"Oh, no, they wouldn't stand in the way," faltered poor Marg'et Ann.

How could she explain to this muscular fellow, whose pale-faced mother had no creed but what Lloyd thought or wanted or liked, that it was their unspoken grief that made it hard for her? How shall any woman explain her family ties to any man?

Marg'et Ann did not need to consult her father. He looked up from his writing when she entered the door.

"Was that Lloyd Archer, Marg'et Ann?" he asked kindly.

"Yes, sir."

"I'd a little rather you wouldn't go with him. He seems to be falling into a state of mind that is likely to end in infidelity. It troubles your mother and me a good deal."

Marg'et Ann went into the bedroom to take off her riding skirt, and she did not come out until she was sure no one could see that she had been crying.

Mrs. Morrison continued to complain all through the fall; at least so her neighbors said, although the good woman had never been known to murmur; and Marg'et Ann said nothing whatever about her engagement to Lloyd Archer.

Late in October Archie Skinner and Rebecca were married and moved to the Martin Prather farm, and Lloyd, restless and chafing under all this silence and delay, had no longer anything to suggest when Marg'et Ann urged her mother's failing health as a reason for postponing their marriage.

Before the crab-apples bloomed again Mrs. Morrison's life went out as quietly as it had been lived. There was a short, sharp illness at the last, and in one of the pauses of the pain the sick woman lay watching her daughter, who was alone with her.

"I'm real glad there was nothing between you and Lloyd Archer, Marg'et Ann," she said feebly; "that would have troubled me a good deal. You'll have your father and the children to look after. Nancy Helen will be coming up pretty soon, and be some help; she grows fast. You'll have to manage along as best you can."

The girl's sorely troubled heart failed her. Her eyes burned and her throat ached with the effort of self-control. She buried her face in the patchwork quilt beside her mother's hand. The woman stroked her hair tenderly.

"Don't cry, Marg'et Ann," she said, "don't cry. You'll get on. It's the Lord's will."

The evening after the funeral Lloyd Archer came over, and Marg'et Ann walked up the lane with him. She was glad to get away from the Sabbath hush of the house, which the neighbors had made so pathetically neat,—taking up the dead woman's task where she had left it, and doing everything with scrupulous care, as if they feared some vision of neglected duty might disturb her rest.

The frost was out of the ground and the spring plowing had begun. There was a smell of fresh earth from the furrows, and a red-bud tree in the thicket was faintly pink.

Lloyd was silent and troubled, and Marg'et Ann could not trust her voice. They walked on without speaking, and the dusk was deepening before they turned to go back. Marg'et Ann had thrown a little homespun shawl over her head, for there was a memory of frost in the air, but it had fallen back and Lloyd could see her profile with its new lines of grief in the dim light.

"It don't seem right, Marg'et Ann," he began in a voice strained almost to coldness by intensity of feeling.

"But it is right,—we know that, Lloyd," interrupted the girl; then she turned and threw both arms about his neck and buried her face on his shoulder. "Oh, Lloyd, I can't bear it—I can't bear it alone—you must help me to be—to be—reconciled!"

The young man laid his cheek upon her soft hair. There was nothing but hot, unspoken rebellion in his heart. They stood still an instant, and then Marg'et Ann raised her head and drew the little shawl up and caught it under her quivering chin.

"We must go in," she said staidly, choking back her sobs.

Lloyd laid his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him again.

"Is there no help, Marg'et Ann?" he said piteously, looking into her tear-stained face. In his heart he knew there was none. He had gone over the ground a thousand times since he had seen her standing beside her mother's open grave with the group of frightened children clinging to her.

"God is our refuge and our strength, In straits a present aid; Therefore, although the earth remove We will not be afraid,"

repeated the girl, her sweet voice breaking into a whispered sob at the end. They walked to the step and stood there for a moment in silence.

The minister opened the door.

"Is that you, Marg'et Ann," he asked. "I think we'd better have worship now; the children are getting sleepy."

* * * * *

Almost a year before patient, tireless Esther Morrison's eternal holiday had come, a man, walking leisurely along an empty mill-race, had picked up a few shining yellow particles, holding in his hand for an instant the destiny of half the world. Every restless soul that could break its moorings was swept westward on the wave of excitement that followed. Blue Mound felt the magnetism of those bits of yellow metal along with the rest of the world, and wild stories were told at singing-school and in harvest fields of the fortunes that awaited those who crossed the plains.

Lloyd Archer, eager, restless, and discontented, caught the fever among the first. Marg'et Ann listened to his plans, heartsore and helpless. She had ceased to advise him. There was a tacit acknowledgment on her part that she had forfeited her right to influence his life in any way. As for him, unconsciously jealous of the devotion to duty that made her precious to him and unable to solve the problem himself, he yet felt injured that she could not be true to him and to his ideal of her as well. If she had left the plain path and gone with him into the byways, his heart would have remained forever with the woman he had loved, and not with the woman who had so loved him; and yet he sometimes urged her to do this thing, so strange a riddle is the "way of a man with a maid."

Lloyd had indulged a hope which he could not mention to any one, least of all to Marg'et Ann, that the minister would marry again in due season. But nothing pointed to a fulfillment of this wish. The good man seemed far more interested in the abolition of slavery in the South than in the release of his daughter from bondage to her own flesh and blood, Lloyd said to himself, with the bitterness of youth. Indeed, the household had moved on with so little change in the comfort of its worthy head that a knowledge of Lloyd's wishes would have been quite as startling to the object of them as the young man's reasons for their indulgence.

The gold fever had seemed to the minister a moral disorder, calling for spiritual remedies, which he had not failed to administer in such quantity and of such strength as corresponded with the religious therapeutics of the day.

Marg'et Ann hinted of this when her lover came to her with his plans.

She was making soap, and although they stood on the windward side of the kettle, her eyes were red from the smoke of the hickory logs.

"Do you think it is just right, Lloyd?" she asked, stirring the unsavory concoction slowly with a wooden paddle. "Isn't it just a greed for gold, like gambling?"

Lloyd put both elbows on the top of the ash hopper and looked at her laughingly. He had on a straw hat lined with green calico, and his trousers were of blue jeans, held up by "galluses" of the same; but he was a handsome fellow, with sound white teeth and thick curling locks.

"I don't know as a greed for gold is any worse than a greed for corn," he said, trying to curb his voice into seriousness.

"But corn is useful—it is food—and, besides, you work for it." Marg'et Ann pushed her sunbonnet back and looked at him anxiously.

"Well, I've planted a good deal more corn than I expect to eat this year, and I was calculating to sell some of it for gold,—you wouldn't think that was wrong, would you, Marg'et Ann?"

"No, of course not; but some one will eat it,—it's useful," maintained the girl earnestly.

"I haven't found anything more useful than money yet," persisted the young man good-naturedly; "but if I come home from California with two or three bags full of gold, I'll buy up a township and raise corn by the wholesale,—that'll make it all right, won't it?"

Marg'et Ann laughed in spite of herself.

"You're such a case, Lloyd," she said, not without a note of admiration in her reproof.

When it came to the parting there was little said. Marg'et Ann hushed her lover's assurances with her own, given amid blinding tears.

"I'll be just the same, Lloyd, no matter what happens, but I can't let you make any promises; it wouldn't be right. I can't expect you to wait for me. You must do whatever seems right to you; but there won't be any harm in my loving you,—at least as long as you don't care for anybody else."

The young man said what a young man usually says when he is looking into trustful brown eyes, filled with tears he has caused and cannot prevent, and at the moment, in the sharp pain of parting, the words of one were not more or less sincere than those of the other.

* * * * *

The years that followed moved slowly, weighted as they were with hard work and monotony for Marg'et Ann, and by the time the voice of the corn had changed three times from the soft whispering of spring to the hoarse rustling of autumn, she felt herself old and tired.

There had been letters and messages and rumors, more or less reliable, repeated at huskings and quiltings, to keep her informed of the fortunes of those who had crossed the plains, but her own letters from Lloyd had been few and unsatisfactory. She could not complain of this strict compliance with her wishes, but she had not counted upon the absence of her lover's mother, who had gone to Ohio shortly after his departure and decided to remain there with a married daughter. There was no one left in the neighborhood who could expect to hear directly from Lloyd, and the reports that came from other members of the party he had joined told little that poor Marg'et Ann wished to know, beyond the fact that he was well and had suffered the varying fortunes of other gold-hunters.

There were moments of bitterness in which she tried to picture to herself what her life might have been if she had braved her parents' disapproval and married Lloyd before her mother's death; but there was never a moment bitter enough to tempt her into any neglect of present duty. The milking, the butter-making, the washing, the spinning, all the relentless hard work of the women of her day, went on systematically from the beginning of the year to its end, and the younger children came to accept her patient ministrations as unquestioningly as they had accepted their mother's.

She wondered sometimes at her own anxiety to know that Lloyd was true to her, reproaching herself meanwhile with puritanic severity for such unholy selfishness; but she discussed the various plaids for the children's flannel dresses with Mrs. Skinner, who did the weaving, and cut and sewed and dyed the rags for a new best room carpet with the same conscientious regard for art in the distribution of the stripes which was displayed by all the women of her acquaintance; indeed, there was no one among them all whose taste in striping a carpet, or in "piecing and laying out a quilt," was more sought after than Marg'et Ann's.

"She always was the old-fashionedest little thing," said grandmother Elliott, who had been a member of Mr. Morrison's congregation back in Ohio. "I never did see her beat." The good old lady's remark, which was considered highly commendatory, and had nothing whatever to do with the frivolities of changing custom, was made at a quilting at Squire Wilson's, from which Marg'et Ann chanced to be absent.

"It's a pity she don't seem to get married," said Mrs. Barnes, who was marking circles in the white patches of the quilt by means of an inverted teacup of flowing blue; "she's the kind of a girl I'd 'a' thought young men would 'a' took up with."

"Marg'et Ann never was much for the boys," said grandmother Elliott, disposed to defend her favorite, "and dear knows she has her hands full; it's quite a chore to look after all them children."

The women maintained a charitable silence. The ethics of their day did not recognize any womanly duty inconsistent with matrimony. "A disappointment" was considered the only dignified reason for remaining single. Grandmother Elliott felt the weakness of her position.

"I'm sure I don't see how her father would get on," she protested feebly; "he ain't much of a hand to manage."

"If Marg'et Ann was to marry, her father would have to stir round and get himself a wife," said Mrs. Barnes, with cheerful lack of sentiment, confident that her audience was with her.

"I've always had a notion Marg'et Ann thought a good deal more of Lloyd Archer than she let on,—at least more than her folks knew anything about," asserted Mrs. Skinner, stretching her plump arm under the quilt and feeling about carefully. "I shouldn't wonder if she'd had quite a disappointment."

"I would have hated to see her marry Lloyd Archer," protested grandmother Elliott; "she's a sight too good for him; he's always had queer notions."

"Well, I should 'a' thought myself she could 'a' done better," admitted Mrs. Barnes, "but somehow she hasn't. I tell 'Lisha it's more of a disgrace to the young man than it is to her."

Evidently this discussion of poor Marg'et Ann's dismal outlook matrimonially was not without precedent.

One person was totally oblivious to the facts and all surmises concerning them. Theoretically, no doubt, the good minister esteemed it a reproach that any woman should remain unmarried; but there are theories which refinement finds it easy to separate from daily life, and no thought of Marg'et Ann's future intruded upon her father's deep and daily increasing distress over the wrongs of human slavery. Marg'et Ann was conscious sometimes of a change in him; he went often and restlessly to see Squire Kirkendall, who kept an underground railroad station, and not infrequently a runaway negro was harbored at the Morrisons'. Strange to say, these frightened and stealthy visitors, dirty and repulsive though they were, excited no fear in the minds of the children, to whom the slave had become almost an object of reverence.

Marg'et Ann read her first novel that year,—a story called "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which appeared in the "National Era,"—read it and wept over it, adding all the intensity of her antislavery training to the enjoyment of a hitherto forbidden pleasure. She did not fail to note her father's eagerness for the arrival of the paper; and recalled the fact that he had once objected to her reading "Pilgrim's Progress" on the Sabbath.

"It's useful, perhaps," he had said, "useful in its way and in its place, but it is fiction nevertheless."

There were many vexing questions of church discipline that winter, and the Rev. Samuel McClanahan rode over from Cedar Township often and held long theological discussions with her father in the privacy of the best room. Once Squire Wilson came with him, and as the two visitors left the house Marg'et Ann heard the Rev. Samuel urging upon the elder the necessity of "holding up Brother Morrison's hands."

It was generally known among the congregation that Abner Kirkendall had been before the session for attending the Methodist Church and singing an uninspired hymn in the public worship of God, and it was whispered that the minister was not properly impressed with the heinousness of Abner's sin. Then, too, Jonathan Loomis, the precentor, who had at first insisted upon lining out two lines of the psalm instead of one, and had carried his point, now pushed his dangerous liberality to the extreme of not lining out at all. The first time he was guilty of this startling innovation, "Rushin' through the sawm," as Uncle John Turnbull afterwards said, "without deegnity, as if it were a mere human cawmposeetion," two or three of the older members arose and left the church; and the presbytery was shaken to its foundations of Scotch granite when Mr. Morrison humbly acknowledged that he had not noticed the precentor's bold sally until Brother Turnbull's departure attracted his attention.

It is true that the minister had preached most acceptably that day from the ninth and twelfth verses of the thirty-fifth chapter of Job: "By reason of the multitude of oppressions they make the oppressed to cry: they cry out by reason of the arm of the mighty.... There they cry, but none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men." And it is possible that the zeal for freedom that burned in his soul was rather gratified than otherwise by Jonathan's bold singing of the prophetic psalm:—

"He out of darkness did them bring And from Death's shade them take, Those bands wherewith they had been bound Asunder quite he brake.

"O that men to the Lord would give Praise for His goodness then, And for His works of wonder done Unto the sons of men."

But such absorbing enthusiasm, even in a good cause, argued a doctrinal laxity which could not pass unnoticed.

"A deegnifyin' of the creature above the Creator, the sign above the thing seegnified," Uncle Johnnie Turnbull urged upon the session, smarting from the deep theological wound he had suffered at Jonathan's hands.

A perceptible chill crept into the ecclesiastical atmosphere which Marg'et Ann felt without thoroughly comprehending.

Nancy Helen was sixteen now, and Marg'et Ann had taught the summer school at Yankee Neck, riding home every evening to superintend the younger sister's housekeeping.

Laban had emerged from the period of unshaven awkwardness, and was going to see Emeline Barnes with ominous regularity.

There was nothing in the affairs of the household to trouble Marg'et Ann but her father's ever increasing restlessness and preoccupation. She wondered if it would have been different if her mother had lived. There was no great intimacy between the father and daughter, but the girl knew that the wrongs of the black man had risen like a dense cloud between her father and what had once been his highest duty and pleasure.

She was not, therefore, greatly surprised when he said to her one day, more humbly than he was wont to speak to his children:—

"I think I must try to do something for those poor people, child; it may not be much, but it will be something. The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few."

"What will you do, father?"

Marg'et Ann asked the question hesitatingly, dreading the reply. The minister looked at her with anxious eagerness. He was glad of the humble acquiescence that obliged him to put his half-formed resolution into words.

"If the presbytery will release me from my charge here, I may go South for a while. Nancy Helen is quite a girl now, and with Laban and your teaching you could get on. They are bruised for our iniquities, Marg'et Ann,—they are our iniquities, indirectly, child."

He got up and walked across the rag-carpeted floor. Marg'et Ann sat still in her mother's chair, looking down at the stripes of the carpet,—dark blue and red and "hit or miss;" her mother had made them so patiently; it seemed as if patience were always under foot for heroism to tread upon. She fought with the ache in her throat a little. The stripes on the floor were beginning to blur when she spoke.

"Isn't it dangerous to go down there, father, for people like us,—for Abolitionists, I mean; I have heard that it was."

"Dangerous!" The preacher's face lighted with the faint, prophetic joy of martyrdom; poor Marg'et Ann had touched the wrong chord. "It cannot be worse for me than it is for them,—I must go," he broke out impatiently; "do not say anything against it, child!"

And so Marg'et Ann said nothing.

Really there was not much time for words. There were many stitches to be taken in the threadbare wardrobe, concerning which her father was as ignorant and indifferent as a child, before she packed it all in the old carpet sack and nerved herself to see him start.

He went away willingly, almost cheerfully. Just at the last, when he came to bid the younger children good-by, the father seemed for an instant to rise above the reformer. No doubt their childish unconcern moved him.

"We must think of the families that have been rudely torn apart. Surely it ought to sustain us,—it ought to sustain us," he said to Laban as they drove away.

Two days later they carried him home, crippled for life by the overturning of the stage near Cedar Creek.

He made no complaint of the drunken driver whose carelessness had caused the accident and frustrated his plans; but once, when his eldest daughter was alone with him, he looked into her face and said, absently, rather than to her,—

"Patience, patience; I doubt not the Lord's hand is in it."

And Marg'et Ann felt that his purpose was not quenched.

In the spring Lloyd Archer came home. Marg'et Ann had heard of his coming, and tried to think of him with all the intervening years of care and trial added; but when she saw him walking up the path between the flowering almonds and snowball bushes, all the intervening years faded away, and left only the past that he had shared, and the present.

She met him there at her father's bedside and shook hands with him and said, "How do you do, Lloyd? Have you kept your health?" as quietly as she would have greeted any neighbor. After he had spoken to her father and the children she sat before him with her knitting, a very gentle, self-contained Desdemona, and listened while he told the minister stories of California, mentioning the trees and fruits of the Bible with a freedom and familiarity that savored just enough of heresy to make him seem entirely unchanged.

When Nancy Helen came into the room he glanced from her to Marg'et Ann; the two sisters had the same tints in hair and cheek, but the straight, placid lines of the elder broke into waves and dimples in the younger. Nancy Helen shook hands in a limp, half-grown way, blushingly conscious that her sleeves were rolled up, and that her elders were maturely indifferent to her sufferings; and Lloyd jokingly refused to tell her his name, insisting that she had kissed him good-by and promised to be his little sweetheart when he came back.

Marg'et Ann was knitting a great blue and white sock for Laban, and after she had turned the mammoth heel she smoothed it out on her lap, painstakingly, conscious all the time of a tumultuous, unreasonable joy in Lloyd's presence, in the sound of his voice, in his glance, which assured her so unmistakably that she had a right to rejoice in his coming.

She did not see her lover alone for several days. When she did, he caught her hands and said, "Well, Marg'et Ann?" taking up the unsettled question of their lives where they had left it. And Marg'et Ann stood still, with her hands in his, looking down at the snow of the fallen locust-bloom at her feet, and said,—

"When father is well enough to begin preaching again, then I think—perhaps—Lloyd"—

But Lloyd did not wait to hear what she thought, nor trouble himself greatly about the "perhaps."

* * * * *

The minister's injuries were slow to mend. They were all coming to understand that his lameness would be permanent, and there was on the part of the older children a tense, pained curiosity concerning their father's feeling on the subject, which no word of his had thus far served to relieve. There was a grave shyness among them concerning their deepest feelings, which was, perhaps, a sense of the inadequacy of expression rather than the austerity it seemed. Marg'et Ann would have liked to show her sympathy for her father, and no doubt it would have lightened the burdens of both; but any betrayal of filial tenderness beyond the dutiful care she gave him would have startled the minister, and embarrassed them both. Life was a serious thing to them only by reason of its relation to eternity; a constant underrating of this world had made them doubtful of its dignity. Marg'et Ann felt it rather light-minded that she should have a lump in her throat whenever she thought of her father on crutches for the rest of his life. She wondered how Laban felt about it, but it was not likely that she would ever know. Laban had made the crutches himself, a rude, temporary pair at first, but he was at work on others now that were more carefully made and more durable; and she knew from this and the remarks of her father when he tried them that they both understood. It was not worth while to talk about it of course, and yet the household had a dull ache in it that a little talking might have relieved.

Marg'et Ann had begged Lloyd not to speak to her father until the latter was "up and about." It seemed to her unkind to talk of leaving him when he was helpless, and Lloyd was very patient now, and very tractable, working busily to get the old place in readiness for his bride.

Mr. Morrison sat at his table, reading, or writing hurriedly, or gazing absently out into the June sunshine. He was sitting thus one afternoon, tapping the arms of his chair nervously with his thin fingers, when Marg'et Ann brought her work and sat in her mother's chair near him. It was not very dainty work, winding a mass of dyed carpet rags into a huge, madder-colored ball, but there were delicate points in its execution which a restless civilization has hurried into oblivion along with the other lost arts, and Marg'et Ann surveyed her ball critically now and then, to be sure that it was not developing any slovenly one-sidedness under her deft hands. The minister's crutches leaned against the arm of his painted wooden chair with an air of mute but patient helpfulness. Marg'et Ann had cushioned them with patchwork, but he had walked about so much that she already noted the worn places beginning to show under the arms of his faded dressing-gown. He leaned forward a little and glanced toward her, his hand on them now, and she put down her work and went to his side. He raised himself by the arms of his chair, sighing, and took the crutches from her patient hand.

"I am not of much account, child,—not of much account," he said wearily.

Marg'et Ann colored with pain. She felt as a branch might feel when the trunk of the tree snaps.

"I'm sure you're getting on very well, father; the doctor says you'll be able to begin preaching again by fall."

The minister made his way slowly across the room and stood a moment in the open door; then he retraced his halting steps with their thumping wooden accompaniment and seated himself slowly and painfully again. One of the crutches slid along the arm of the chair and fell to the floor. Marg'et Ann went to pick it up. His head was still bowed and his face had not relaxed from the pain of moving. Standing a moment at his side and looking down at him, she noticed how thin and gray his hair had become. She turned away her face, looking out of the window and battling with the cruelty of it all. The minister felt the tenderness of her silent presence there, and glanced up.

"I shall not preach any more, Marg'et Ann, at least not here, not in this way. If I might do something for those down-trodden people,—but that is perhaps not best. The Lord knows. But I shall leave the ministry for a time,—until I see my way more clearly."

His daughter crossed the room, stooping to straighten the braided rug at his feet as she went, and took up her work again. Certainly the crimson ball was a trifle one-sided, or was it the unevenness of her tear-filled vision? She unwound it a little to remedy the defect as her father went on.

"Things do not present themselves to my mind as they once did. I have not decided just what course to pursue, but it would certainly not be honorable for me to occupy the pulpit in my present frame of mind. You've been a very faithful daughter, Marg'et Ann," he broke off, "a good daughter."

He turned and looked at her sitting there winding the great ball with her trembling fingers; her failure to speak did not suggest any coldness to either of them; response would have startled him.

"I have thought much about it," he went on. "I have had time to think under this affliction. Nancy Helen is old enough to be trusted now, and when Laban marries he will perhaps be willing to rent the land. No doubt you could get both the summer and winter schools in the district; that would be a great help. The congregation has not been able to pay much, but it would be a loss"—

He faltered for the first time; there was a shame in mentioning money in connection with his office.

"I have suffered a good deal of distress of mind, child, but doubtless it is salutary—it is salutary."

He reached for his crutches again restlessly, and then drew back, remembering the pain of rising.

Marg'et Ann had finished the ball of carpet rags and laid it carefully in the box with the others. She had taken great pains with the coloring, thinking of the best room in her new home, and Lloyd had a man's liking for red.

And now the old question had come back; it was older than she knew. Doubtless it was right that men should always have opinions and aspirations and principles, and women only ties and duties and heartaches. It seemed cruel, though, just now. She choked back the throbbing pain in her throat that threatened to make itself seen and heard.

"Of course I must do right, Marg'et Ann."

Her father's voice seemed almost pleading.

Of course he must do right. Marg'et Ann had not dreamed of anything else. Only it was a little hard just now.

She glanced at him, leaning forward in his chair with the crutches beside him. He looked feeble about the temples, and his patched dressing-gown hung loose in wrinkles. She crossed the room and stood beside him. Of course she would stay with him. She did not ask herself why. She did not reason that it was because motherhood underlies wifehood and makes it sweet and sufficing; makes every good woman a mother to every dependent creature, be it strong or weak. I doubt if she reasoned at all. She only said,—

"Of course you will do right, father, and I will see about the school; I think I can get it. You must not worry; we shall get on very well."

Out in the June sunshine Lloyd was coming up the walk with Nancy Helen. She had been gathering wild strawberries in the meadow across the lane, and they had met at the gate. Her sunbonnet was pushed back from her crinkly hair, and her cheeks were stained redder than her finger-tips by Lloyd's teasing.

Marg'et Ann looked at them and sighed.

* * * * *

After her brother's return from presbytery Miss Nancy McClanahan borrowed her sister-in-law's horse and rode over to visit the Morrisons. It was not often that Miss Nancy made a trip of this kind alone, and Marg'et Ann ran down the walk to meet her, rolling down her sleeves and smoothing her hair.

Miss Nancy took the girl's soft cheeks in her hands and drew them into the shadow of her cavernous sunbonnet for a withered kiss.

"I want to see your father, Margie," she whispered, and the gentle constraint of spiritual things came into Marg'et Ann's voice as she answered,—

"He's in the best room alone; I moved him in there this morning to be out of the sweeping. You can go right in."

She lingered a little, hoping her old friend's concern of soul might not have obscured her interest in the salt-rising bread, which had been behaving untowardly of late; but Miss Nancy turned her steps in the direction of the best room, and Marg'et Ann opened the door for her, saying,—

"It's Miss McClanahan, father."

The minister looked up, wrinkling his forehead in the effort to disentangle himself from his thoughts. The old maid crossed the room toward him with her quick, hitching step.

"Don't try to get up, Joseph," she said, as he laid his hand on his crutches; "I'll find myself a chair."

She sat down before him, crossing her hands in her lap. The little worn band of gold was not on her finger, but there was a smooth white mark where it had been.

"Samuel got home from presbytery yesterday; he told me what was before them. I thought I'd like to have a little talk with you."

Her voice trembled as she stopped. A faint color showed itself through the silvery stubble on the minister's cheeks; he patted the arms of his chair nervously.

"I'm hardly prepared to discuss my opinions. They are vague, very vague, at best. I should be sorry to unsettle the faith"—

"I don't care at all about your opinions," Miss Nancy interrupted, pushing his words away with both hands; "I only wanted to speak to you about Marg'et Ann."

"Marg'et Ann!" The minister's relief breathed itself out in gentle surprise.

"Yes, Marg'et Ann. I think it's time somebody was thinking of her, Joseph." Miss Nancy leaned forward, her face the color of a withered rose. "She's doing over again what I did. Perhaps it was best for you. I believe it was, and I don't want you to say a word,—you mustn't,—but I can speak, and I'm not going to let Marg'et Ann live my life if I can help it."

"I don't understand you, Nancy."

The minister laid his hands on his crutches and refused to be motioned back into his chair. He stood before her, looking down anxiously into her thin, eager face.

"I know you don't. Esther never understood, either. You didn't know that Marg'et Ann gave up Lloyd Archer because he had doubts, but I knew it. I wanted to speak then, but I couldn't—to her—Esther,—and now you don't know that she's going to give him up again because you have doubts, Joseph. That's the way with women. They have no principles, only to do the hardest thing. But I know what it means to work and worry and pinch and have nothing in the end, not even troubles of your own,—they would be some comfort. And I'm going to save Marg'et Ann from it. I'm going to come here and take her place. I've got a little something of my own, you know; I always meant it for her."

She stopped, looking at him expectantly. The minister turned away, rubbing his hands up and down his polished crutches. There was a soft, troubled light in his eyes.

"Why, Nancy!"

His companion got up and moved a step backward. Her cheeks flushed a pale, faded red.

"Oh, no," she said, with a quick, impatient movement of her head, "not that, Joseph; that died years ago,—you are the same to me as other men, excepting that you are Marg'et Ann's father. It's for her. It's the only way I can live my life over again, by letting her live hers. I don't know that it will be any better; but she will know, she will have a certainty in place of a doubt. I don't know that my life would have been any better; I know yours would not, and anyway it's all over now. I know I can get on with the children, and I don't think people will talk. I hope you're not going to object, Joseph. We've always been very good friends."

He shook his head slowly.

"I don't see how I can, Nancy. It's very good of you. Perhaps," he added, looking at her with a wistful desire for contradiction,—"perhaps I've been a little selfish about Marg'et Ann."

"I don't think you meant to be, Joseph," said the old maid soothingly; "when anybody's so good as Marg'et Ann, she doesn't call for much grace in the people about her. I think it's a duty we owe to other people to have some faults."

Outside the door Marg'et Ann still lingered, with her anxiety about the bread on her lips and the shadow of much serving in her soft eyes. Miss Nancy stopped and drew her favorite into the shelter of her gaunt arms.

"I'm coming over next week to help you get ready for the wedding, Margie," she said, "and I'm going to stay when you're gone and look after things. They don't need me at Samuel's now, and I'll be more comfortable here. I've got enough to pay a little for my board the rest of my life, and I don't mean to work very hard, but I can show Nancy Helen and keep the run of things. There, don't cry. We'll go and look at the sponge now. I guess you'd better ride over to Yankee Neck this afternoon, and tell them you don't want the winter school—There, there!"



At the Foot of the Trail

I

The slope in front of old Mosey's cabin was a mass of purple lupine. Behind the house the wild oats were dotted with brodiaea, waving on long, glistening stems. The California lilac was in bloom on the trail, and its clumps of pale blossoms were like breaks in the chaparral, showing the blue sky beyond.

In the corral between the house and the mountain-side stood a dozen or more burros, wearing that air of patient resignation common to very good women and very obstinate beasts. Old Mosey himself was pottering about the corral, feeding his stock. He stooped now and then with the unwillingness of years, and erected himself by slow, rheumatic stages. The donkeys crowded about the fence as he approached with a forkful of alfalfa hay, and he pushed them about with the flat of the prongs, calling them by queer, inappropriate names.

A young man in blue overalls came around the corner of the house, swinging a newly trimmed manzanita stick.

"Hello, Mosey!" he called. "Here I am again, as hungry as a coyote. What's the lay-out? Cottontail on toast and patty de foy grass?"

The old man grinned, showing his worn, yellow teeth.

"I'll be there in a minute," he said. "Just set down on the step."

The young fellow came toward the corral.

"I've got a job on the trail," he said. "I'm going down-town for my traps. Who named 'em for you?" he questioned, as the old man swore softly at the Democratic candidate for President.

"Oh, the women, mostly. They take a lot of interest in 'em when they start out; they're afraid I ain't good to them. They don't say so much about it when they get back."

"They're too tired, I suppose."

"Yes, I s'pose so."

"You let out five this morning, didn't you? I met them on my way down. The girl in bloomers seemed to be scared; she gave a little screech every few minutes. The others didn't appear to mind."

"Oh, she wasn't afraid. Women don't make a noise when they're scared; it's only when they want to scare somebody else."

The young fellow leaned against the fence and laughed, with a final whoop. A gray donkey investigated his hip pocket, and he reached back and prodded the intruder with his stick.

"You seem to be up on the woman question, Mosey. It's queer you ain't married."

The old man was lifting a boulder to hold down a broken bale of hay, and made no reply. His visitor started toward the cabin. The old man adjusted another boulder and trotted after his guest, brushing the hay from his flannel shirt. A column of blue-white smoke arose from the rusty stovepipe in the cabin roof, and the smell of overdone coffee drifted out upon the spiced air.

"I was just about settin' down," said the host, placing another plate and cup and saucer on the blackened redwood table. "I'll fry you some more bacon and eggs."

The visitor watched him as he hurried about with the short, uncertain steps of hospitable old age.

"By gum, Mosey, I'd marry a grass-widow with a second-hand family before I'd do my own cooking."

The young fellow gave a self-conscious laugh that made the old man glance at him from under his weather-beaten straw hat.

"Your mind seems to run on marryin'," he said; "guess you're hungry. Set up and have some breakfast."

The visitor drew up a wooden chair, and the old man poured two cups of black coffee from the smoke-begrimed coffee-pot and returned it to the stove. Then he took off his hat and seated himself opposite his guest. The latter stirred three heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar into his cup, muddied the resulting syrup with condensed milk, and drank it with the relish of abnormal health.

"I tell you what, Mosey," he said, reaching for a slice of bacon and dripping the grease across the table, "there ain't any flies on the women when it comes to housekeeping. Now, a woman would turn on the soapsuds and float you clean out of this house; then she'd mop up, and put scalloped noospapers on all the shelves, and little white aprons on the windows, and pillow-shams on your bunk, and she'd work a doily for you to lay your six-shooter on, with 'God bless our home' in the corner of it; and she'd make you so comfortable you wouldn't know what to do with yourself."

"I'm comfortable enough by myself," said the old man uneasily. "When you work for yourself, you know who's boss."

"Naw, you don't, Mosey, not by a long shot; you don't know whether you're boss or the cookin'. I tried bachin' once"—the speaker made a grimace of reminiscent disgust; "the taste hasn't gone out of my mouth yet. You're a pretty fair cook, Mosey, but you'd ought to see my girl's biscuits; she makes 'em so light she has to put a napkin over 'em to keep 'em from floating around like feathers. Fact!" He reached over and speared a slice of bread with his fork. "If I keep this job on the trail, maybe you'll have a chance to sample them biscuits. I'm goin' to send East for that girl."

"Where you goin' to live?"

"Well, I didn't know but we could rent this ranch and board you, Mosey. Seems to me you ought to retire. It ain't human to live this way. If you was to die here all by yourself, you'd regret it. Well, I must toddle."

The visitor stood a moment on the step, sweeping the valley with his fresh young glance; then he set his hat on the back of his head and went whistling down the road, waving his stick at old Mosey as he disappeared among the sycamores in the wash. The old man gathered the dishes into a rusty pan, and scalded them with boiling water from the kettle.

"I believe I'll do it," he said, as he fished the hot saucers out by their edges and turned them down on the table; "it can't do no harm to write to her, no way."

II

Mrs. Moxom put on her slat sunbonnet, took a tin pan from the pantry shelf, and hurried across the kitchen toward the door. Her daughter-in-law looked up from the corner where she was kneading bread. She was a short, plump woman, and all of her convexities seemed emphasized by flour. She put up the back of her hand to adjust a loosened lock of hair, and added another high light to her forehead.

"Where you going, mother?" she called anxiously.

The old woman did not turn her head.

"Oh, just out to see how the lettuce is coming on. I had a notion I'd like some for dinner, wilted with ham gravy."

"Can't one of the children get it?"

There was no response. Mrs. Weaver turned back to her bread.

"Your grandmother seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue paper of an enervating magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal reminiscences of a ship that never returned.

"Oh, well, mother," said that young person comfortably, "let her alone. I think we all tag her too much. I hate to be tagged myself."

"Well, I'm sure I don't want to tag her, Ethel; I just don't want her to overdo."

Mrs. Weaver spoke in a tone of mingled injury and self-justification.

"Oh, well, mother, she isn't likely to put her shoulder out of joint pulling a few heads of lettuce."

The girl broke out again into cheerful interrogations concerning the disaster at sea:—

"Did she neverr returren? No, she neverr returrened."

Mrs. Weaver gave a little sigh, as if she feared her daughter's words might prove prophetic, and buried her plump fists in the puffy dough.

Old Mrs. Moxom turned when she reached the garden gate and glanced back at the house. Then she clasped the pan to her breast and skurried along the fence toward the orchard. Once under the trees, she did not look behind her, but went rapidly toward the field where she knew her son was plowing. The reflection of the sun on the tin pan made him look up, and when he saw her he stopped his team. She came across the soft brown furrows to his side.

"I'd have come to the fence when I saw you, if I hadn't had the colt," he said kindly. "What's wanted?"

The old woman's face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one trembling hand.

"Jason," she said, with a little jerk in her voice, "your paw's alive."

The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt's back; then he took off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment.

"I expect you'd 'most forgot all about him," pursued the old woman, with a vague reproach in her tone.

"I hadn't much to forget," answered the man, resentment rising in his voice. "He hasn't troubled himself about me."

"Well, he didn't know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon after we was married. It's a dreadful position to be placed in. It 'u'd be awfully embarrassing to—to the Moxom girls."

The man gave her a quick, curious glance. He had never heard her speak of his half-sisters in that way before.

"They're so kind of high-toned," she went on, "just as like as not they'd blame me. I'm sure I don't know what to do."

Jason kicked the soft earth with his sunburnt boot.

"Where is he?" he asked sullenly.

"In Californay."

"How'd you hear?"

"I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs. Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle Samuel's folks, and they put it in another envelope and backed it to me here. I thought at first I wouldn't say anything about it, but it seemed as if I'd ought to tell you; it doesn't hurt you any, but it's awful hard on the—the Moxom girls."

The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot.

"Well, I'd just give him the go-by," he announced resolutely. "You're a decent man's widow, and that's enough. He's never"—

"Oh, I ain't saying anything against your step-paw, Jason," the old woman broke in anxiously. "He was an awful good man. It seems queer to think it was the way it was. Dear me, it's all so kind of confusing!"

The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her matrimonial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by twins.

"I'm sure I don't see how I could help thinking he was dead," she went on after a little silence, "when he wrote he was going off on that trip and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they got lost from each other, and water was so scarce and all that. And then, you know, I didn't get married again till you was 'most ten years old, Jason. I'm sure I don't know what to do. I don't want to mortify anybody, but I'd like to know just what's my dooty."

"Well, I can tell you easy enough." The man's voice was getting beyond control, but he drew it in with a quick, angry breath. "Just drop the whole thing. If he's got on for forty years, mother, I guess he can manage for the rest of the time."

"But it ain't so easy managin' when you begin to get old, Jason. I know how that is."

Her son jerked the lines impatiently, and the colt gave a nervous start.

"I suppose you know this farm really came to you from your paw, don't you, Jason?" she asked humbly.

"Don't know as I did," answered the man, without enthusiasm.

"Well, you see, after we was married, your grandfather Weaver offered your paw this quarter-section if he'd stay here in Ioway; but he had his heart set on going to Californay, and didn't want it; so after it turned out the way it did, and you was born, your grandfather gave me this farm, and I done very well with it. That's the reason your step-paw insisted on you having it when we was dividing things up before he died."

"Seems to me father worked pretty hard on this place himself."

The man said the word "father" half defiantly.

"Mr. Moxom? Oh, yes, he was a first-rate manager, and the kindest man that ever drew breath. I remember when your sister Angie was born—oh, dear me!"—the old woman felt her voice giving way, and stopped an instant,—"it seems so kind of strange. Well, I guess we'd better just drop it, Jason. I must go back to the house. Emma didn't like my coming for lettuce. She'll think I've planted some, and am waitin' for it to come up."

She gave her son a quivering smile as she turned away. He stood still and watched her until she had crossed the plowed ground. It seemed to him she walked more feebly than when she came out.

"That's awful queer," he said, shaking his head, "calling her own daughters 'the Moxom girls.'"

III

Ethel Weaver had been to Ashland for the mail, and was driving home in the summer dusk. A dash of rain had fallen while she was in the village, and the air was full of the odor of moist earth and the sweetness of growing corn. The colt she was driving held his head high, glancing from side to side with youthful eagerness for a sensation, and shying at nothing now and then in sheer excess of emotion over the demand of his monotonous life.

The girl held a letter in her lap, turning the pages with one unincumbered hand, and lifting her flushed face with a contemptuous "Oh, Barney, you goose!" as the colt drew himself into attitudes of quivering fright, which dissolved suddenly at the sound of her voice and the knowledge that another young creature viewed his coquettish terrors with the disrespect born of comprehension. As they turned into the lane west of the house, Ethel folded her letter and thrust it hastily into her pocket, and the colt darted through the open gate and drew up at the side door with a transparent assumption of serious purpose suggested by the proximity of oats.

"Ed!" called the girl, "the next time you hitch up Barney for me, I wish you'd put a kicking-strap on him. I had a picnic with him coming down the hill by Arbuckle's."

Ed maintained the gruff silence of the half-grown rural male as he climbed into the buggy beside his sister and cramped the wheel for her to dismount.

"They haven't any quart jars over at the store, mother," said Ethel, entering the house and walking across to the mirror to remove her hat. "They're expecting some every day. Well, I do look like the Witch of Endor!" she exclaimed, twisting her loosened rope of hair and skewering it in place with a white celluloid pin. "That colt acted as if he was possessed."

"Oh, I'm sorry about the jars," said Mrs. Weaver regretfully. "I wanted to finish putting up the curr'n's to-morrow."

"Did you get any mail?" quavered grandmother Moxom.

"I got a letter from Rob."

There was a little hush in the room. The girl stood still before the mirror, with a sense of support in the dim reflection of her own face.

"Is he well?" ventured the old woman feebly, glancing toward her daughter-in-law.

"Yes, he's well; he's got steady work on some road up the mountain. He writes as if people keep going up, but he never tells what they go up for. He said something about a lot of burros, and at first I thought he was in a furniture store, but I found out he meant mules. An old man keeps them, and hires them out to people. Rob calls him 'old Mosey.' They're keeping bach together. Rob tried to make biscuits, and he says they tasted like castor oil."

As her granddaughter talked, Mrs. Moxom seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into the patchwork cushion of her chair.

"Rob wants me to come out there and be married," pursued the girl, bending nearer to the mirror and returning her own gaze with sympathy.

"Why, Ethel!" Mrs. Weaver's voice was full of astonished disapproval. "I should think you'd be ashamed to say such a thing."

"I didn't say it; Rob said it," returned the girl, making a little grimace at herself in the glass.

"Well, I have my opinion of a young man that will say such a thing to a girl. If a girl's worth having, she's worth coming after."

Mrs. Weaver made this latter announcement with an air of triumph in its triteness. Her daughter gave a little sniff of contempt.

"Well, if a fellow's worth having, isn't he worth going to?" she asked with would-be flippancy.

"Why, Ethel Imogen Weaver!" Mrs. Weaver repeated her daughter's name slowly, as if she hoped its length might arouse in the owner some sense of her worth. "I never did hear the like."

The girl left the mirror, and seated herself in a chair in front of her mother.

"It'll cost Rob a hundred dollars to come here and go back to California, and a hundred dollars goes a long way toward fixing up. Besides, he'll lose his job. I'd just as soon go out there as have him come here. If people don't like it they—they needn't."

The girl's fresh young voice began to thicken, and she glanced about in restless search of diversion from impending tears.

"Well, girls do act awful strange these days."

Mrs. Weaver took warning from her daughter's tone and divided her disapproval by multiplying its denominator.

"Yes, they do. They act sometimes as if they had a little sense," retorted Ethel huskily.

"Well, I don't know as I call it sense to pick up and run after a man, even if you're engaged to him; do you, mother?"

Old Mrs. Moxom started nervously at her daughter-in-law's appeal.

"Well, it does seem a long way to go on—on an uncertainty, Ethel," she faltered.

The girl turned a flushed, indignant face upon her grandmother.

"Well, I hope you don't mean to call Rob an uncertainty?" she demanded angrily.

"Oh, no; I don't mean that," pleaded the old woman. "I haven't got anything agen' Rob. I don't suppose he's any more uncertain than—than the rest of them. I"—

"Why, grandmother Moxom," interrupted the girl, "how you talk! I'm sure father isn't an uncertainty, and there wasn't anything uncertain about grandfather Moxom. To tell the honest truth, I think they're just about as certain as we are."

The old woman got up and began to move the chairs about with purposeless industry.

"It's awful hard to know what to do sometimes," she said, indulging in a generality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering.

"Well, it isn't hard for me to know this time," said Mrs. Weaver, her features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. "No girl of mine shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose chase."

Ethel got up and moved toward the stairway, her tawny head thrown back, and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread.

"I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and wasteful," she said over her shoulder, "so they can have something to nag them about. I'm sure I"—She slammed the door upon her voice, which seemed to be carried upward in a little whirlwind of indignation.

Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in-law for sympathy, but the old woman refused to meet her gaze.

"I'm just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and getting Ethel all worked up," clucked the younger woman anxiously.

Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it.

"Men-folks are kind of helpless when it comes to planning," she said apologetically. "To think of them poor things trying to keep house—and the biscuits being soggy! It does kind of work on her feelings, Emma."

Mrs. Weaver gave her mother-in-law a glance of rotund severity.

"I don't mind their getting married," she said, "but I want it done decent. I don't intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she wasn't worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits!"

She lifted her chin and looked at her companion over the barricade of conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with none of her daughter-in-law's satisfaction in it.

"I'm sure I don't know," she said drearily; "sometimes it ain't easy to know your dooty at a glance."

Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to such lax uncertainty.

"The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night, "you'd have thought she sided with Ethel."

Jason Weaver was far too much of a man to hazard an opinion on the proprieties in the face of his wife's disapproval, so he grunted an amiable acquiescence in that spirit of justifiable hypocrisy known among his kind as "humoring the women-folks." Privately he was disposed to exult in his daughter's spirit and good sense, and so long as these admirable qualities did not take her away from him, and paternal pride and affection were both gratified, he saw no reason to complain. This satisfaction, however, did not prevent his "stirring her up" now and then, as he said, that he might sun himself in the glow of her youthful temper and chuckle inwardly over her smartness.

"Well, Dot, how's Rob?" he asked jovially one evening at supper about a month later. "Does he still think he's worth running after?"

"I don't know whether he thinks so or not, but I know he is," asserted the young woman, tilting her chin and looking away from her father with a cool filial contempt for his pleasantries bred by familiarity. "He's well enough, but the old man that lives with him had a fall and broke his leg, and Rob has to take care of him."

Old Mrs. Moxom laid down her knife and fork, and dropped her hands in her lap hopelessly.

"Well, now, what made him go and do that?" she asked, with a fretful quaver in her voice, as if this were the last straw.

"I don't know, grandmother," answered Ethel cheerfully. "As soon as he's well enough to be moved, they're going to take him to the county hospital. I guess that's the poorhouse. But Rob says he's so old they're afraid the bone won't knit; he suffers like everything. Poor old man, I'm awful sorry for him. Rob has to do all the cooking."

The old woman pushed back her chair and brushed the crumbs from her apron.

"I guess I'll go upstairs and lay down awhile, Emma. I been kind of light-headed all afternoon. I guess I set too long over them carpet rags."

She got up and crossed the room hurriedly. Her son looked after her with anxious eyes. Presently they heard her toiling up the stairs with the slow, inelastic tread of infancy and old age.

"I don't know what's come over your mother, Jason," said his wife. "She hasn't been herself all summer. Sometimes I think I'd ought to write to the girls."

"Oh, I guess she'll be all right," said Jason, with masculine hopefulness. "Dot, you'd better go up by and by and see if grandmother wants anything."

Safe in her own room, Mrs. Moxom sank into a chair with a long breath of relief and dismay.

"The poorhouse!" she gasped. "That seems about as mortifying as to own up to your girls that you wasn't never rightly married to their father."

She got up and wandered across the room to the bureau. "I expect he's changed a good deal," she murmured. She took a daguerreotype from the upper drawer, and gazed at it curiously. "Yes, I expect he's changed quite a good deal," she repeated, with a sigh.

IV

"Why, mother Moxom!"

Mrs. Weaver sank into her sewing-chair in an attitude of pulpy despair.

"Well, I don't see but what it's the best thing for me to do," asserted the old woman. "The cold weather'll be coming on soon, and I always have more or less rheumatism, and they say Californay's good for rheumatism. Besides, I think I need to stir round a little; I've stayed right here 'most too close; and as long as Ethel has her heart set on going, I don't see but what it's the best plan. If I go along with her, I can make sure that everything's all right. If you and Jason say she can't go, why, then, I don't see but what I'll just have to start off and make the trip alone."

"Why, mother Moxom, I just don't know what to say!"

Mrs. Weaver's tone conveyed a deep-seated sense of injury that she should thus be deprived of speech for such insufficient cause.

"'Tisn't such a very hard trip," pursued the old woman doggedly. "They say you get on one of them through trains and take your provision and your knitting, and just live along the road. It isn't as if you had to change cars at every junction, and get so turned round you don't know which way your head's set on your shoulders."

Mrs. Weaver's expression began to dissolve into reluctant interest in these details.

"Well, of course, if you think it'll help your rheumatism, and you've got your mind made up to go, somebody'll have to go with you. Have you asked Jason?"

"No, I haven't." Mrs. Moxom's voice took on an edge. "I can't see just why I've got to ask people; sometimes I think I'm about old enough to do as I please."

"Why, of course, mother," soothed the daughter-in-law. "Would you go and see the girls before you'd start?"

"No, I don't believe I would," answered the old woman, her voice relaxing under this acquiescence. "They'd only make a fuss. They've both got good homes and good men, and they're married to them right and lawful, and there's nothing to worry about. Besides, I'd just get interested in the children, and that'd make it harder. I've done the best I knew how by the girls, and I don't know as they've got any reason to complain"—

"Why, no, mother," interrupted the daughter-in-law, with rising feathers, "I never heard anybody say but what you'd done well by all your children. I only thought they'd want to see you. I think they'd come over if they knew it—well, of course, Angie couldn't, having a young baby so, but Laura she'd come in a minute."

"Well, I don't believe I want to see them," persisted Mrs. Moxom. "It'll only make it harder. I guess you needn't let them know I'm goin'. Ethel and I'll start as soon as she can get ready. Seems like Rob's having a pretty hard time. He couldn't come after Ethel now if he wanted to. It wouldn't be right for him to leave that—that—old gentleman."

"Well, I wouldn't want the girls to have any hard feelings towards me."

"The Moxom girls ain't a-going to have any hard feelings towards you, Emma," asserted the old woman, with emphasis.

"She has the queerest way of talking about your sisters, Jason," Mrs. Weaver confided to her husband later. "It makes me think, sometimes, she's failing pretty fast."

V

As the road to the foot of the trail grew steeper, Rob Kendall found an increasing difficulty in guiding his team with one hand. His bride drew herself from his encircling arm reluctantly.

"You'd better look after the horses," she said, with a vivid blush. "What'll grandmother think of us?"

The young fellow removed the offending arm and reached back to pat the old lady's knee.

"I ain't afraid of grandmother," he said joyously. "Grandmother's a brick. If she stays out here long, she'll soon be the youngest woman on the mesa. I shouldn't wonder if she'd pick up some nice old gentleman herself—how's that, grandmother?" He bent down and kissed his wife's ear. "Catch me going back on grandmothers after this!"

"You haven't changed a bit, Rob," said Ethel fondly; "has he, grandmother?" She turned her radiant smile upon the withered face behind her.

The old woman did not answer. The newly wedded couple resumed their rapturous contemplation of each other.

"How's that funny old man, Rob?" asked Ethel, smoothing out her dimples.

"Old Mosey? He's pretty rocky. I'm afraid he won't pull through." Rob strove to adjust his voice to the subject. "I'd 'a' got a house down in town, but I didn't like to leave him. We'll have to go pretty soon, though. I'm afraid you'll be lonesome up here."

The old woman on the back seat leaned forward a little. The young couple smiled exultantly into each other's eyes, with superb scorn of the world.

"Lonesome!" sneered the girl.

Her husband drew her close to him with an ecstatic hug.

"Yes, lonesome," he laughed, his voice smothered in her bright hair.

The old woman settled back in her seat. The team made their way slowly through the sandy wash between the boulders. When they emerged from the sycamores, Rob pointed toward the cabin. "That's the place!" he said triumphantly.

The sunset was sifting through the live-oaks upon the shake roof. Two tents gleamed white beside it, frescoed with the shadow of moving leaves. Ethel lifted her head from her husband's shoulder, and looked at her home with the faith in her eyes that has kept the world young.

"I've put up some tents for us," said the young fellow gleefully; "but you mustn't go in till I get the team put away. I won't have you laughing at my housekeeping behind my back. Old Mosey's asleep in the shanty; the doctor gives him something to keep him easy. You can go in there and sit down, grandmother; you won't disturb him."

He helped them out of the wagon, lingering a little with his wife in his arms. The old woman left them and went into the house. She crossed the floor hesitatingly, and bent over the feeble old face on the pillow.

"It's just as I expected; he's changed a good deal," she said to herself.

The old man opened his eyes.

"I was sayin' you'd changed a good deal, Moses," she repeated aloud.

There was no intelligence in his gaze.

"For that matter, I expect I've changed a good deal myself," she went on. "I heard you'd had a fall, and I thought I'd better come out. You was always kind of hard to take care of when you was sick. I remember that time you hurt your foot on the scythe, just after we was married; you wouldn't let anybody come near you but me"—

"Why, it's Angeline!" said the old man dreamily, with a vacant smile.

"Yes, it's me."

He closed his eyes and drifted away again. The old wife sat still on the edge of the bed. Outside she could hear the sigh of the oaks and the trill of young voices. Two or three tears fell over the wrinkled face, written close with the past, like a yellow page from an old diary. She wiped them away, and looked about the room with its meagre belongings, which Rob had scoured into expectant neatness.

"He doesn't seem to have done very well," she thought; "but how could he, all by himself?" She got up and walked to the door, and looked out at the strange landscape with its masses of purple mountains.

"I've got to do one of two things," she said to herself. "I've just got to own up the whole thing, and let the girls be mortified, or else I've got to keep still and marry him over again, and pass for an old fool the rest of my life. I don't believe I can do it. They've got more time to live down disgrace than I have. I believe I'll just come out and tell everything. Ethel!" she called. "Come here, you and Rob; I've got something to tell you."

The young couple stood with locked arms, looking out over the valley. At the sound of her voice they clasped each other close in an embrace of passionate protest against the intrusion of this other soul. Then they turned toward the sunset, and went slowly and reluctantly into the house.



Lib

A young woman sat on the veranda of a small redwood cabin, putting her baby to sleep. The infant displayed that aggressive wide-awakeness which seems to characterize babies on the verge of somnolence. Now and then it plunged its dimpled fists into the young mother's bare white breast, stiffened its tiny form rebelliously, raised its head, and sent gleams of defiance from beneath its drooping eyelids.

It was late in March, and the ground about the cabin was yellow with low-growing compositae. The air was honey-sweet and dripping with bird-song. Inside the house a woman and a girl were talking.

"Oh, he's not worrying," said the latter. "What's he got to worry about? He lets us do all that. Lib's got the baby and we've got to bear all the disgrace. I"—

"Myrtie," called a clear voice from the veranda, "shut up! You may say what you please about me, and you may say what you please about him, but nobody's going to call this baby a disgrace."

She caught the child up and kissed the back of its neck with passionate vehemence. The baby struggled in her embrace and gave a little cry of outraged dignity.

Indoors the girl looked at her mother and bit her lip in astonished dismay.

"I didn't know she could hear," she whispered.

A tall young woman came up the walk, trailing her tawdry ruffles over the fragrant alfileria.

"Is Miss Sunderland"—She colored a dull pink and glanced at the baby.

"I'm Lib Sunderland. Won't you come in?" said Lib.

The newcomer sank down on the upper step and leaned against the post of the veranda.

"No. I don't want to see any one but you. I guess we can talk here."

The baby sat up at the sound of the stranger's voice and stared at her with round, blinking eyes. She drew off her cotton gloves and whipped her knee with them in awkward embarrassment. She had small, regular features of the kind that remain the same from childhood to old age, and her liver-colored hair rolled in a billow almost to her eyes.

"Maybe you'll think it strange for me to come," she began, "but I didn't know what else to do. I'm Ruby Adair."

She waited a little, but her statement awoke no response in Lib's noncommittal face.

"I don't know whether you know what they're saying over at the store or not," the visitor went on haltingly.

"No," said Lib, with dry indifference; "there ain't any men in our family to do the loafin' and gossipin' for us."

"Since you moved over here from Bunch Grass Valley, they're saying that Thad Farnham is the—is—you know he was in the tile works over there a year or more ago."

"Yes, I know." Lib's voice was like the crackling of dead leaves under foot.

"I think it's pretty hard," continued Miss Adair, gathering courage, and glancing from under the surf of her hair at her listener's impassive face; "him and me's engaged!"

Lib's eyes narrowed, and the velvety down on her lip showed black against the whiteness around her mouth.

"What does he say?" she asked.

"What can he say?" Thad's fiancee broke out nervously, "except that it ain't so. But that doesn't shut people's mouths. Nobody can do that but you. I think"—she raised her chin virtuously and twisted her gloves tight in her trembling hands—"that you ought to come out plain and tell who the man is—I mean the—you know what I mean!"

"Yes," said Lib dully, "I know what you mean."

There was a little silence, broken only by the mad twitter of nesting linnets in the passion-vine overhead.

"Of course," resumed the stranger, "I wouldn't want you to think but what I'm sorry for you. You've been treated awful mean by somebody."

A surprised look grew in the eyes Lib fixed upon her visitor. The baby stirred in its sleep, and she bent down and rubbed her cheek against its hair.

"You needn't waste any time being sorry for me," she said.

"It's too bad," continued Miss Adair, intent upon her own exalted charity, "but that doesn't make it right for you to get other folks into trouble. You'd ought to remember that."

"If you think he's all right, why don't you go ahead and marry him?" asked Lib.

"My folks would make such a fuss, and besides I don't know as it would be just right for me to act like I didn't care, after all that's been said—and me a church-member!"

Miss Ruby bent her head a little forward, as if under the weight of her moral obligations.

"Has he joined the church?" inquired Lib in a curious voice.

"He's been going to the union meetings regular with me, and he's stood up twice for prayers, but I dunno 's they'd take him into the church with all these stories going about. You'd ought to think of that, too—you may be standing in the way of saving his soul."

"If his soul was lost, it would be awful hard to find," said Lib quietly.

Her listener's weak mouth slackened. "Wh-at?" she asked, with a little stuttering gasp.

"Oh, I dunno. Some things are hard to find when they're lost, you know."

"And you'll speak up and tell the truth?" The visitor arose, gathering her flounces about her with one hand.

"If I speak up, I'll tell the truth, you can bet on that," said Lib.

Miss Adair waited an instant, as if for some assurance which Lib did not vouchsafe. Then she writhed down the walk in her twisted drapery and disappeared.

Thad Farnham and his father had been cutting down a eucalyptus-tree. The two men looked small and mean clambering over the felled giant, as if belonging to some species of destructive insect. The tree in its fall had bruised the wild growth, and the air was full of oily medicinal odors. Long strips of curled cinnamon-colored bark strewed the ground. The father and son confronted each other across the pallid trunk. The older man's face was leathery-red with anger.

"The story's got around that the kid's yours, anyway," he announced. "I don't care who started it, but if it's true, you'll make a bee-line for the widow's and marry the girl. D'you hear?"

Thad dropped his eyes sullenly and made a feint of examining the crosscut saw.

"I don't go much on family," continued old Farnham, "and I never 'lowed you'd set anything on fire excepting maybe yourself, but I'm not raising sneaks and liars, and what little I've got hain't been scraped together to fatten that kind of stock!"

"Who said I lied?"

"Nobody. But I'm going to take you over to face that girl and see what she says. If you don't foller peaceable, I'll coax you along with a hatful of cartridges. I hear you've been whining around the revival meetings. I never suspected you till I heard that!"

"I don't see why you suspect a feller for lookin' after the salvation"—

"Oh, damn your salvation!" broke in the old man.

"Well, I dunno"—

"Well, I do!" roared the father; "I know you can't make an angel without a man to start with, and I'll do what I can to furnish the man, seein' I'm responsible for you bein' born in the shape of one, and the preachers may put in the wing and the tail feathers if they can! Now start that saw!"

* * * * *

Old Farnham and his son sat in the small front room of the widow Sunderland's cabin. The old man's jaw was set, and he grasped his knees with his big hairy hands as if to steady himself.

Neither of the men arose when Lib came into the room with the baby. The old man's eyes followed her as she seated herself without so much as a glance at his companion.

"My name's Farnham," he began hoarsely. "This is my son Thad. You've met him, maybe?" He stopped and cleared his throat.

Lib did not turn her head.

"Yes, I've met him," she said quietly.

The old man's face turned the color of dull terra-cotta.

"They say he took advantage of you. I don't know. I wasn't much as a young feller, but I wasn't a scrub, and I don't savvy scrubs. I fetched him over here to-day to ask you if it's true, and to say to you if it is, he'll marry you or there'll be trouble. That don't square it, but it's the best I can do."

There was a tense stillness in the little room. The baby gave a squeal of delight and kicked a small red stocking from its dimpled foot. The old man picked it up and laid it on Lib's lap. She looked straight into his face for a while before she spoke.

"I guess you're a good man, Mr. Farnham," she said slowly. "I wouldn't mind being your daughter-in-law, if you had a son that took after you. I think the baby would like you very well for a grandpap, too. The older he grows, the more particular I'm getting about his relations. I didn't think much about anything before he came, but I've done a lot of thinkin' since. I guess that's generally the way with girls."

She turned toward Thad, and her voice cut the air like a lash.

"Suppose you was the father of this baby, and had to be drug here by the scruff of the neck to own it, wouldn't you think I'd done the poor little thing harm enough just by—by that, without tackin' you onto him for the rest of his life? No, sir!" She stood up and took a step backward. "You go and tell everybody—tell Ruby Adair, that I say this child hasn't any father; he never had any, but he's got a mother, and a mother that thinks too much of him to disgrace him by marrying a coward, which is more than she'll be able to say for her children if she ever has any! Now go!"



For Value Received

A soft yellow haze lay over the San Jacinto plain, deepening into purple, where the mountains lifted themselves against the horizon. Nancy Watson stood in her cabin door, and held her bony, moistened finger out into the tepid air.

"I believe there's a little breath of wind from the southeast, Robert," she said, with a desperate hopefulness; "but the air doesn't feel rainy."

"Oh, I guess the rains'll come along all right; they gener'lly do." The man's voice was husky and weak. "Anyway, the barley'll hold its own quite a while yet."

"Oh, yes; quite a long while," acquiesced his wife, with an eager, artificial stress on the adjective. "I don't care much if the harvest isn't earlier'n usual; I want you to pick up your strength."

She turned into the room, a strained smile twitching her weather-stained face. She was glad Robert's bed was in the farthest corner away from the window. The barley-field that stretched about the little redwood cabin was a pale yellowish green, deeper in the depressions, and fading almost into brown on the hillocks. There had been heavy showers late in October, and the early sown grain had sprouted. It was past the middle of November now, and the sky was of that serene, cloudless Californian blue which is like a perpetual smiling denial of any possibility of rain.

"Is the barley turning yellow any?" queried the sick man feebly.

Nancy hesitated.

"Oh, not to speak of," she faltered, swallowing hard.

Her husband was used to that gulping sob in her voice when she stood in the door. There was a little grave on the edge of the barley-field. He had put a bit of woven-wire fence about it to keep out the rabbits, and Nancy had planted some geraniums inside the small inclosure. There were some of the fiery blossoms in an old oyster can at the head of the little mound, lifting their brilliant smile toward the unfeeling blue of the sky.

"There's pretty certain to be late rains, anyway," the man went on hoarsely. "Leech would let us have more seed if it wasn't for the mortgage." His voice broke into a strained whisper on the last word.

Nancy crossed the room, and laid her knotted hand on his forehead.

"You hain't got any fever to-day," she said irrelevantly.

"Oh, no; I'm gettin' on fine; I'll be up in a day or two. The mortgage'll be due next month, Nancy," he went on, looking down at his thin gray hands on the worn coverlet; "I calc'lated they'd hold off till harvest, if the crop was comin' on all right." He glanced up at her anxiously.

The woman's careworn face worked in a cruel convulsive effort at self-control.

"It ain't right, Robert!" she broke out fiercely. "You've paid more'n the place is worth now; if they take it for what's back, it ain't right!"

Her husband looked at her with pleading in his sunken eyes. He felt himself too weak for principles, hardly strong enough to cope with facts.

"But they ain't to blame," he urged; "they lent me the money to pay Thomson. It was straight cash; I guess it's all right."

"There's wrong somewhere," persisted the woman, hurling her abstract justice recklessly in the face of the evidence. "If the place is worth more, you've made it so workin' when you wasn't able. If they take it now, I'll feel like burnin' down the house and choppin' out every tree you've planted!"

The man turned wearily on his pillow. His wife could see the gaunt lines of his unshaven neck. She put her hand to her aching throat and looked at him helplessly; then she turned and went back to the door. The barley was turning yellow. She looked toward the little grave on the edge of the field. More than the place was worth, she had said. What was it worth? Suppose they should take it. She drew her high shoulders forward and shivered in the warm air. The anger in her hard-featured face wrought itself into fixed lines. She recrossed the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"How much is the mortgage, Robert?" she asked calmly. The sick man gave a sighing breath of relief, and drew a worn account-book from under his pillow.

"It'll be $287.65, interest an' all, when it's due," he said, consulting his cramped figures. Each knew the amount perfectly well, but the feint of asking and telling eased them both.

"I'm going down to San Diego to see them about it," said Nancy; "I can't explain things in writing. There's the money for the children's shoes; if the rains hold off, they can go barefoot till Christmas. Mother can keep Lizzie out of school, and I guess Bobbie and Frank can 'tend to things outside."

A four-year-old boy came around the house wailing out a grief that seemed to abate suddenly at sight of his mother. Nancy picked him up and held him in her lap while she took a splinter from the tip of his little grimy outstretched finger; then she hugged him almost fiercely, and set him on the doorstep.

"What's the matter with gramma's baby?" called an anxious voice from the kitchen.

"Oh, nothing, mother; he got a sliver in his finger; I just took it out."

"He's father's little soldier," said Robert huskily; "he ain't a-goin' to cry about a little thing like that."

The little soldier sat on the doorstep, striving to get his sobs under military discipline and contemplating his tiny finger ruefully.

An old woman came through the room with a white cloth in her hand.

"Gramma'll tie it up for him," she said soothingly, sitting down on the step, and tearing off a bandage wide enough for a broken limb.

The patient heaved a deep sigh of content as the unwieldiness of the wounded member increased, and held his fat little fingers wide apart to accommodate the superfluity of rag.

"There, now," said the old woman, rubbing his soft little gingham back fondly; "gramma'll go and show him the turkeys."

The two disappeared around the corner of the house, and the man and woman came drearily back to their conference.

"If you go, Nancy," said Robert, essaying a wan smile, "I hope you'll be careful what you say to 'em; you must remember they don't think they're to blame."

"I won't promise anything at all," asserted Nancy, hitching her angular shoulders; "more'n likely, I'll tell 'em just what I think. I ain't afraid of hurtin' their feelin's, for they hain't got any. I think money's a good deal like your skin; it keeps you from feelin' things that make you smart dreadfully when you get it knocked off."

Robert smiled feebly, and rubbed his moist, yielding hand across his wife's misshapen knuckles.

"Well, then, you hadn't ought to be hard on 'em, Nancy; it's no more'n natural to want to save your skin," he said, closing his eyes wearily.

"Robert Watson?"

The teller of the Merchants' and Fruitgrowers' Bank looked through the bars of his gilded cage, and repeated the name reflectively. He did not notice the eager look of the woman who confronted him, but he did wonder a little that she had failed to brush the thick dust of travel from the shoulders of her rusty cape.

The teller was a slender, immaculate young man, whose hair arose in an alert brush from his forehead, which was high and seemed to have been polished by the same process that had given such a faultless and aggressive gloss to his linen. He turned on his spry little heel and stepped to the back of the inclosure, where he took a handful of long, narrow papers from a leather case, and ran over them hastily. Nancy did not think it possible that he could be reading them; the setting in his ring made a little streak of light as his fingers flew. She watched him with tense earnestness; it seemed to her that the beating of her heart shook the polished counter she leaned against. She hid her cotton-gloved hands under her cape for fear he would see how they trembled.

The teller returned the papers to their case, and consulted a stout, short-visaged man, whose lips and brows drew themselves together in an effort of recollection.

The two men stood near enough to hear Nancy's voice. She pressed her weather-beaten face close to the gilded bars.

"I am Mrs. Watson. I came down to see you about it; my husband's been poorly and couldn't come. We'd like to get a little more time; we've had bad luck with the barley so far, but we think we can make it another season."

The men gave her a bland, impersonal attention.

"Yes?" inquired the teller, with tentative sympathy, running his pencil through his upright hair, and tapping his forefinger with it nervously. "I believe that's one of Bartlett's personal matters," he said in an undertone.

The older man nodded, slowly at first, and then with increasing affirmation.

"You're right," he said, untying the knot in his face, and turning away.

The teller came back to his place.

"Mr. Bartlett, the cashier, has charge of that matter, Mrs. Watson. He has not been down for two or three days: one of his children is very sick. I'll make a note of it, however, and draw his attention to it when he comes in." He wrote a few lines hurriedly on a bit of paper, and impaled it on an already overcrowded spindle.

"Can you tell me where he lives?" asked Nancy.

The young man hesitated.

"I don't believe I would go to the house; they say it's something contagious"—

"I'm not afraid," interrupted Nancy grimly.

The teller wrote an address, and slipped it toward her with a nimble motion, keeping his hand outstretched for the next comer, and smiling at him over Nancy's dusty shoulder.

The woman turned away, suddenly aware that she had been blocking the wheels of commerce, and made her way through the knot of men that had gathered behind her. Outside she could feel the sea in the air, and at the end of the street she caught a glimpse of a level blue plain with no purple mountains on its horizon.

Someway, the mortgage had grown smaller; no one seemed to care about it but herself. She had felt vaguely that they would be expecting her and have themselves steeled against her request. On the way from the station she had thought that people were looking at her curiously as the woman from "up toward Pinacate" who was about to lose her home on a mortgage. She had even felt that some of them knew of the little wire-fenced grave on the edge of the barley-field.

She showed the card to a boy at the corner, who pointed out the street and told her to watch for the number over the door.

"It isn't very far; 'bout four blocks up on the right-hand side. Yuh kin take the street car fer a nickel, er yuh kin walk fi' cents cheaper," he volunteered, whereupon an older boy kicked him affectionately, and advised him in a nauseated tone to "come off."

Nancy walked along the smooth cement pavement, looking anxiously at the houses behind their sentinel palms. The vagaries of Western architecture conveyed no impression but that of splendor to her uncritical eye. The house whose number corresponded to the one on her card was less pretentious than some of the others, but the difference was lost upon her in the general sense of grandeur.

She went up the steps and rang the bell, with the same stifling clutch on her throat that she had felt in the bank. There was a little pause, and then the door opened, and Nancy saw a fragile, girl-like woman with a tear-stained face standing before her.

"Does Mr. Bartlett live here?" faltered the visitor, her chin trembling.

The young creature leaned forward like a flower wilting on its stem, and buried her face on Nancy's dusty shoulder.

"Oh, I'm so glad to see you," she sobbed; "I thought no one ever would come. I didn't know before that people were so afraid of scarlet fever. They have taken my baby away for fear he would take it. Do you know anything about it? Please come right in where she is, and tell me what you think."

Nancy had put her gaunt arm around the girl's waist, and was patting her quivering shoulder with one cotton-gloved hand. Two red spots had come on her high cheek-bones, and her lips were working. She let herself be led across the hall into an adjoining room, where a yellow-haired child lay restless and fever stricken. A young man with a haggard face came forward and greeted her eagerly. "Now, Flora," he said, smoothing his wife's disordered hair, "you don't need to worry any more; we shall get on now. I'm sure she's a little better to-day; don't you think so?" He appealed to Nancy, wistfully.

"Yes; I think she is," said Nancy stoutly, moving her head in awkward defiance of her own words.

"There, Flora, that's just what the doctor said," pleaded the husband.

The young wife clung to the older woman desperately.

"Oh, do you think so?" she faltered. "You know, I never could stand it. She's all—well, of course, there's the baby—but—oh—you see—you know—I never could bear it!" She broke down again, sobbing, with her arms about Nancy's neck.

"Yes, you can bear it," said Nancy. "You can bear it if you have to, but you ain't a-goin' to have to—she's a-goin' to get well. An' you've got your man—you ought to recollect that"—she stifled a sob—"he seems well an' hearty."

The young wife raised her head and looked at her husband with tearful scorn. He met her gaze meekly, with that ready self-effacement which husbands seem to feel in the presence of maternity.

"Have you two poor things been here all alone?" asked Nancy.

"Yes," sobbed the girl-wife, this time on her husband's shoulder; "everybody was afraid,—we couldn't get any one,—and I don't know anything. You're the first woman I've seen since—oh, it's been so long!"

"Well, you're all nervous and worn out and half starved," announced Nancy, untying her bonnet-strings. "I've had sickness, but I've never been this bad off. Now, you just take care of the little girl, and I'll take care of you."

It was a caretaking like the sudden stilling of the tempest that came to the little household. The father and mother would not have said that the rest and order that pervaded the house, and finally crept into the room where the sick child lay, came from a homely woman with an ill-fitting dress and hard, knotted hands. To them she seemed the impersonation of beauty and peace on earth.

That night Nancy wrote to her husband. The letter was not very explicit, but limited expression seems to have its compensations. There are comparatively few misunderstandings among the animals that do not write at all. To Robert the letter seemed entirely satisfactory. This is what she wrote:—

I have not had much time to see about the Morgage. One of their children is very sick and I will have to stay a few days. If the cough medisine gives out tell mother the directions is up by the Clock. I hope you are able to set up. Write and tell me how the Barley holds on. Tell the children to be good. Your loving wife,

NANCY WATSON.

"Nancy was always a great hand around where there's sickness," Robert commented to his mother-in-law. "I hope she won't hurry home if she's needed."

He wrote her to that effect the next day, very proud of his ability to sit up, and urging her not to shorten her stay on his account. "Ime beter and the Barly is holding its own," he said, and Nancy found it ample.

"This Mrs. Watson you have is a treasure," said the doctor to young Bartlett; "where did you find her?"

"Find her? I thought you sent her," answered Bartlett, in a daze.

"No; I couldn't find any one; I was at my wits' end."

The two men stared at each other blankly.

"Well, it doesn't matter where she came from," said the doctor, "so she stays. She's a whole relief corps and benevolent society in one."

Young Bartlett spoke to Nancy about it the first time they were alone.

"Who sent you to us, Mrs. Watson?" he asked.

Nancy turned and looked out of the window.

"Nobody sent me—I just came."

Then she faced about.

"I don't want to deceive nobody. I come down from Pinacate to see you about some—some business. They told me at the bank that you was up at the house, so I come up. When I found how it was, I thought I'd better stay—that's all."

"From Pinacate—about some business?" queried the puzzled listener.

"Yes; I didn't mean to say anything to you; I don't want to bother you about it when you're in trouble an' all wore out. I told them down at the bank; they'll tell you when you go down." And with this the young man was obliged to be content.

It was nearly two weeks before the child was out of danger. Then Nancy said she must go home. The young mother kissed her tenderly when they parted.

"I'm so sorry you can't stay and see the baby," she said, with sweet young selfishness; "they're going to bring him home very soon now. He's so cute! Archie dear, go to the door with Mrs. Watson, and remember"—She raised her eyebrows significantly, and waited to see that her husband understood before she turned away.

The young man followed Nancy to the hall.

"How much do I owe"—He stopped, with a queer choking sensation in his throat.

Nancy's face flushed.

"I always want to be neighborly when there's sickness," she said; "'most anybody does. I hope you'll get on all right now. Good-by."

She held out her work-hardened hand, and the young man caught it in his warm, prosperous grasp. They looked into each other's eyes an instant, not the mortgagor and the mortgagee, but the woman and the man.

"Good-by, Mrs. Watson. I can never"—The words died huskily in his throat.

"Papa," called a weak, fretful little voice.

Nancy hitched her old cape about her high shoulders.

"Good-by," she repeated, and turned away.

* * * * *

Robert leaned across the kitchen table, and held a legal document near the lamp.

"It's marked 'Satisfaction of mortgage' on the outside," he said in a puzzled voice; "and it must be our mortgage, for it tells all about it inside; but it says"—he unfolded the paper, and read from it in his slow, husky whisper,—"'The debt—secured thereby—having been fully paid—satisfied—and discharged.' I don't see what it means."

Nancy rested her elbows on the table, and looked across at him anxiously.

"It must be a mistake, Robert. I never said anything to them except that we'd like to have more time."

He went over the paper again carefully.

"It reads very plain," he said. Then he fixed his sunken eyes on her thoughtfully. "Do you suppose, Nancy, it could be on account of what you done?"

"Me!" The woman stared at him in astonishment.

Suddenly Robert turned his eyes toward the ceiling, with a new light in his thin face.

"Listen!" he exclaimed breathlessly, "it's raining!"

There was a swift patter of heralding drops, and then a steady, rhythmical drumming on the shake roof. The man smiled, with that ineffable delight in the music which no one really knows but the tiller of the soil.

Nancy opened the kitchen door and looked out into the night.

"Yes," she said, keeping something out of her voice; "the wind's strong from the southeast, and it's raining steady."

Nancy Watson always felt a little lonesome when it rained. She had never mentioned it, but she could not help wishing there was a shelter over the little grave on the edge of the barley-field.



The Face of the Poor

Mr. Anthony attached a memorandum to the letter he was reading, and put his hand on the bell.

"Confound them!" he said under his breath, "what do they think I'm made of!"

A negro opened the door, and came into the room with exaggerated decorum.

"Rufus, take this to Mr. Whitwell, and tell him to get the answer off at once. Is any one waiting?"

"Yes, suh, several. One man's been there some time. Says his name's Busson, suh."

"Send him in."

The man gave his head a tilt forward which seemed to close his eyes, turned pivotally about, and walked out of the room in his most luxurious manner. Rufus never imitated his employer, but he often regretted that his employer did not imitate him.

Mr. Anthony's face resumed its look of prosperous annoyance. The door opened, and a small, roughly dressed man came toward the desk.

"Well, here I am at last," he said in a tone of gentle apology; "I suppose you think it's about time."

The annoyance faded out of Mr. Anthony's face, and left it blank. The visitor put out a work-callous hand.

"I guess you don't remember me; my name's Burson. I was up once before, but you were busy. I hope you're well; you look hearty."

Mr. Anthony shook the proffered hand, and then shrank back, with the distrust of geniality which is one of the cruel hardships of wealth.

"I am well, thank you. What can I do for you, Mr. Burson?"

The little man sat down and wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief. He was bearded almost to the eyes, and his bushy brows stood out in a thatch. As he bent his gaze upon Mr. Anthony it was like some gentle creature peering out of a brushy covert.

"I guess the question's what I can do for you, Mr. Anthony," he said, smiling wistfully on the millionaire; "I hain't done much this far, sure."

"Well?" Mr. Anthony's voice was dryly interrogative.

"When Edmonson told me he'd sold the mortgage to you, I thought certain I'd be able to keep up the interest, but I haven't made out to do even that; you've been kept out of your money a long time, and to tell the truth I don't see much chance for you to get it. I thought I'd come in and talk with you about it, and see what we could agree on."

Mr. Anthony leaned back rather wearily.

"I might foreclose," he said.

The visitor looked troubled. "Yes, you could foreclose, but that wouldn't fix it up. To tell the truth, Mr. Anthony, I don't feel right about it. I haven't kep' up the place as I'd ought; it's been running down for more'n a year. I don't believe it's worth the mortgage to-day."

Some of the weariness disappeared from Mr. Anthony's face. He laid his arms on the desk and leaned forward.

"You don't think it's worth the mortgage?" he asked.

"Not the mortgage and interest. You see there's over three hundred dollars interest due. I don't believe you could get more'n a thousand dollars cash for the place."

"There would be a deficiency judgment, then," said the millionaire.

"Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. I supposed the law was arranged some way so you'd get your money. It's no more'n right. But it seems a kind of a pity for you and me to go to law. There ain't nothing between us. I had the money, and you the same as loaned it to me. It was money you'd saved up again old age, and you'd ought to have it. If I'd worked the place and kep' it up right, it would be worth more, though of course property's gone down a good deal. But mother and the girls got kind of discouraged and wanted me to go to peddlin' fruit, and of course you can't do more'n one thing at a time, and do it justice. Now if you had the place, I expect you could afford to keep it up, and I wouldn't wonder if you could sell it; but you'd have to put some ready money into it first, I'm afraid."

Mr. Anthony pushed a pencil up and down between his thumb and forefinger, and watched the process with an inscrutable face. His visitor went on:—