox, or ez freckled ez a tur-r-key-aig," she thought, flushing with irritation.

Beauty is jealous of preeminence, and would fain have precedence even of love. She could take no sort of satisfaction in a captive that her bright eyes had not shackled. Somehow this love seemed to flout, to diminish, her attractions. It was like an accident. She could account for his subjection on no other grounds. As she sat silent, grave enough now and very beautiful, gazing askance and troubled upon him, he went on:—

"I war so oneasy an' beset lest suthin' hed happened on the mounting, whilst I war away, ter trouble you-uns or some o' yer folks. I never hed time ter study much 'bout sech in the day, but I dreamt 'bout ye in the night, an' all night,"—he laughed a little,—"all sort'n mixed up things. I got ter be a plumb Joseph fur readin' dreams—only I could read the same one forty diff'rent ways, an' every way made me a leetle mo' oneasy than the t'other one. I s'pose ye hev been perlite enough ter miss me a leetle," he concluded.

She flashed her great eyes at him with a pretended stare of surprise. "My—no!" she exclaimed. "We-uns hev hed the comet ter keep us comp'ny—we ain't missed nobody!"

He laughed a little, as at a repartee, and then went on:—

"Waal, the comic war a-cuttin' a pretty showy figger down yander at Colbury. 'Ston-ishin' how much store folks do 'pear ter set on it! They hed rigged up some sort'n peepin'-glass in the Court-House yard, an' thar war mighty nigh the whole town a-squinchin' up one eye ter examinate the consarn through it—all the court off'cers, 'torney-gin'ral, an' sech, an' old Doctor Kane an' Jedge Peters, besides a whole passel o' ginerality folks. They 'lowed the glass made it 'pear bigger."

"Did it?" she asked, with sudden interest.

"Bless yer soul, chile, I didn't hev time ter waste on it. Jedge Peters he beckoned ter me, an' 'lowed he'd interjuce me ter it; but I 'lowed the comic outside war plenty big enough fur me. 'Jedge,' I says, 'my mission hyar air ter make onnecessary things seem small, not magnified. That's why I'm continually belittlin' Rolf Quigley. Wat kin go on lookin' cross-eyed at the stars, ef so minded, but I be bound ter tend ter the 'lection.' An' the jedge laffed and says: 'Justus, nex' time I want ter git 'lected ter office, I'm goin' ter git ye ter boost me in. Ye hev got it a sight mo' at heart than yer brother.' Fur thar war Wat, all twisted up at the small e-end o' the tellingscope, purtendin' ter be on mighty close terms with the comic, though lots o' other men said it jes' dazed thar eyes, an' they couldn't see nuthin' through it, an' mighty leetle arterward through sightin' so long one-eyed."

"Waal, how's the prospects fur the 'lection?" she asked.

"Fine! Fine!" he answered with gusto. "Folks all be so frien'ly everywhar ter we-uns."

He leaned his shoulder suddenly back against the rough rails of the fence. His hat was in his hand. His hair, fine, thin, chestnut-brown, and closely clinging about his narrow head, was thrown back from his forehead. His clear blue eyes were turned upward, with the light of reminiscence slowly dawning in them. It may have been the reflection of the dazzling flake of cloud, it may have been some mental illumination, but a sort of radiance was breaking over the keen, irregular lines of his features, and a flush other than the floridity of a naturally fair complexion was upon his thin cheek and hollow temple.

"O The'dosia," he cried, "I can't holp thinkin', hevin' so many frien's nowadays,—whenst it's 'Hail!' hyar, an' 'Howdy!' thar, an' a clap on the shoulder ter the east, an' a 'How's yer health?' ter the west, an' a handshake ter the north, an' 'Take a drink?' ter the south, from one e-end o' the county ter the t'other,—how I fared whenst I hed jes' one frien' in the worl', an' that war yer mother! An' how she looked the fust day she stood in the door o' my cabin up thar—kem ter nuss Elmiry through that spell she hed o' the scarlet fever. An' arterward she says ter me: 'Ye do manage s'prisin', Justus; an' I be goin' ter save ye some gyardin seed out'n my patch this year, an' ef ye'll plough my patch I'll loan ye my horse-critter ter plough your'n. An' the gals kin kem an' l'arn ter sew an' churn, an' sech, long o' 'Dosia.' An' how they loved ye, 'Dosia—special Elmiry!"

His eyes filled with sudden tears. They did not fall; they were absorbed somehow as he resumed:—

"Sech a superflu'ty o' frien's nowadays! Ef 't warn't they'd count fur all they're wuth in the ballot-box, I'd hev no use fur 'em. I kin sca'cely 'member thar names. But then I hed jes' one—jes' one in all the worl'—yer mother! Bless her soul!" he concluded enthusiastically.

He was still and reflective for a moment. Then he made a motion as though he would take one of Theodosia's hands. But she clasped both of them demurely behind her.

"I don't hold hands with no man ez blesses another 'oman's soul by the hour," she said, with an affectation of primness.

There may have been something more serious in her playful rebuff, but in the serenity of his perfect security he did not feel it or gauge its depth.

A glimpse of her mother at the window added its suggestion—a lean, sallow, lined face, full of anxious furrows, with a rim of scanty gray-streaked hair about the brow, with spectacles perched above, and beneath the flabby jaw a scraggy, wrinkled neck.

"An' she's so powerful pretty!" Theodosia exclaimed, with an irreverent burst of laughter, "I don't wonder ye feel obligated ter bless her soul."

"She 'pears plumb beautiful to my mind," he said unequivocally,—"all of a piece with her beautiful life."

Theodosia was suddenly grave, angered into a secret, sullen irritation. These were words she loved for herself: it was but lately she had learned so to prize them. Her eyes were as bright as a deer's! Had not some one protested this, with a good round rural oath as attestation? Her hair on the back of her head, and its shape to the nape of her neck, were so beautiful—she had never seen it: how could she say it wasn't? Her chin and her throat—well, if people could think snow was a prettier white, he wouldn't give much for their head-stuffin'. And her blush! her blush! It was her own fault. He would not have taken another kiss if she had not blushed so at the first that he must needs again see her cheek glow like the wild rose.

These were echoes of a love-making that had lately taken hold of her heart, that had grown insistently sweet and dear to her, that had established its sway impetuously, tyrannically, over her life, that had caused her to seem more to herself, and as if she were infinitely more to her new lover.

She wondered how she could ever have even tolerated this dullard, with his slow, measured preference, his unquestioning security of her heart, his doltish credulity in her and her promise, his humble gratitude to her mother,—who had often enough, in good sooth, got full value in return for aught she gave,—who appeared "beautiful" to his mind. She broke forth abruptly, her cheeks flushing, her eyes brave and bright, the subject nearest her heart on her lips, in the sudden influx of courage set astir by the mere contemplation of it.

"Waal now, tell 'bout Wat—how he enj'ys bein' a candidate, an' sech." Then, with a tremor because of her temerity: "I have hearn o' that thar beautisome old 'oman a time or two afore, but Wat ez a candidate air sorter fraish an' new."

He turned his clear, unsuspicious eyes upon her. He had replaced his wide wool hat on his head, and he leaned forward, resting his cheek on his hand and his elbow on his knee. He aimlessly flicked his long spurred boot, as he talked, with a willow wand which he carried in lieu of horsewhip.

"Waal, Wat is some similar ter a balky horse. He don't seem ter sense a word I say, nor ter be willin' ter do a thing I advise, nor even ter take heart o' grace 'bout bein' 'lected, till we gets out 'mongst folks, an' thar handshakin's and frien'liness seems ter hearten up the critter. I hev jes' hed ter baig an' baig, an' plead an' plead, with that boy 'bout this an' that an' t'other, till I wouldn't go through ag'in what I hev been through ter git 'lected doorkeeper o' heaven. But," with a sudden change of tone and a flush of pride, "The'dosia, ye dunno what a' all-fired pretty speaker Wat hev got ter be. Jes' stan's up ez straight an' smilin' afore all the crowd, an' jes' tells off his p'ints, one, two, three, ez nip! An' the crowd always cheers an' cheers—jes' bawls itse'f hoarse. Whenever thar's a chance ter speak, Wat jes' leaves them t'other candidates nowhar."

Ah, Theodosia's beauty well deserved the guerdon of sweet words. She might have been pictured as a thirsting Hebe. She had a look of quaffing some cup of nectar, still craving its depths, so immediate a joy, so intense a light, were in her widely open eyes; her lips were parted; the spray of blackberry leaves that she held near her cheek did not quiver, so had her interest petrified every muscle. She was leaning slightly forward; her red sunbonnet had fallen to the ground, and the wind tossed her dark brown hair till the heavy masses, with their curling ends disheveled, showed tendrils of golden hue. Her round, plump arm was like ivory. The torn sleeve fell away to the elbow, and her mother, glancing out of the window, took remorseful heed of it, and wished that she herself had set a stitch in it.

"The'dosia shows herself so back'ard 'bout mendin', an' sech—she air enough ter skeer any man away. An' Justus knows jes' what sech laziness means. Kin mend clothes hisse'f ez good ez the nex' one, an' useter do it too, strong an' taut, with a double thread, whenst the fambly war leetle chil'n an' gin ter bustin' out'n thar gear."

But Justus took no note of the significance of the torn sleeve.

"Why, 'Dosia," he went on, "everybody 'lowed ez Wat's speeches seemed ter sense what the people wanted ter hear. Him an' me we'd talk it over the night before, an' Wat he'd write down what we said on paper an' mem'rize it; an' the nex' day, why, folks that wouldn't hev nuthin' ter say ter him afore he spoke would be jes' aidgin' up through the crowd ter git ter shake han's with him."

She smiled with delight at the picture. If it were sweet to him to praise, how sweet it was to her to listen! "Tell on!" she said softly.

Her interest flattered him; it enriched the reminiscence, dear though his memory held it. He had no doubt as to the unity of feeling with which they both regarded the incidents he chronicled. He went on with the certainty of responsive sentiment, the ease, the serenity of a man who opens his heart to the woman he loves.

"Why, 'Dosia," he said, "often, often if it hed n't been fur the folks, I could hev run up an' dragged him off'n the rostrum an' hugged him fur pride, he looked so han'some an' spoke so peart! An' ter think 't war jes' our leetle Wat—the Fambly's leetle Wat—growed up ter be sech a man! Ye'll laff at me—other folks did—whenst I tell ye that ag'in an' ag'in I jes' cotch' myse'f cheerin' with the loudest. I could n't holp it."

"He'll be 'lected, Justus?" she breathlessly inquired, and yet imperatively, as if, even though she asked, she would brook no denial.

"Oh, they all say thar's no doubt—no doubt at all."

She drew a long breath of contentment, of pleasure. She leaned back, silent and reflective, against the rail fence behind the bench, her eyes fixed, absorbed, following the outline of other scenes than the one before them, which indeed left no impression upon her senses, scenes to come, slowly shaping the future. All trace of the red glow of the sun had departed from the landscape. No heavy, light-absorbing, sad-hued tapestries could wear so deep a purple, such sombre suggestions of green, as the circling mountains had now assumed: they were not black, and yet such depths of darkness hardly comported with the idea of color. The neutral tints of the sky were graded more definitely, with purer transparency, because of the contrast. The fine grays were akin to pearl color, to lavender, even, in approaching the zenith, to the palest of blue—so pale that the white glitter of a star alternately appeared and was lost again in its tranquil inexpressiveness. The river seemed suddenly awake; its voice was lifted loud upon the evening air, a rhythmic song without words. The frogs chanted by the waterside. Fireflies here and there quivered palely over the flat cornfields at the back of the house. There was a light within, dully showing through the vines at the window.

"An' then, 'Dosia," said Justus softly, "when the 'lection is over, it's time fur ye an' me ter git married."

She roused herself with an obvious effort, and looked uncomprehendingly at him for a moment, as if she hardly heard.

"The las' one o' Fambly will be off my han's then. Fambly will hev been pervided fur—every one, Wat an' all. I hev done my bes' fur Fambly, an' I dunno but I hev earned the right ter think some fur myse'f now."

He would not perhaps have arrogated so much, except to the woman by whom he believed himself beloved. She said nothing, and he went on slowly, lingering upon the words as if he loved the prospect they conjured up.

"We-uns will hev the gyardin an' orchard, an' pastur' an' woods-lot an' fields, ter tend ter, an' the cows an' bees, an' the mare an' filly, an' peegs an' poultry, ter look arter. An' the house air all tight, the roof an' all in good repair, an' we-uns will have it all ter ourselves."

She turned upon him with sudden interest.

"What will kem o' Wat?"

"Oh, he mus' live in town whilst sher'ff, bein' off'cer o' the court an' official keeper o' jail, though he kin app'int a jailer."

"Live in Colbury!" she exclaimed in wonderment.

Justus laughed in triumph. "Oh, I tell ye, Wat's 'way up in the pictur's! He'll be a reg'lar town man 'fore long, I reckon, dandified an' sniptious ez the nex' one, marryin' one o' them finified town gals ez wear straw hats stiddier sunbonnets,—though they do look ter be about ez flimsy an' no-'count cattle ez any I ever see," the sterling rural standpoint modifying his relish of Walter's frivolous worldly opportunities.

She tossed her head in defiance of some sudden unspoken thought. As she lifted her eyes, fired by pride, she saw the comet all a-glitter in the darkening sky.

She hardly knew that he had seized her hand; but his importunity must be answered.

"D'rec'ly after the 'lection—'lection day, 'Dosia?" he urged.

"Ain't ye got no jedgmint," she temporized, laughing unmirthfully, "axin' sech a question ez that under that onlucky comet!"

"I hev been waitin' so long, 'Dosia!"

It was the first suggestion of complaint she had ever heard from him.

"Then ye air used ter waitin', an' 't won't kill ye ter wait a leetle longer. I'll let ye know 'lection day."

II.

It was a hot day in the little valley town, the first Thursday in August, the climax of a drought, with the sun blazing down from dawn to dusk, and not a cloud, not a vagrant mist, not even the stir of the impalpable ether, to interpose. The mountains that rimmed the horizon all around Colbury shimmered azure, through the heated air. No wind came down those darker indentations that marked ravines. A dazzling, stifling stillness reigned; yet now and again an eddying cloud of dust would spring up along the streets, and go whirling up-hill and down, pausing suddenly, and settling upon the overgrown shrubbery in the pretty village yards, or on white curtains hanging motionless at the windows of large, old-fashioned frame houses. Even the shade was hot with a sort of closeness unknown in the open air, yet as it dwindled to noontide proportions some alleviation seemed withdrawn; and though the mercury marked no change, all the senses welcomed the post-meridian lengthening of the images of bough and bole beneath the trees, and the fantastic architecture of the shadows of chimney and gable and dormer-window, elongated out of drawing, stretching across the grassy streets and ample gardens. There among the grape trellises, and raspberry bushes, and peach and cherry trees, the locusts chirred and chirred a tireless, vibrating panegyric on hot weather. The birds were hushed; sometimes under a clump of matted leaves one of the feathered gentry might be seen with wings well held out from his panting sides. The beautiful green beetle, here called the "June-bug," hovered about the beds of thyme, its jeweled, enameled green body and its silver gauze wings flashing in the sun, although June was far down the revolving year. Blue and lilac lizards basked in the garden walks, which were cracked by the heat. Little stir was in the streets; the languid business of a small town was transacted if absolute need required, and postponed if a morrow would admit of contemplation. The voters slowly repaired to the polls with a sense of martyrdom in the cause of party, and the election was passing off in a most orderly fashion, there being no residuum of energy in the baking town to render it disorderly or unseemly. Often not a human being was to be seen, coming or going.

To Theodosia it was all vastly different from the picture she had projected of Colbury with an election in progress. In interest, movement, populousness, it did not compare with a county-court day, which her imagination had multiplied when she estimated the relative importance of the events. She had made no allowance for the absence of the country people, specially wont to visit the town when the quarterly court was in session, but now all dutifully in place voting in their own remote districts. The dust, the suffocating heat, the stale, vapid air, the indescribable sense of a lower level—all these affected her like a veritable burden, accustomed as she was to the light and rare mountain breeze, to the tempered sun, the mist, and the cloud. The new and untried conditions of town life trammeled and constrained her. She had a certain pride, and she feared she continually offended against the canons of metropolitan taste. In every passing face she saw surprise, and she fancied contempt. In every casual laugh she heard ridicule. Her brain was a turmoil of conflicting anxieties, hopes, resolutions, and in addition these external demands upon her attention served to intensify her absorbing emotions and to irritate her nerves rather than to divert or soothe them. She had escaped from the relative at whose house she was making a visit, craftily timed to include election day, on the plea that she wished to see something of the town. "Ye don't live up on the mounting, Cousin Anice, 'mongst the deer, an' b'ar, an' fox, like me," she had said jestingly, "or ye'd want ter view all the town ye kin." And once outside the shabby little palings, she returned no more for hours.

Along the scorching streets she wandered, debating within herself anxious questions which, she felt, affected all her future, and unfitting herself still further to reach that just and wise conclusion she desired to compass. She could not altogether abstract her mind, despite the interests which she had at stake. She noticed that her unaccustomed feet stumbled over the flag-stones of the pavement—"Fit fur nothin' but followin' the plough!" she muttered in irritation. She hesitated at the door of a store, then sidled sheepishly in, tearing her dress on a nail in a barrel set well in the corner and out of the way.

But while looking over the pile of goods which she had neither the wish nor the money to purchase, she could have sunk with shame with the sudden thought that perhaps it was not the vogue in Colbury to keep a clerk actively afoot to while away the idle time of a desperately idle woman. She could not at once decide how she might best extricate herself, and for considerable time the empty show of an impending purchase went on.

"I'll—I'll kem an' see 'bout'n it ter-morrer," she faltered at last. "Much obleeged."

"No trouble to show goods," said the martyr of the counter, politely. In truth he had in the course of his career shown them as futilely to women who were much older and far, far uglier, and contemplating purchase as remotely.

She went out scarlet, slow, tremulous, and walking close into the wall like an apprehensive cat, looking now and again over her shoulder. She wondered if he laughed when he was alone.

Her shadow was long now as it preceded her down the street, lank, awkward, clumsy. She took note of the late hour which it intimated, and followed the extravagant, lurching caricature of herself to her cousin's house, a little unpainted, humble building set far back in the yard, against the good time coming when a more ornate structure should be prefixed. The good time seemed still a long way off. Her cousin's ironing-board was on the porch, and presently a lean, elderly, active woman whisked out, her flat-iron in her hand.

"Cousin Anice," called Theodosia from the gate, "how's the 'lection turned out?"

Cousin Anice paused to put her finger in her mouth; thus moistened, she touched it to the flat-iron, which hissed smartly, and which she applied then to the apron on the board.

"Laws-a-massy! chile, the polls is jes' closed, an' all the country deestric's ter be hearn from. We won't know till ter-morrer—till late ter-night, nohow."

Theodosia leaned against the gate. How could she wait! How could she endure the suspense! She thought of Justus, and of her promise to fix the date of the wedding on election day, but only as an additional factor of trouble in her own anxiety and indecision.

"Wat's been hyar ez cross ez two sticks," said Mrs. Elmer. She paused to hold up the apron, exquisitely white, and sheer, and stiff, and to gaze with critical professional eyes upon it; she was what is known as a "beautiful washer and ironer," although otherwise not comely. "Wat's beat plumb out o' sight, ef the truth war knowed, I reckon. He 'lows he's powerful 'feared. Ef't war Justus, now, he'd hev been 'lected sure. Justus is a mighty s'perior man; pity he never hed no eddication. He could hev done anything—sharp ez a brier. Yes; Wat's beat, I reckon."

In the instant Theodosia's heart sank. But she turned from the palings, and sauntered resolutely on. It well behooved her to take counsel with herself. "I mought hev made a turr'ble, turr'ble mistake," she muttered. She was sensible of a sharp pang pervading her consciousness. Nevertheless, judgment clamored for recognition.

"Everybody gins Justus a good name, better'n Wat," she argued. "An' ef Wat ain't 'lected"—

She walked down the street with a freer step, her head lifted, her self-respect more secure. With the possible collapse of her prospect of living in Colbury, and her ambition to adjust herself to the exigent demands of its more ornate civilization, her natural untrained grace was returning to her. She felt that she was certainly stylish enough for the hills, where she was likely to live all her days, and with this realization she quite unconsciously seemed easy enough, unconstrained enough, graceful enough, to pass muster in a wider sphere. Her heart was beating placidly now with the casting away of this new expectation that had made all its pulses tense. The still air was cooler, or at least darker. A roseate suffusion was in the sky, although a star twinkled there. More people were in the streets; doors and windows were open, and faces appeared now and again among the vines and curtains. As she hesitated on the street corner, two young girls in white dresses and with fair hair passed her. She watched them with darkening brow as they drew hastily together, and suddenly she overheard the half-smothered exclamation which had a dozen times to-day barely escaped her ears.

"What a pretty, pretty girl! Oh, my! how pretty, how pretty!"

Theodosia stood like one bewitched; a light like the illumination of jewels was in her sapphire eyes; the color surged to her cheek; she lifted up her head on its round, white throat; her lips curved. "Oh, poor fool!" she thought in pity for herself, for this was what the Colbury people had been saying all day in their swift, recurrent glances, their half-masked asides, their furtive turning to look after her. And she—to have given herself a day of such keen misery unconscious of their covert encomiums!

"I live up thar in the wilderness till I jes' don't sense nothin'," she said.

All the wilting prospects of life were refreshed as a flower in the perfumed dew-fall. She felt competent, able to cope with them all; her restored self-confidence pervaded her whole entity, spiritual and material. She walked back with an elastic step, a breezy, debonair manner, and she met Justus Hoxon at the gate of her cousin's yard with a jaunty assurance, and with all the charm of her rich beauty in the ascendant.

He would fain have detained her in the twilight. "What's that ye promised to tell me 'lection day?"

"I 'lowed the day Wat war 'lected," she temporized, laying her hand on the gate, which his stronger hand kept still closed.

"Waal, this is the day Wat is 'lected."

She drew back. Even in the dim light he could see her blue eyes widening with inquiry as she looked at him.

"I 'lowed the returns warn't all in," she said doubtfully.

"They ain't, but enough hev kem in sence the polls closed ter gin him a thumpin' majority. He's safe." The tense ring of triumph was in his voice.

The scene was swimming before her; she was dazed by the sudden alternations of hope and despair, of decision and counter-decision, by the seeming instability of all this. Once more she thought, in a tremble, and with a difference, of the mistake she might have made. She held to the gate to keep her feet, no longer to open it.

"What did ye promise ter tell me 'lection day?" he demanded once more, clasping her hand as it lay on the palings.

"'Lection day?" she said with a forced laugh—"'t ain't e-ended yit. An'," with a sudden resolution of effecting a diversion—"afore it is e-ended I want ter git a peep through that thar thing they call a tellingscope, ef they let women folks look through it."

He was instantly intent.

"Laws-a-massy, yes!" he exclaimed. "I seen Mis' Dr. Kane and Mis' Jedge Peters, an' thar darters, an' a whole passel o' women folks over thar one night las' week. The young folks jes' amble up an' down the court-house yard, bein' moonlight, like a lot o' young colts showin' thar paces. An' even ef they ain't thar ter-night, I'll take ye over thar arter supper, with yer cousin Anice ter keep ye in countenance."

But after supper there was a sufficiency of fluttering white dresses astir in the court-house yard, and now and again crossing the wide, ill-paved street thither, to warrant Theodosia in dispensing with her cousin's company, much to that sophisticated worthy's relief.

"I hev seen all Colbury's got ter show," she said with sated pride. "An' bein' ez I hev hed a hard day's ironin', I hev got a stitch in my side."

"I'd onderstan' that better if ye hed hed a hard day's sewin'," said Justus. He was in high feather, eager, jubilant, drinking in all the rich and subtle flavors of success with the gusto of personal triumph.

"He air prouder'n Wat," more than one observer opined.

There was another fine exhibition of pride on display in the court-house yard that evening. One might have inferred that Dr. Kane had made the comet, from his satisfaction in its proportions, his accurate knowledge and exposition of its history, its previous appearances, and when its coming again might be expected. He was the principal physician of the place, and the little telescope was his property, and he had thus generously loaned it to the public with the hope of illuminating the general ignorance by a nearer view of the starry heavens, while it served his own and his neighbors' interest in the nightly progress of the great comet. Total destruction had been prophesied as the imminent fate of the telescope, but it had so far justified its owner's confidence in the promiscuous politeness of Kildeer County, and had been a source of infinite pleasure to the country folks from the coves and mountains, who had never before seen, nor in good sooth heard of, such an instrument. For weeks past almost all night curious groups took possession of it at intervals, and doubtless it did much to enlarge their idea of science and knowledge of celestial phenomena, for often Dr. Kane's idle humor induced him to stand by and explain the various theories touching comets,—their velocity, their substance or lack of substance, their recurrence, their status in the astral economy,—and cognate themes. As he was a man of very considerable reading and mental qualifications, of some means for the indulgence of his taste, and a good deal of leisure, the synopsis of astronomical science presented in the successive expositions was very well worth listening to, especially by the more ignorant of the community, who were thus enlightened as to facts hitherto foreign even to their wildest imaginings.

But following hard on every benefaction is the trail of ingratitude, and certain of the irreverent in the crowd found a piquant zest in secret derision of the doctor, who sometimes did, in truth, present the air of a showman with a panorama. More especially was this the case when his enthusiasm waxed high, and his satisfaction in the glories of the comet partook of a positive personal pride.

"What's he goin' ter do about it?" demanded one grinning rustic of another on the outskirts of the crowd.

"Put salt on its tail," responded his interlocutor.

Others affected to believe that the doctor was performing a great feat with the long bow, especially in the tremendous measurements of which he seemed singularly prodigal. A reference to the height of the mountains of the moon as compared with the neighboring ranges elicited a whispered hope that the roads were better there than those of the Great Smoky; and an inquiry concerning the probable fate of the comet provoked a speculation that when he was done with it he would sell it at public outcry to the highest bidder at the east door of the court-house.

Close about the stand, however, the crowd took on something of the demeanor of a literary society. Discussions were in order, questions asked and answered, authorities quoted and refuted: the other physician, who practiced much in consultation with Dr. Kane, two or three clergymen, several of the officers of the court, and a number of lawyers, all taking part. The more youthful members of the gathering affected the role of peripatetic philosophers, and sauntered to and fro, arm in arm, in the light of the waxing moon.

The big black shadows of the giant oaks were all dappled with silver as the beams pierced the foliage and fell to the ground below; only the cornice of the building threw an unbroken image, massive and sombre, on the sward. The low clustering roofs of the town had a thin bluish haze hovering about them, and were all softly and blurringly imposed on the vaguely blue sky and the dim hills beyond. Among them a vertical silver line glinted, sharply metallic,—the steeple of a church. Here and there a yellow light gleamed from a lamp within a window. No sound came from the streets; all the life of the place seemed congregated here.

There was a continual succession of postulants to gaze through the telescope, some gravely curious, some stolidly iconoclastic and incredulous, others with covert levity, and still others, self-conscious, solicitous, secretly determined to affect to see all that other people could see, lest some subtle incapacity, some flagrant rusticity, be inferred from failure. These last were hasty observers, scarcely waiting to adjust the eye to the lens, fluttered, and prolific of inapt exclamations, which too often betrayed the superficial character of the investigation. To this class did Theodosia belong.

"Plumb beautiful!" she murmured under her breath, after a momentary contact of her dazzled eye with the brass rim of the telescope.

"Try ag'in, 'Dosia!" exclaimed Justus, aghast at this perfunctory dismissal of the comet, as she turned to go away.

She winced a little from his voice, clear, vibrant and urgent, for Justus had no solicitude concerning the superior canons of Colbury touching etiquette, and suffered none of her anxieties. She caught Dr. Kane's eyes fixed upon him as she moved hastily away, and then he came up beside Justus, who stood near the telescope.

"Let me explain the thing to you, Hoxon," he said. "Try a peep yourself."

Justus glanced after her. Walter had joined her—not so soon, however, but that she heard a half-suppressed criticism on her lover as he turned to the telescope and Dr. Kane's exposition.

"Pity he's got no education—smart fellow, but can't even read and write."

"Smart" enough to be an apt pupil. The others pressed close around, listening to the measured voice of the physician and the quick, pertinent questions of the star-gazer.

It is as an open scroll, that magnificent, wonder-compelling cult of the skies, not the sealed book of other sciences. Since the days of the Chaldean, all men of receptive soul in solitary places, the sailor, the shepherd, the hunter, or the hermit, whether of the wilderness of nature or the isolation of crowds, have read there of the mystery of the infinite, of the order and symmetry of the plan of creation, of the proof of the existence of a God, who controls the sweet influences of Pleiades and makes strong the bands of Orion. The unspeakable thought, the unformulated prayer, the poignant sense of individual littleness, of atomic unimportance, in the midst of the vast scheme of the universe, inform every eye, throb in every breast, whether it be of the savant, with all the appliances of invention to bring to his cheated senses the illusion of a slightly nearer approach, or of the half-civilized llanero of the tropic solitudes, whose knowledge suffices only to note the hour by the bending of the great Southern Cross. It is the heritage of all alike.

For Justus Hoxon, who had followed the slow march of the stars through many a year in the troubled watches of the night, when anxiety and foreboding could make no covenant with sleep, there was, in one sense, little to learn. He knew them all in their several seasons, the time of their rising, when they came to the meridian, and when they were engulfed in the west, till with another year they sparkled on the eastern rim of the sky. He listened to Dr. Kane's explanation of this with an air of acceptance, but he hardly heeded the detail of their distance from the earth and from one another—he knew that they were far,—and he shook his head over speculations as to their physical condition, vegetation, and inhabitation. "Ye ain't got no sort o' means o' knowin' sech, Doctor," he said reprehensively, gauging the depths of the ignorance of the wise man.

He heard their names with alert interest, and repeated them swiftly after his mentor to set them in his memory. "By George!" he cried delightedly, "I hed no idee they hed names!"

And as the amateur astronomer, pleased with so responsive a glow, began the tracing of the fantastic imagery of the constellations, detailing the story of each vague similitude, he marked the sudden dawn of a certain enchantment in his interlocutor's mind, the first subtle experience of the delights of the ideal and the resources of fable. It exerted upon Dr. Kane a sort of fascinated interest, the observation of this earliest exploration of the realms of fancy by so keen and receptive an intelligence. The comet, the telescope, the crowd, were forgotten, as with Hoxon at his elbow he made the tour of the court-house yard, from point to point, wherever the best observation might be had of each separate sidereal etching on the deep blue. For a time the crowd casually watched them with a certain good-natured ridicule of their absorption, and the telescope maintained its interest to the successive wights who peered through at the comet still splendidly ablaze despite the light of the gibbous moon. The ranks of young people promenaded up and down the brick walks and the grassy spaces. Elder gossips sat on the court-house steps, or stood in groups, and discussed the questions of the day. Gradually disintegration began. The clangor of the gate rose now and then as homeward-bound parties passed through, becoming constantly more frequent. Still the shifting back and forth of the thinning ranks of the peripatetic youth went on, and laughter and talk resounded from the court-house steps. At intervals the telescope was deserted; the motionless trees were bright with the moon and glossy with the dew. The voice of guard-dogs was now and again reverberated from the hills. The languid sense of a late hour had dulled the pulses, and when Justus Hoxon turned back to earth it was to an almost depopulated scene, the realization of the approach of midnight, and the sight of Theodosia sitting alone in the moonlight on the steps of the east door of the court-house, waiting for him with a touching patience, as it seemed to him at the moment.

"Air you-uns waitin' fur me, 'Dosia, all by yerse'f?" he demanded hastily, with a contrite intonation.

"I 'pear to be all by myse'f," she said, with a playful feigning of uncertainty, glancing about her. She gave a forced laugh, and the constraint in her tone struck his attention.

"I 'lowed ez Wat war with ye," he said apologetically. "Air ye ready ter go over ter yer cousin Anice's now?"

He was standing leaning against one of the columns of the portico, his face half in the shadow of his hat and half in the moonlight.

She sat still upon the steps, looking up at him, her upturned eyes taking an appealing expression from her lowly attitude. She was silent for a moment, as if at a loss. Then suddenly her eyes fell.

"'Pears ter me ter be right comical ter hev ter remind ye o' what I promised ter tell ye 'lection day," she said.

"Why, 'Dosia," he broke in vehemently, "I hev axed ye twice ter-day, an' I didn't ax ye jes' now 'kase ye hed been hyar so long alone, an' I wanted ter take ye ter yer cousin Anice's ef so be ye wanted ter go." He stopped for a moment. Then, with a change of tone, "Ye can't make out ez I hev been anything but hearty in lovin' ye—nearly all yer life long!" His voice rang out with a definite note of conviction, of assertion.

Reproach was an untenable ground. She desisted from the effort. Her eyes wandered down the street that lay shadowy with gable, and dormer-window, and long chimneys, in sharp geometric figures in the moonshine, alternating with the deeper shadow of the trees. There were no lights save a twinkle here and there in an upper window.

A flush rose to his pale cheeks. His heart was beating fast with heavy presage. He hesitated to demand his fate at so untoward a moment. He took off his hat, mechanically fanning with its broad brim, and gazing about him at the slowly dulling splendor of the moonlight as the disk tended further and further toward the west. The stars were brightening gradually, and within the range of his vision flared the great comet, every moment the lustre of its white fire intensifying. He only saw; he did not note. His every faculty was concentrated on the girl's drawling voice as she began again, hesitating, and evidently at a loss.

"Waal, I hate ter tell ye, Justus, but I hev ter do it, an' I mought ez well the day that I promised ter set the day. It's—it's—never! I ain't goin' ter marry ye at all!"

He recoiled as from a blow. And yet he could not accept the fact.

"The'dosia," he said, "air ye mad with me 'kase ye 'low I forgot ye this evenin'?"

Theodosia had recovered her poise. Now that she had begun she felt suddenly fluent. It did not accord with her estimate of her own attractions to dismiss a lover because he had forgotten her. She began to find a relish in the situation, and sought to adjust its details more accurately to her preferences.

"Justus, I know ye never furgot me fur one minute. I kin find no fault with yer likin' fur me."

She had never seen a stage. She had never heard of a theatre, but she was posing and playing a part as definitely as if it graced the boards.

He detected a certain spurious note in her voice. It bewildered him. He stared silently at her.

"I can't marry you-uns. I never kin."

"Why?" he demanded in a measured tone. "How kem ye hev changed yer mind? Ye hev told me often that ye would."

"W-a-al," she drawled, looking away at the skies, her unthinking eyes arrested, too, by the blazing comet, "I did 'low wunst I would. But a man with eddication would suit me bes', an' ye hain't got none."

"No more hev ye," he argued warmly. He was clinging for dear life to his vanishing hope of happiness. He did not realize depreciation in his words—only the facts that made them suited to each other. "Ye know ye wouldn't take l'arnin' at school—an' I couldn't git it; 'pears ter me we air 'bout ekal."

"It air a differ in a 'oman," said Theodosia, quickly. "A 'oman hev got no call to be l'arned like a man."

This very subordinate view failed in this instance of the satisfaction it is wont to give to the masculine mind.

"Waal, ye didn't git enough l'arnin' ter hurt ye," he retorted. Then, relenting, he added, "But I don't find no fault with ye fur that nuther."

The color flared into her face. How she resented his clemency to her ignorance! She still sat in her lowly posture on the step, leaning her bare head against the column of the porch, for her bonnet lay on the floor beside her; but there was a suggestion of self-assertion in her voice.

"I ain't expectin' ter live all my days in the woods, like a deer or suthin' wild. I expec' ter live in town with eddicated folks, ez be looked up ter, an' respected by all, an' kin make money, an' hev a sure-enough house." Her ambitious eyes swept the shadowy gables down the street.

He broke out laughing; his voice was softer; his face relaxed.

"Laws-a-massy! Dosia," he exclaimed, "yer head's plumb turned by one day's roamin' round town. Ye won't be in sech a hurry ter turn me off whenst we git back ter the mountings."

"I ain't goin' back ter the mountings!" she cried; "I be a-goin' ter marry a town man ez hev got position, an' eddication, an' place." She paused, stung by the fancied incredulity in his eyes. "Why not? Ain't I good-lookin' enough?"

She had risen to her feet; her eyes flashed upon him; her beautiful face wore a look of pride. It might have elicited from another man a protest of its beauty. He stared at her with an expression of alarm that was almost ghastly.

"Other men like me fur my looks, ef ye don't, Justus Hoxon," she said in indignation.

"Ef they jes' likes ye fur yer looks they won't like ye long," Hoxon said severely. "I'll like ye when yer brown head is ez white ez cotton—ez much ez I like ye now—more!—more, I'll be bound! O 'Dosia," with a sudden renewal of tenderness, "don't talk this hyar cur'ous way! I dunno what's witched ye. But let's go home ter the mountings, ter yer mother, an' see ef she can't straighten out any tangle yer feelin's hev got inter."

It needed only this—the allusion to her commonplace mother, the recollection of the forlorn little mountain home, the idea of her mother's insistent championship of Justus Hoxon—to bring the avowal so long trembling on her lips.

"I won't! I ain't likin' ye nowadays, Justus Hoxon, nor fur a long time past. I ain't keerin' nothin' 'bout ye."

There was something in her tone that carried conviction.

"Air ye in earnest?" he said, appalled.

"Dead earnest."

He gazed at her in the ever dulling light, that yet was clear enough to show every lineament—even the long black eyelashes that did not droop or quiver above her great blue eyes.

"Then thar's no more to be said." He spoke in a changed voice, calm and clear, and she stared at him in palpable surprise. She had expected an outburst of reproach, of beseechings, of protestation. She had braced herself to meet it, and she felt the reaction. She was hardly capable of coping with seeming indifference. It touched her pride. She missed the tribute of the withheld pleadings. She sought to rouse his jealousy.

"It's another man I like," she said, "better—oh, a heap better—than you-uns."

"That's all right, then."

He wondered to hear the words so glibly enunciated. His lips seemed to him stiff, petrifying. He looked very white about them. She did not heed. She was angered, wounded, perplexed, by his acquiescence, his calmness, his taciturnity. A wave of anxiety that was half regret went over her. She felt lost in the turmoil of these complex emotions. With that destructive impulse to hurl down, to tear, to strike, that is an element of a sort of blind irritation, she went on tumultuously:

"He is a man ez hev got eddication, an' a place, an' a fine chance an' show in life—it's—it's—yer brother Walter."

Her aim was true that time. Her shaft struck in the very core of his heart: but the satisfaction of this knowledge was denied her. He looked very white, it is true, but the pale moonlight was on his face; and he only said in an undertone:

"Walter!"

She laughed aloud, a sort of mockery of glee. She had expected to enjoy the revelation, and her laughter was an incident of the scene as she had planned it.

"We war a-courtin' consider'ble o' the time whilst ye war off electioneerin'," she said, with the side glance of her old coquetry.

She saw his long shadow on the pavement bend forward and recoil suddenly. She did not look at him.

"An' so ter-night," she went on briskly,—she had truly thought it a very good joke,—"whilst you-uns war a-star-gazing an' sech, Wat an' me jes stepped inter the register's office thar, an' the Squair married us. We 'lowed ye didn't see nothin' of it through the tellingscope, did ye? So Wat said I must tell ye, ez he didn't want ter tell ye."

She could not see his face, the light was dulling so, and he had replaced his wide hat. There was a moment's silence. Then his voice rang out quite strong and cheerful, "Why, then thar's no more to be said."

He stood motionless an instant longer. Then suddenly he turned with a wave of his hand that was like a gesture of farewell, and she marked how swiftly his shadow seemed to slink from before him as he walked away, and passed the corner of the house, and disappeared from view.

She gazed silently after him for a moment. Then, leaning against the column, she burst into a tumult of tears.

* * * * *

Daylight found Justus Hoxon far on the road to the mountains. In the many miles, as he fared along, his thoughts could hardly have been pleasant company. As he sought to discover fault or flaw in himself, search as he might, he could find naught that might palliate the flippant faithlessness of his beloved, or the treachery of his brother. His ambition might have been too worldly a thing, but not a pulse of that most vital emotion beat for himself. He realized it now—he realized his life in looking back upon this completed episode, as he might have done in the hour of death. He had so expended himself in the service of others that there was naught left for him. He had no gratulation in it, no sense of the virtue of unselfishness, no preception of achievement; it only seemed to him that his was the most flagrant folly that ever left a man in the world, but with no place in it. A sorry object for pride he seemed to himself, but he quivered, and scorched, and writhed in its hot flames. His one object was to take himself out of the sight and sound of Colbury, till he might have counsel within himself, and perfect his scheme of revenge—not upon the woman. Poor Theodosia, with her limitations, could hardly have conceived how she had shattered the ideal to which her image had conformed in his mind, as she had stood on the porch and vaunted her beauty, and her belief in its power, and her pitiful ambitions. The woman was heartily welcome to the lot she had chosen. But the treacherous man,—it was not in Justus Hoxon's scheme of things to receive a blow and return nothing. A "hardy fighter" he was esteemed, albeit his prowess was eclipsed by his more peaceful virtues. This, however, should be returned in kind. He would make no attack to be put in the wrong, arrested, perhaps, after the Colbury interpretation of assault and battery. But Walter had many a weak point in his armor, glaringly apparent now to the once fond brother.

Only a surly, bitter word he had for greeting to the few neighbors whom he met, and who went their way in the conviction that his brother had lost his election; for none ascribed any emotion of Justus Hoxon's to his own sake.

He reached in the evening the little cabin where the padlock hung on the door, and the heavy, untrodden dust of the drought lay without; and so it was that the old days when "Fambly" had struggled through their humble experiences came back to him with that incomparable sweetness of the irrevocable past. Hardships! How could there be, with fond faith in one another, and in all the world! Poverty—so rich they were in love! Life, after all, is more than meat, and there is no hunger like that of a famished heart. He reviewed that forlorn, anxious, struggling orphanage, transfigured in the subtle glow of regretful, loving memory, as one might gaze into the rich glamours of a promised land. Alas, that our promised land should be so often the land we made haste to leave! As he sat down on the step he saw the ragged cluster of children troop down the road from twenty years agone, almost as if he actually beheld them, himself at the head. He could still feel their plump palms clinging to his hand at the first suggestion of danger. He had led them a right thorny path, each to a successful goal. And now could he turn against "Fambly"? Should he denounce the treachery of one of the little group that he could see huddling together for warmth on the meagre hearthstone, while outside the snows of a long-vanished winter were a-whirl? Should he pull down the temple on Walter's success—the pride of them all? He remembered how his sisters, with that feminine necessity of hero-worship in their untaught little hearts, had clung about Walter. He remembered too that almost every thought of his own life had been given to this man, who had ruthlessly and secretly robbed him of all that was dear to him, and in such wise as to hold him up to ridicule, a scoffing jest, a very good joke! So Walter considered it, and so doubtless would all Colbury. It would have surprised Walter, but his sometime mentor's cheek burned with shame for him.

No; the claims of "Fambly" were paramount. He gave it precedence, as in the old days he had denied himself when "Fambly" dined at the skillet, and the bone and the broken bit he took for his share. He could not bring discredit upon it. He would not lift his hand against it. It was the object of a lifelong allegiance, and he only marveled that, since the uses of the loyalty were at an end, the empty life should go on. He gazed mechanically at the padlock as he sat there with his dreary thoughts, remembering with what different heart he had turned the key. Ah, Happiness—to pass out from a door, and knock there never again!

He rose at last, his burden adjusted to his strength. He had never worked for thanks. It hardly mattered to him now how his efforts were requited. And though he encountered treachery at close quarters,—of his own household,—it was not in his heart to be a traitor to "Fambly" and its obvious interests. So he too went out from the door in the footprints of Happiness—likewise to return no more.

* * * * *

Walter Hoxon had not altogether ill-gauged the general proclivity to deem all fair in love or war. He was accounted to have performed something of a feat in the clever outwitting of his unsuspecting rival, and to the minds of the many there was an element of the romantic in this hasty wedding of the damsel of his choice almost under the eyes of the expectant bridegroom. He had added to the prestige of success in politics the lustre of valiance in the lists of love, and he encountered laughing congratulations from his friends and political supporters, which served much to reassure him and to banish a vague and subtle anxiety as to public opinion that had begun to gnaw at his heart. They all seemed to think he had done a very fine thing, and that it was a very good joke, and he was soon most jauntily of their persuasion. He could not know that here and there people were saying to one another, aside, the words he had feared to hear in reproach—that the swain whom he and his lady-love had conspired to dupe was his brother, who had done everything for him—had, as a mere child, encountered and vanquished poverty, had clothed and educated this man and his sisters, had served his every interest with a perfect self-abnegation all his life; that it was his brother who had won his election, being a man of much influence and untaught eloquence, and of great native tact and intelligence; that the secrecy, the conspiracy, and the publicity of the dramatic denouement, in lieu of an open rivalry, rendered it a case of the most flagrant ingratitude, and argued much unworthiness in the people's choice.

But suddenly a doubt began to prevail as to whether he were the people's choice. In the returns from the farthest districts, not heard from till quite late in the day, in which Walter Hoxon had felt secure, Quigley developed unexpected strength. In great perturbation Walter swiftly patrolled the town in search of Justus; unprecedented developments were imminent, and he hardly dared face the emergency without his valiant backer at hand. Justus had disappeared as utterly as if the night had swallowed him up.

"Consarn the tormentin' critter!" exclaimed Walter, mopping his brow as he stood at the little gate of Mrs. Elmer's yard, returning thither, after his fruitless searching, in the hope of finding his brother among the familiar faces. "Mad ez a hornet, I'll be bound, an' lef' me in the lurch. Beat arter all, I'll bet!"

Theodosia listened, tremulous, aghast. All the fine prospects that had seemed so near, into whose charming perspectives she might in another moment have stepped as actually as upon that path to the gate, were drawing away, dissolving, as tenuous, as intangible, as those morning sunlit mists shifting and rising from before the massive blue ranges of the Great Smoky Mountains, and dallying with the distances into invisibility.

"I tole ye ag'in an' ag'in ye bes' not be too sure," she said, a sob in her throat, with an obvious disposition to wreak her disappointment upon him.

It was crushed in the moment.

He turned a frowning face full upon her. "Hold yer jaw!" he cried violently. "Ef 't warn't for you-uns I'd hev Justus hyar, an' I'll be bound he could fix it. Ye miserable deceitful critter—settin' two own brothers at loggerheads! I'll take no word from you-uns—sure!"

He shook his head indignantly at her, clapped his hat upon it, and turned desperately away as a man came running up. "Have ye found Justus?" Wat exclaimed.

"Justus? No. But they say it's a tie—a tie!"

For the news was already bruited throughout the town—in a ferment of excitement, because of the closeness of the contest—that the two candidates, racing gallantly neck and neck, had come under the wire together with not so much as the point of a nose to distinguish the winner.

Walter stood still for a moment, his dark eyes dilated with eagerness and anxiety. Suddenly he leaned back against the gate-post with a deep sigh of relief and relaxation.

"Then it's all right," he exclaimed breathlessly. "The coroner's my frien', ef I ain't got another in the worl'. Old Beckett will stan' by me, sure!"

As the coroner held the election, the sheriff himself being a candidate, it was his duty to give the casting vote. This prolongation of the jeopardy of the result heightened the popular interest, the more as the officer did not immediately decide upon his action in the matter.

"I want a leetle time ter think it over—a leetle time fur the casting vote," he said, as he gnawed at a plug of tobacco, then crossed his ponderous legs while he leaned back in a splint-bottomed chair in the register's office.

He was a tall, portly man, with a large, round imperious face, thatched heavily with iron-gray hair. He wore no beard, and was dressed in brown jeans, which imparted a certain sallowness to his dark complexion. He had small gray eyes, at once shrewd and good-natured, but his manner was bluff, imperative, and all the judiciary of the State could hardly have compassed an expression of a greater sense of importance.

He was observed with much interest by a number of men who lounged about the room. A tense sub-current of curiosity underlay the suspense natural to the occasion, for it was well known to the gossips about the court-house that he and the sheriff had not been on the best of terms; when their official functions had happened to bring them into contact they had clashed smartly, and the county rang with their feuds. His course was obvious to all—his hesitation only an affectation, lest a too vehement animosity be imputed to him.

"Poor Quigley's cake is dough," observed one of the incumbent's friends in an undertone, standing with his hands in his pockets, and gazing through the long dark vista of the hall out of the door into the sunlight's glow, as it fell upon the few houses and the great stretch of arable land beyond. A horizontal shadow of a cloud lay at its extremity, as definite as a material barrier, and far above it rose tiers of green and bronze hills like a moulding to the base of the lapis-lazuli-tinted mountains.

"This never happened in this county before," said the register, glancing up from a big book in which he was copying the doings of "the party of the first part" and "the party of the second part"—the familiar spirits of his den.

"Why, no!" exclaimed the coroner, with a pleased laugh. "To me the castin' vote is ez phee-nomenal an' ez astonishin' ez the comet." He chuckled—the fat man's unctuous laugh. "Something like the comet, too: it has its place in the legal firmament, but 't ain't often necessary to use it."

"That war a toler'ble funny tale 'bout the comet they air a-tellin' roun' town," observed a young countryman pausing in front of the two, his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his red head, a wide grin of enjoyment on his freckled face,—"about the feller that hed his sweetheart a-courtin' out hyar in the yard last night, an' tuk ter lookin' at the comet through the spy-glass, an' whilst he war busy a-star-gazin' the comet, another feller stepped up with the Squair, an' married his gal—ha! ha! ha!"

Beckett looked up interested. Incongruously enough a vein of romance ran through the massive strata of conceit, and intolerance, and vainglory, and pertinacity, and pugnacity that made up the very definite structure of his nature. He dearly loved a lover. He was as sentimental as a girl of eighteen, and he melted instantly into suavest amenities at the first intimation of a love-story in abeyance.

"I ain't heard 'bout that," he said in a mellifluous voice. "Ye know I was tucked up in yonder"—he jerked his thumb over his shoulder—"tendin' to the countin' of the votes, bein' returnin'-officer. Who married?"

"Why this hyar Walter Hoxon—him ez is candidate fur sher'ff," said the red-haired interlocutor, widening his grin.

Beckett elevated his heavy, grizzled eyebrows. A sudden, secret, important look, as if he were colloguing with some one vanquished in argument, crossed his face. He nodded once or twice, but only said acquiescently: "Ah—ha! Ah—ha! Toler'ble enterprisin'. Run fur office an git married 'lection day."

He smiled broadly. Any innovation on the stereotyped methods appealed to him with the grace and relish of a new metre to a neophytic rhymester.

"Wat's a nice boy, a mighty good boy, too," he went on, with his oily voice quite soft. "Run mighty well in this 'lection, too. He's a mighty smart, good boy."

He nodded his big head approvingly. "I don't wonder he cut the t'other feller out. Mighty fine feller Wat is."

"Well, now," said the register, suddenly putting his pen behind his ear, and leaving the party of the first part and the party of the second part to their own devices, "I'm blest if I don't think Justus is worth a hundred of Wat, lock, stock, an' barrel."

Once more the grizzled eyebrows went up toward the iron-gray thatch of the coroner's forehead. "Justus! I'm free ter say I dunno nobody equal ter Justus. I hev known Justus sence he war knee-high ter a pa'tridge—the way he did keer fur them chil'n, an' brung 'em up ter be equal ter anybody in the lan'! An' smart—smart ain't the word fur him! Ef he hed education he could do anything; but he hed ter stan' back an' let the t'other chil'n git it. Whar would Wat be ef 't warn't fur Justus?"

"That's what makes me say 't was a mighty mean trick he played on Justus," the register broke in.

"Who? How?" demanded the coroner.

"Why, Justus was the t'other feller. Wat an' the girl never let him have an inklin' of it. They just fooled him along, believin' she was goin' ter marry him. An' las' night when it was reported all over town that Wat was elected, an' Justus took time from electioneerin' fur his brother to breathe, they tolled him out to look at the comet, an' slipped off an' married."

The man of sentiment, with the election in his hand, sat looking loweringly about him. His satisfaction was wilted; his fat hung flabbily on his big bones; his small eyes were hard and cold.

"Waal," he said, rising at last, "these extry an' occasional opportunities like comets an' castin' votes oughter be took full advantage of—full advantage of; no doubt about that."

And thus it was that the casting vote tipped the scale in favor of the incumbent.

"He's ez hard-headed, an' tyrannical, an' perverse, an' cantankerous a critter ez ever lived, with no feelin's, nor softness, nor perliteness in him—but he's a square man. He'll do the fair thing—every time," the coroner said in explanation.

And so he braced himself for another term of official wrangling.

* * * * *

Poor Theodosia! She never forgot that return home, through all the dust of the drought and the glare of the midsummer sun. Even to herself her nature seemed too small for the magnitude of the various anguish which she was called upon to endure. The sharp alternations of certainty and doubt which she had undergone seemed slight, seemed naught, in comparison with the desolate finality of despair, the fang of hopeless regret, and the dread of the veiled future with which she had made no covenant of expectation or preparation, that preyed upon every plodding step as she went. Her anxiety as to the wisdom of her course was not assuaged by the aghast dismay of her mother's face, when she reached the little house overlooking the encircling mountains,—as still, as meditative, as majestically unmoved, as if no more troublous world existed,—and unfolded the story of her visit to Colbury. She felt for the first time in her life how Justus Hoxon's friend merited his confidence. Her mother had no reproaches, no sarcasms, no outbursts of grief. She addressed herself to the support and the comforting of her daughter, but with so evident a hopelessness and an expectation of bitter things to come that the girl burst out sobbing afresh.

"D' ye think Wat air so wuthless ez all that!"

The discipline of life began for her here. As the price of his political defeat, Walter had scant relish for the triumph he had scored in love. He was surly, taciturn, or else loud with reproaches and criminations, which grew more vehement and contumelious if she answered, seeking to exculpate or justify herself; and if she were silent, her submission seemed to exasperate him and to develop a crafty ingenuity in finding fault. He brooded grimly on his brother's probable exultation when he should return and hear the news of the casting vote. To fortify himself for the encounter he spent much time at the still, and his drunken, reasonless wrath was even more formidable to the object of his displeasure than his sober, surly resentment against her as the cause of all his disasters. But Justus did not come. Walter began to doubt if the news of the untoward result of the election, in which he had spent all his energies, had reached him. He also began to desire, contradictorily enough, that his brother should know it. For although Justus must needs recognize it as a mortal blow to his dearest foe, it had the capacity of doing much execution in its recoil. Justus had had the election so greatly at heart; he had struggled, and planned, and managed with such preternatural activity and tact and energy from the first, that it would smite him hard to know that it was all in vain. And then his vicarious ambitions, his pride, his pleasure, in the elevation of "Fambly"! Walter cast about futilely for an assurance that he might have the satisfaction of reducing all this. He knew that Justus, in his mistaken certainty of the result of the election, would not ask for information, and that he could not read the newspapers. A letter—even if there were any remote presumption as to his address—would lie indefinitely in the mail, and find its way at last to the Dead Letter Office.

Walter realized after a time that Justus intended to return no more—the woman he loved was his brother's wife. Justus had probably put the breadth of the State between them, Walter sneeringly concluded.

He made haste to quarrel with his wife's mother, in his perverse relish of aught that might give Theodosia pain, and they quitted her home and took up their residence in the house in which Theodosia had once expected to live, the scene of the early struggles of "Fambly."

Theodosia's beauty could hardly be said to fade; it disappeared in the overblowing. She grew very fat and unwieldy as the years wore on; her face broadened, her florid complexion degenerated into a mottled red and purple. She was no prettier than her mother had been when she ridiculed her lover's eulogy of her mother's spiritual beauty. She had a hard life with her drunken, idle, slothful husband, who habitually imputed to her agency every evil that had ever befallen him, holding it to excuse him from all exertion to better their very poor estate, and whose affection had been easily kindled by her beauty and as easily extinguished.

* * * * *

Justus, self-exiled from the mountains, tramped the valley roads, hardly caring whither, and drifted finally to the outskirts of one of the large manufacturing towns of Tennessee. He worked for some seasons doggedly, drudgingly, on a farm near by, but found a sort of entertainment in the sights and sounds within the city limits, as having no association with the past which his memory dreaded. He prospered in some sort, for although he was ignorant of all methods of skilled labor, fidelity is an art with so few proficients that friends and opportunities were not lacking. His progress was somewhat hampered, however, despite his evident intelligence, by a doubt which prevailed concerning his mental balance. He was often observed to stand and gaze smilingly, fondly, after any group of ragged, dirty children; he, although of the poorest, was profuse in gratuities to any callow beggar who did not know enough of the world's ways to expect nothing of such as he, as did the older ones. He could not read, but he bought newspapers from the smallest of the guild of newsboys, and meditatively turned the sheets in his hand, and then softly and slowly tore them to bits. And these things created a doubt of his sanity, for who could know how "Fambly" looked at him from the pinched face of every poor, and cold, and hungry child?

At last, despite this unsuspected drawback, a congenial occupation came to him. He was night watchman at a great factory, and as he paced, all solitary, back and forth in the yard, he was wont to note the stars as the infallible seasons brought them into place; and he began to remember their names, and to trace the strange configuration of the constellations, and to con again the stories woven into their shining meshes which he heard at the time that the great comet blazed among them.

And this is his never failing interest—dark summer nights, when the Galaxy opens a broad avenue of constellated light across the heavens, seeming a veritable road, as if it might be the way to God's throne, beaten hard and bright by the feet of saints and martyrs; or when the moon is full, and autumnal glamours reign, and only the faint sidereal outlines prevail; or when winter winds are high, and the snow lies on slanting roofs, and spires gleam with icicles, and Orion draws his scintillating blade; or when, all bedight in scarlet, "Arcturus and his sons" are guided into the vernal sky.



BOOKS BY "Charles Egbert Craddock." (MARY N. MURFREE.)

IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS. Short Stories. 16mo, $1.25.

DOWN THE RAVINE. For Young People. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00.

THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

IN THE CLOUDS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

THE STORY OF KEEDON BLUFFS. For Young People. 16mo, $1.00.

THE DESPOT OF BROOMSEDGE COVE. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

HIS VANISHED STAR. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN. 16mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

THE END