Chapter 3 No.3

Striking the Flag.

The events narrated in our last chapter took place early in November, and it was not till the following March that the astonished friends of Horace Rutherford saw him reappear amongst them as suddenly and as unexpectedly as he had departed. "Business of importance" was the sole explanation he vouchsafed to those who questioned him respecting the motive of his brief European tour; and with that answer public curiosity was perforce obliged to content itself. Society had, in fact, grown weary of discussing the affairs of the Rutherford family. Clement Rutherford's mesalliance, his mother's sudden illness at that memorable dinner-party, her subsequent seclusion from the world, and Horace's inexplicable absence, had all afforded food for the insatiable appetite of the scandal-mongers. Then Gossip grew eloquent respecting the flirtations and "fast" manners of Clement Rutherford's wife, and whispered that the old lady's seizure had been either apoplexy or paralysis, brought on by her distress of mind at her son's marriage, and that she had never been herself since. Next, the elegant establishment of the newly-wedded pair on Twenty-sixth street, with its gorgeous furniture and costly appointments, furnished a theme for much conversation, and doubts were expressed as to whether the "Upper Ten" would honor with its august presence the ball which Mrs. Clement Rutherford proposed giving on Shrove Tuesday, which in that year came about the middle of March. But as to that, it was generally conceded that they would. Youth, beauty, wealth and the shadow of an old family name could cover a multitude of such sins as rapid manners, desperate flirtations and a questionable origin; and notwithstanding her fastness, and, worse still, her ci-devant governess-ship, Mrs. Clement Rutherford was a decided social success.

On the day succeeding that oh which he had arrived, Horace made his appearance at his brother's house. Clement had not heard of his return, and received him with a cordiality strikingly at variance with his usual manner.

"Come into the library," he said, after the first greetings had been exchanged. "I have some fine cigars for you to try, and you can tell me something about your travels."

"Thank you, Clement: I believe I must decline your offer. I have a message for your wife: can I see her?"

A cloud swept over the brow of the elder brother.

"I suppose you can," he said, coldly, looking at his watch as he spoke. "Two o'clock. She took breakfast about half an hour ago, so she is probably at home. You had better go up stairs to her boudoir, as she calls it, and Christine, her maid, will tell her that you wish to see her."

He turned away, and was about to leave the room when Horace caught his hand.

"Clement! brother! Answer me one question: Are you happy in your married life?"

"Go ask the scandal-mongers of New York," was the bitter reply: "they are eloquent respecting the perfection of my connubial bliss."

"If she had been a kind and affectionate wife, if she had made him happy," muttered Horace as he ascended the stairs, "my task would have been a harder one. Now my duty is clear, and my course lies smooth and straight before, me."

The room into which he was ushered by Christine, the pretty French maid, was a perfect marvel of elegance and extravagance. It was very small, and on every part of it had been lavished all that the combined efforts of taste and expenditure could achieve. The walls had been painted in fresco by an eminent Italian artist, and bevies of rosy Cupids, trailing after them garlands of many-hued flowers, disported on a background of a delicate green tint. The same tints and design were repeated in the Aubusson carpet, and on the fine Gobelin tapestry which covered the few chairs and the one luxurious couch that formed the useful furniture of the tiny apartment. étagères of carved and gilded wood occupied each corner, and, together with the low mantelshelf (which was upheld by two dancing nymphs in Carrara marble), were crowded with costly trifles in Bohemian glass, Dresden and Sèvres porcelain, gilded bronze, carved ivory and Parian ware. An easel, drawn toward the centre of the room, supported the one painting that it contained, the designs on the walls being unsuited for the proper display of pictures. This one picture had evidently been selected on account of the contrast which it afforded to the gay coloring and riante style of the decorations. It was a superb marine view by Hamilton--a cloudy sunset above a stormy sea, the lurid sinking sun flinging streaks of blood-red light upon the leaden waters that, in the foreground, foamed and dashed themselves wildly against the rocks of a barren and precipitous shore.

Horace stood lost in contemplation before the easel, when the door opened and his sister-in-law entered. He turned to greet her, and her beauty, enhanced as it was by the elegance of her attire, drew from him an involuntary glance of admiration. Her dress was an exemplification of how much splendor may be lavished on a morning-costume without rendering it absolutely and ridiculously inappropriate. She wore a robe of turquoise-blue Indian cashmere, edged around the long train and flowing sleeves with a broad border of that marvelous gold embroidery which only Eastern fingers can execute or Eastern imaginations devise. A band of the same embroidery confined the robe around her slender, supple waist, and showed to advantage the perfection of her figure. A brooch and long ear-pendants of lustreless yellow gold, and a fan of azure silk with gilded sticks, were the adjuncts to this costume, whose rich hues and gorgeous effects would have crushed a less brilliant and stylish-looking woman, but which were wonderfully becoming to its graceful wearer.

"Welcome home, Horace!" she said in that low sweet voice which was one of her most potent charms. "How kind it is of you to pay me a visit so soon after your return!"

She placed herself on the couch and motioned to him to take a seat near her. He drew up his chair, and a short, embarrassed pause succeeded.

Mrs. Rutherford toyed with her fan and stole glances from under her long black lashes at her visitor, who sat twisting one of his gloves and wishing most ardently that Providence had entrusted the painful task before him to some one of a more obdurate and less chivalrous nature.

Wearied of silence, the lady spoke at last.

"Have you nothing of interest respecting your travels to tell me?" she asked.

Her voice seemed to break the spell which paralyzed him. He turned toward her with the look of one who nerves himself up to take a desperate resolution:

"Yes: I have a story to relate to you, and one of more than common interest."

"Really!" She yawned behind her fan. "Excuse me, but I was at Mrs. Houdon's ball last evening, and the 'German' was kept up till five o'clock this morning. I am wretchedly tired. Now do go on with your story: I have no doubt but that I shall find it amusing, but do not be much surprised if I fall asleep."

"I think you will find it interesting, and I have no fear of its putting you to sleep. But you must make me one promise. I am but a poor narrator, and you must engage not to interrupt me."

"I have no hesitation in promising to remain perfectly quiet, no matter how startling your incidents or how vivid your descriptions may be."

She leaned back among the cushions with another stifled yawn and shaded her eyes with her fan. Without heeding the veiled impertinence of her manner, Horace commenced his narrative:

"Some twenty-five years ago a friendless, penniless Englishwoman died at one of the cheap boarding-schools in Dieppe, where she had officiated for some time as English teacher and general drudge. She left behind her a little girl about five years of age--a pretty, engaging child, whose beauty and infantile fascinations so won the heart of Madame Tellier, the proprietress of the establishment, that she decided to take charge of the little creature and educate her, her project being to fit her for the post of English teacher in her school. But the pretty child grew up to be a beautiful but unprincipled girl, with an inborn passion for indolence and luxury. At the age of seventeen she eloped from the school with a young Parisian gentleman, who had been spending the summer months at one of the seaside hotels in Dieppe, and her benefactress saw her and heard of her no more.

"We will pass over the events of the next few years. It would hardly interest you to follow, as I did, each step by which the heroine of my history progressed ever downward on the path of vice. We find her at last traveling in Italy under the protection of the Count von Erlenstein, an Austrian noble of great wealth and dissolute character. She has cast aside the name she once bore, and, anticipating the jewel-borrowed cognomens of Cora Pearl and La Reine Topaze, she adopts a title from the profusion of pink coral jewelry which she habitually wears, and Rose Sherbrooke is known as Rose Coral."

Horace paused. A short, sharp sound broke the momentary silence: it was caused by the snapping of one of the gilded fan-sticks under the pressure of the white, rigid fingers that clasped it. But the listener kept her face hidden, and but for that convulsive motion the speaker might have fancied that she slept, so silent and motionless did she remain. After a short pause Horace continued:

"The attachment of Count von Erlenstein proved to be a lasting one, and we find Rose Coral at a later period installed in a luxurious establishment in Vienna, and one of the reigning queens of that realm of many sovereigns, the demi-monde of the gay capital of Austria. But the count falls ill; his sickness speedily assumes a dangerous form; his death deprives Rose Coral of her splendor; and the sunny streets of Vienna know her fair face no more. I will not retrace for you, as I could do, each step in her rapid descent from luxury to poverty, from splendor to vice, from celebrity to ruin. But one day she makes her appearance, under the name of Rhoda Steele, on board the steamship America, bound for New York. The state-room which she occupies is shared by a young girl named Marion Nugent, whose future career is to be that of a governess in the United States. On the first night out one of the occupants of the state-room is taken suddenly ill and dies, the corpse is committed to the deep, and it is reported throughout the ship that the name of the deceased is Rhoda Steele. The tale was false: it was Marion Nugent who died--it was Rose Sherbrooke, alias Rose Coral, alias Rhoda Steele, who lived to rob the dead girl of her effects and to assume her name!"

The broken fan was flung violently to the floor, and Mrs. Rutherford sprang to her feet, her face livid with passion and her blue eyes blazing with a steel-like light.

"How dare you come here to assert such falsehoods?" she cried. "You have always hated me--you and all the rest of your haughty family--because it pleased Clement Rutherford to marry me--me, a penniless governess. But I am your sister-in-law, and I demand that you treat me with proper respect. You came here to-day simply to insult me. Well, sir, I will summon my husband, and he shall protect me from your insolence."

She turned toward the door as she spoke, but he motioned her back with an imperative and scornful gesture.

"Softly, Rose Coral," he said, with a sneer: "the manners of the Quartier Brèda are not much to my taste, nor do they suit the character you have been pleased to assume. Do you think me so void of common sense as to return home without full proof of your identity? I have in my possession a large colored photograph of you, taken some years ago by Hildebrandt of Vienna, and endorsed by him on the back with a certificate stating that it is an accurate likeness of the celebrated Rose Coral. Secondly, I have brought home with me two witnesses--one is Jane Sheldon, late housekeeper for the Rev. Walter Nugent, and formerly nurse to the deceased Marion Nugent; and the other is a French hairdresser who lived many years in Vienna, and who, for several months, daily arranged the profuse tresses of Rose Coral. One will prove who you are not, and the other will as certainly prove who you are."

"Who I was" she said, defiantly. "I will deny it no longer: I am Rose Sherbrooke, once known as Rose Coral, and, what is more to the purpose, I am the wife of Clement Rutherford. Have a care, my brother Horace, lest you reveal to the world that your immaculate relatives have been touching pitch of the blackest hue and greatest tenacity. Prove me to be the vilest of my sex, I remain none the less a wedded wife--your brother's wife--and I defy you. The game is played out, and I have won it."

She threw herself back in her chair and cast on him a glance of insolent disdain. Horace Rutherford looked at her with a scornful smile.

"The game is not played out," he said, calmly. "One card remains in my hand, and I produce it. It is the Ace of Diamonds, and its title is The Rose of the Morning."

A livid paleness overspread Mrs. Rutherford's features, and a stifled cry escaped from her lips. She half rose from her seat, but, seeming to recollect herself, she sank back and covered her face with her hands. Horace continued, after a momentary pause:

"My investigations into the history of the Count Wilhelm von Erlenstein during the last years of his life revealed the fact that he had lost the most valuable of the jewels of his family. It had been stolen. It was a pink diamond of great size and beauty, known to gem-connoisseurs by the name of The Rose of the Morning--one of those remarkable stones which have a history and a pedigree, and which are as well known by reputation to diamond-fanciers as are Raphael's Transfiguration and the Apollo Belvidere to the lovers of art. This gem was worn by Count Wilhelm as a clasp to the plume in his toque at a fancy ball given by one of the Metternich family, at which he appeared in the costume of Henri III. of France. He afterward, with culpable carelessness, placed it, amongst his studs, pins, watch-chains and other similar bijouterie, in a small steel cabinet which stood in his bed-chamber. His illness and the dismissal of Rose Coral occurred soon after the fancy ball in question, and it was not till his heir, the present count, had been for some time in possession of the estates that it was discovered that the great diamond was missing. It was not to be found, and suspicion immediately fell upon the late count's valet, a Frenchman named Antoine Lasalle; who was found to have been mysteriously possessed of a large sum of money after the count's death. He was arrested, and it was conclusively proved that he had stolen a number of valuable trinkets from his dying master, but still no trace of The Rose of the Morning could be discovered, and Lasalle strenuously denied all knowledge respecting it. The family offered large rewards for its recovery, and the detectives of all the large cities of Europe have been for some time on the alert to discover it, but in vain. As soon as I heard this story, I thought that I could make a tolerably shrewd guess as to the whereabouts of the missing jewel; and I caused investigations to be set on foot in New York by a trusty agent, which resulted in the discovery that The Rose of the Morning had been sold some six months before to a jeweler in Maiden lane for about one-twenty-fifth of its value, the peculiar tint of the stone, and the purchaser's ignorance of the estimation in which it is held by the gem-fanciers of Europe, having militated against the magnitude of the valuation set upon it. It was secured for me at a comparatively trifling price. The person who sold it to the jeweler some six months ago, in spite of a partial disguise and an assumed name, was easy to recognize, from the description given, as that lady of many names, Mrs. John Archer's governess. Now, Rose Coral, what say you? You may be Mrs. Clement Rutherford, my brother's lawful wife, but you are not the less a thief and a criminal, for whom the laws have terrible punishment and bitter degradation."

"This is but a poor invention: where are your proofs?" she cried, looking up as she spoke, but her faltering voice and quivering lips contradicted her words.

"Here is my chief witness." He drew off his left-hand glove as he spoke, and extended his hand toward her. On the third finger blazed the beautiful gem of which he had spoken, its great size and purity fully displayed in the pale afternoon sunlight that flashed back in rosy radiance from its bright-tinted depths.

"It is almost too large to wear as a ring," he said with great coolness, looking at the jewel, "but I wish it to run no further risks till I can transfer it to its lawful owner, which will be as soon as it has played its talismanic part by freeing my brother from his impostor-wife."

The lady rose from her seat, pale, calm and resolved.

"Further insults are useless, sir," she said. "The game is ended now, and you have won it. What is it that you wish me to do?"

"You must sail for Europe in one of next week's steamers, leaving behind you such a confession of guilt as will enable my brother to procure a divorce without revealing the shameful fact that he was the innocent means of introducing an impostor--a ci-devant lorette--to his family and friends as his wife. Better this scandal of an elopement than the horror of having such a story made public. An income amply sufficient for your wants will be settled upon you, on condition that you never return to the United States, and never, in any way, proclaim the fact that Mrs. Clement Rutherford and Rose Coral were one and the same person."

"I accept your conditions," she said, wearily. "I will go, never to return. Now leave me. But stay: will you not answer me one question?"

"I will, certainly."

"Who was it that discovered my secret?"

"My mother--my blind mother. Some years ago, before she lost her sight, I accompanied her on a short European tour, in which we visited England, France, Switzerland, and finally Italy. While we were at Rome I fell ill with the fever of the country, and my physicians gave orders that as soon as I was well enough to travel I should leave Italy for a more bracing climate. We had not visited Naples, and I was anxious that my mother should not return home without seeing the wonders of that city; so as soon as I became convalescent I prevailed upon her to leave me in the care of some friends and to join a party who were going thither. During her stay she went frequently to the opera. One evening she was greatly disturbed by the loud talking and laughing of some persons in the box next to the one she occupied, and she was much struck with the beauty, the brilliant toilette and the boisterous conduct of one of the female members of the party. She inquired the name of the person she had thus remarked. It was yourself, and she learned not only your name, but your whole history. When at her own dinner-table she heard the sweet and singular laugh that had so struck her on that occasion, the sensitiveness of hearing peculiar to the blind caused her to recognize the sound at once; and the description which I afterward gave her of your personal appearance only changed torturing doubt into agonizing certainty."

"Thanks for your courtesy: I will detain you no longer."

Horace bowed and approached the door. Suddenly, as if moved by a sudden impulse, he turned back.

"Believe me, this task has been a hard one," he said, earnestly. "And remember, if hereafter you may need pecuniary aid, do not hesitate to apply to me. For Heaven's sake, do not return to the life you once led. There was one redeeming feature in the imposture which you practiced: it showed that some yearning for a pure name and an innocent life was yet possible to you."

"I want no sermons," she answered, abruptly. "Only leave me at peace. Go: I am sick of the sight of you."

As he closed the door he cast one parting glance on the room and its occupant. She stood leaning against the back of a large arm-chair, her clasped hands resting on the top, and her white, rigid face set in the fixed calmness of total despair.

Thus left alone, she remained standing for some time as motionless as though she were a marble statue and not a living woman. Suddenly she seemed to take some desperate resolve: she threw back her head with a bitter, mirthless laugh, and going to the bell she rang it. Her maid quickly appeared.

"I have a wretched headache, Christine," she said. "I shall not come down to dinner, and do not disturb me till nine o'clock: that will give me time enough to dress for Mrs. Winchester's ball. I will wear the pale-blue satin and my point-lace tunic. Be sure you change the white roses that loop it for pink ones, and lay out my parure of pearls and diamonds, and my point-lace fan and handkerchief. Now bring me the two phials that stand on the third shelf of the closet in my bed-chamber."

Christine departed on her errand and soon returned, bringing with her two bottles, the smallest of which was labeled "Solution of Morphia--POISON. Dose for an adult, ten drops;" while the largest Was simply inscribed "Sulphuric Ether." These she placed on the chimney-piece, and then proceeded to arrange the cushions of the lounge and to draw the curtains. "I will now leave madame to her repose," she said. "Does madame need anything more?"

"No, I shall want nothing more," was the reply. The door closed upon the maid's retreating form, and Mrs. Rutherford instantly shot the bolt.

She cast a sad and wistful glance around the dainty room and on its glittering contents. "J'etais si bien ici," she said regretfully. "I had found here the existence which suited me, and now the end has come. It is not in my nature to remain satisfied with a life of poverty and respectability, and I will not return to one of degradation and vice. But, after all, what does it matter? My fate would have found me sooner or later, and this soft couch is better than a hospital bed or the slabs of La Morgue: this draught is more soothing than the cold waters of the Thames or the Seine. Life is no longer a game that is worth the candle: let us extinguish the lights and put the cards away."

She took up the phial of morphia, drew the little sofa nearer to the fireplace and extended herself upon it. The daylight faded from the sky and night came, and with the night came sleep--a sleep whose dream was of Eternity, and whose wakening light would be the dawn of the resurrection morning.

"Accidental death" was the verdict of the coroner and the newspapers, and, in fact, of the world in general--a conclusion much assisted by the evidence of Christine, who testified that her mistress was in the habit of using narcotics and anaesthetics in large quantities to relieve the pain of the neuralgic headaches from which she was a constant sufferer. Society said, "How sad! Dreadful, is it not?" and went on its way--not exactly rejoicing, for the death of Mrs. Rutherford deprived its members of her long-promised, long-talked-of Shrove-Tuesday ball, and consequently the gay world mourned her loss very sincerely for a short time; in fact, till a well-known leader of fashion announced her intention of giving a fancy-dress party on the night thus left vacant, whereupon Society was consoled, and Mrs. Rutherford's sad fate was forgotten.

Only two persons--Horace Rutherford and his mother--suspected that her death was not an accidental one; but they guarded their secret carefully, and Clement Rutherford will never learn that his dead wife was other than the innocent English girl she represented herself to be. Walter Nugent wrote a pathetic letter to Mrs. Rutherford, begging that a lock of his lost and now forgiven darling's hair might be sent to him; and it cost Horace a sharp pang of regret when he substituted for the black, wavy tress furnished by Clement a golden ringlet purchased from one of the leading hairdressers of New York.

"Heaven forgive me!" he said to himself, remorsefully, as he sealed the little packet; "but I really think that this is one of the cases wherein one cannot be blamed for not revealing the truth."

A few months later, Horace Rutherford stood in Greenwood Cemetery contemplating with curiosity and interest the inscription on a recently-erected monument of pure white marble.

"Sacred to the memory of Marion Nugent, beloved wife of Clement Rutherford," he read. "Well, this is consistent at least. She wears the disguise of a virtuous woman in her very tomb. Marion Nugent rests beneath the waves of the Atlantic ocean, and here Rose Sherbrooke sleeps in an honored grave beneath the shelter of the dead girl's stainless name. But the deception has power to harm no longer, so let us leave her in peace. It is well for our family that, even as a sunken wreck, we still find this pirate bark Under False Colors,"

Lucy Hamilton Hooper.

The Hungry Heart.

A village on the coast of Maine; in this village a boarding-house; in this boarding-house a parlor.

This parlor is, strictly speaking, a chamber: it is in the second story, and until lately it contained a bed, washstand, etc.; but a visitor from New York has taken a fancy to change it to a reception-room. In the rear, communicating with it, is a sleeping-closet.

The room is what you might expect to find in a village boarding-house: the floor of liliuptian extent; the ceiling low, uneven, cracked and yellow; the originally coarse and ugly wall-paper now blotched with age; the carpet thin, threadbare, patched and stained; the furniture of various woods and colors, and in various stages of decrepitude.

But a tiny bracket or two, three or four handsome engravings, two fresh wreaths of evergreens, two vases of garden flowers, a number of Swiss and French knickknacks, and a few prettily-bound books, give the little nest an air of refinement which is almost elegance.

You judge at once that the occupant must be a woman--a woman moreover of sensibility and taste; a woman of good society. Of all this you become positive when you look at her, take note of her gracious manner and listen to her cultured voice.

Her expression is singularly frank and almost childlike: it exhibits a rapid play of thoughts, and even of emotions: it is both vivacious and refined, both eager and sweet. It would seem as if here were the impossible combination, the ideal union, so often dreamed of by poets and artists, of girlish simplicity and innocence with womanly cleverness and feeling.

In a large easy-chair reclines her rather small, slender and willowy form, starting slightly forward when she speaks, and sinking back when she listens. Her sparkling eyes are fixed on the eyes of her one visitor with an intentness and animation of interest which should be very fascinating.

He, a young man, not five years older than herself, very gentle in manner and with a remarkably sweet expression of face, evidently is fascinated, and even strongly moved, if one may judge by the feverish color in his cheeks, the eager inquiry of his gaze and the tremor of his lips.

The first words of hers which we shall record are a strange utterance to come from a woman:

"Let me tell you something which I have read lately. It sounds like a satire, and yet there is too much truth in it: 'Every woman in these days needs two husbands--one to fill her purse, and one to fill her heart; one to dress her, and one to love her. It is not easy to be the two in one.' That is what I have read, and it is only too true. Remember it, and don't marry."

A spasm of intense spiritual pain crossed the young man's fine and kindly face.

"Don't say such things, I beg of you!" he implored. "I am sure that in what you have quoted there is a slander upon most women. I know that it slanders you."

Her lips parted as if for a contradiction, but it was evidently very pleasant to her to hear such words from him, and with a little childlike smile of gratification she let him proceed.

"I have perfect confidence in you," he murmured. "I am willing to put all my chances of happiness in your hands. My only fear is that I am not half worthy of you--not a thousandth part worthy of you. Will you not listen to me seriously? Will you not be so kind?"

A tremor of emotion slightly lifted her hands, and it seemed for a moment as if she would extend them to him. Then there was a sudden revulsion: with a more violent shudder, evidently of a painful nature, she threw herself backward, her face turned pale, and she closed her eyes as if to shut him from her sight.

"I ought to ask your pardon," she whispered. "I never thought that it would come to this. I never meant that it should. Oh, I ask your pardon." Recovering herself with singular quickness, a bright smile dancing along the constantly changing curves of her lips, like sunbeams leaping from wavelet to wavelet, she once more leaned cordially toward him, and said in a gay yet pleading tone, "Let us talk of something else. Come, tell me about yourself--all about yourself, nothing about me."

"I cannot speak of anything else," he replied, after looking at her long in silence. "My whole being is full of you: I cannot think of anything else."

A smile of gratitude sweetly mastered her mouth: then it suddenly turned to a smile of pity; then it died in a quiver of remorse.

"Oh, we cannot marry," she sighed. "We must not marry, if we could. Let me tell you something dreadful. People hate each other after they are married. I know: I have seen it. I knew a girl of seventeen who married a man ten years older--a man who was Reason itself. Her friends told her, and she herself believed it, that she was sure of happiness. But after three years she found that she did not love, that she was not loved, and that she was miserable. He was too rational: he used to judge her as he would a column of figures--he had no comprehension for her feelings."

There was a momentary pause, during which she folded her hands and looked at him, but with an air of not seeing him. In the recollection of this heart-tragedy of the past and of another she had apparently forgotten the one which was now pressing upon herself.

"It was incredible how cold and unsympathizing and dull he could be," she went on. "Once, after she had worked a week in secret to surprise him with a dressing-gown made by her own hands--labored a week, waited and hoped a week for one word of praise--he only said, 'It is too short.' Don't you think it was cruel? It was. I suppose he soon forgot it, but she never could. A woman cannot forget such slights: they do not seem little blows to her; they make her very soul bleed."

"Don't reproach me for it," whispered the young man with a pleading smile. "You seem to be reproving me, and I can't bear it. I am not guilty."

"Oh, not you," she answered quickly. "I am not scolding you. I could not."

She did not mean it, but she gave him a smile of indescribable sweetness: she had had no intention of putting out her hands toward him, but she did it. He seized the delicate fingers and slowly drew her against his heart. Her face crimson with feeling, her whole form trembling to the tiniest vein, she rose to her feet, turning away her head as if to fly, and yet did not escape, and could not wish to escape. Holding her in his arm, he poured into her ear a murmur which was not words, it was so much more than words.

"Oh, could you truly love me?" she at last sobbed. "Could you keep loving me?"

After a while some painful recollection seemed to awaken her from this dream of happiness, and, drawing herself out of his embrace, she looked him sadly in the eyes, saying, "I must not be so weak. I must save myself and you from misery. Oh, I must. Go now--leave me for a while: do go. I must have time to think before I say another word to you."

"Good-bye, my love--soon to be my wife," he answered, stifling with a kiss the "No, no," which she tried to utter.

Although he meant to go, and although she was wretchedly anxious that he should go, he was far from gone. All across the room, at every square of the threadbare carpet, they halted to renew their talk. Minutes passed, an hour had flown, and still he was there. And when he at last softly opened the door, she herself closed it, saying, "Oh no! not yet."

So greedy is a loving woman for love, so much does she hate to lose the breath of it from her soul: to let it be withdrawn is like consenting to die when life is sweetest.

Thus it was through her, who had bidden him to go, and who had meant that he should go, that he remained for minutes longer, dropping into her ear whispers of love which at last drew out her confession of love. And when the parting moment came--that moment of woman's life in which she least belongs to herself--there was not in this woman a single reservation of feeling or purpose.

These people, who were so madly in love with each other, were almost strangers. The man was Charles Leighton, a native of Northport, who had never gone farther from his home than to Boston, and there only to graduate in the Harvard College and Medical School.

The lady was Alice Duvernois: her name was all that was known of her in the village--it was all that she had told of herself. Only a month previous to the scene above described she had arrived in Northport to obtain, as she said, a summer of quiet and sea-bathing. She had come alone, engaged her own rooms, and for a time seemed to want nothing but solitude.

Even after she had made herself somewhat familiar with the other inmates of the boarding-house, nothing positive was learned of her history. That she had been married was probable: an indefinable something in her face and carriage seemed to reveal thus much: moreover, her trunks were marked "James Duvernois."

And yet, so young did she sometimes look, so childlike was her smile and so simple her manner, that there were curious ones who scouted the supposition of wifehood. People addressed her both as "Miss" and "Mrs."; at last it was discovered that her letters bore the latter title: then she became popularly known as "the beautiful widow."

It would be a waste of time to sketch the opening and ripening of the intimacy between Doctor Leighton and this fascinating stranger. On his part it was as nearly a case of love at first sight as perhaps can occur among people of the Anglo-Saxon race. From the beginning he had no doubts about giving her his whole heart: he was mastered at once by an emotion which would not let him hesitate: he longed with all his soul for her soul, and he strove to win it.

Well, we will not go over the story: we know that he had triumphed. Yes, in spite of her terror of the future, in spite of some withholding mystery in the past, she had granted him--or rather she had not been able to prevent him from seizing--her passionate affection. She had uttered a promise which, a month before, she would not have dreamed herself capable of making.

In so doing she had acquired an almost unendurable happiness. It was one of those mighty and terrible joys which are like the effect of opium--one of those joys which condense life and abbreviate it, which excite and yet stupefy, which intoxicate and kill. With this in her heart she lived ten of her old days in one, but also she drew for those ten days upon her future.

After one of her interviews with Leighton, after an hour of throbbing, of trembling, of vivid but confused emotions, her face would be as pale as death, and her weakness such that she could hardly speak. The hands which, while they clung to his, had been soft and moist, became dry and hot as with fever, and then cold as ice. At night she could scarcely sleep: for hours her brain throbbed with the thought of him, and of what stood between him and her. In the morning she was heavy with headache, dizzy, faint, hysterical; yet the moment she saw him again she was all life, all freshness.

From the point of confession there was no more resistance. She would be his wife; she would be married whenever he wished; she seemed mad to reward him for his love; she wanted somehow to sacrifice herself for his sake. Yet, although she hesitated no longer, she sometimes gazed at him with eyes full of anxiety, and uttered words which presaged evil.

"If any trouble springs from this, you must pardon me," she more than once whispered. "I cannot help it. I have never, never, never been loved before; and oh, I have been so hungry, so famished for it, I had begun to despair of it. Yes, when I first met you, I had quite despaired of there being any love in the world for me. I could not help listening to you: I could not help taking all your words and looks into my craving heart; and now I am yours--forgive me!"

Stranger as she was in Northport, everybody trusted the frank sweetness in her face, and sought no other cause for admiring her and wishing her happiness. The whole village came to the church to witness her marriage and to doat upon a bridal beauty which lay far more in expression than in form or feature. A few words of description--inadequate notes to represent the precious gold of reality--must be given to one who could change the stare of curiosity to a beaming glance of sympathy.

Small, slender, fragile; neither blonde nor brunette; a clear skin, with a hectic flush; light chestnut hair, glossy and curling; eyes of violet blue, large, humid and lustrous, which at the first glance seemed black because of the darkness, length and closeness of the lashes, and capable of expressing an earnestness and sweetness which no writer or artist might hope to depict; a manner which in solitude might be languid, but which the slightest touch of interest kindled into animation; in fine, white teeth that sparkled with gayety, and glances that flashed happiness.

She was married without bridal costume, and there was no wedding journey. Leighton was poor, and must attend to his business; and his wife wanted nothing from him which he could not spare--nothing but his love. Impossible to paint her pathetic gratitude for this affection; the spiritual--it was not passionate--fondness which she bore him; the softness of her eyes as she gazed for minutes together into his; the sudden, tremulous outreachings of her hands toward him, as she just touches him with her finger and draws back, then leans forward and lies in his arms, uttering a little cry of happiness. Here was a heart that must long have hungered for affection--a heart unspeakably thankful and joyous at obtaining it.

"I have been smiling all day," she sometimes said to him. "People have asked me why I looked so gay, and what I had heard that was funny. It is just because I am entirely happy, and because the feeling is still a surprise. Shall I ever get over it? Am I silly? No!"

Her gladness of heart seemed to make her angelic. She rejoiced in every joy around her, and grieved for every sorrow. She visited the poor of her husband's patients, watched with them when there was need, made little collections for their relief, chatted away their forebodings, half cured them with her smile. There was something catching, comforting, uplifting in the spectacle of that overbrimming content.

The well were as susceptible to its influence as the sick. Once, half a dozen men and twice as many boys were seen engaged in recovering her veil out of a pond into which the wind had blown it; and when it was handed to her by a shy youth on the end of a twenty-foot pole, all felt repaid for their labors by the childlike burst of laughter with which she received it. Now and then, however, shadows fell across this sunshine. In those dark moments she frequently reverted to the unhappy couple of whom she had told Leighton when he first spoke to her of marriage. She was possessed to describe the man--his dull, filmy, unsympathetic black eyes, his methodical life and hard rationality, his want of sentiment and tenderness.

"Why do you talk of that person so much?" Leighton implored. "You seem to be charging me with his cruelty. I am not like him."

The tears filled her eyes as she started toward him, saying, "No, you are not like him. Even if you should become like him, I couldn't reproach you. I should merely die."

"But you know him so well?" he added, inquiringly. "You seem to fear him. Has he any power over you?"

For a moment she was so sombre that he half feared lest her mind was unstrung on this one subject.

"No," she at last said. "His power is gone--nearly gone. Oh, if I could only forget!"

After another pause, during which she seemed to be nerving herself to a confession, she threw herself into her husband's arms and whispered, "He is my--uncle."

He was puzzled by the contrast between the violence of her emotion and the unimportance of this avowal; but as he at least saw that the subject was painful to her, and as he was all confidence and gentleness, he put no more inquiries.

"Forget it all," he murmured, caressing her; and with a deep sigh, the sigh of tired childhood, she answered, "Yes."

The long summer days, laden with happiness for these two, sailed onward to their sunset havens. After a time, as August drew near its perfumed death, Alice began to speak of a journey which she should soon be obliged to make to New York. She must go, she said to Leighton--it was a matter of property, of business: she would tell him all about it some day. But she would return soon; that is, she would return as soon as possible: she would let him know how soon by letter.

When he proposed to accompany her she would not hear of it. To merely go on with her, she represented, would be a useless expense, and to stay as long as she might need to stay would injure his practice. In these days her gayety seemed forced, and more than once he found her weeping; yet so innocent was he, so simple in his views of life, so candid in soul, that he suspected no hidden evil: he attributed her agitation entirely to grief at the prospect of separation.

His own annoyance in view of the journey centred in the fact that his wife would be absent from him, and that he could not incessantly surround her with his care. Whether she would be happy, whether she would be treated with consideration, whether she would be safe from accidents and alarms, whether her delicate health would not suffer, were the questions which troubled him. He had the masculine instinct of protection: he was as virile as he was gentle and affectionate.

The parting was more painful to him than he had expected, because to her it was such an undisguised and terrible agony.

"You will not forget me?" she pleaded. "You will never, never hate me? You will always love me? You are the only person who has ever made the world pleasant to me; and you have made it so pleasant! so different from what it was! a new earth to me! a star! I will come back as soon as this business will let me. Some day I will come back, never to go away. Oh, will not that be delightful?"

Her extreme distress, her terror lest she might not return, her forebodings lest he should some day cease to love her, impressed him for a moment--only for a truant moment--with doubts as to a mystery. As he left the railway station, full of gratitude for the last glance of her loving eyes, he asked himself once or twice, "What is it?"

What was it?

We will follow her. She is ominously sad during the lonely journey: she is almost stern by the time she arrives in New York. In place of the summer's sweetness and gayety, there is a wintry and almost icy expression in her face, as if she were about to encounter trials to which she had been long accustomed, and which she had learned to bear with hardness if not with resentment.

No one meets her at the railway station, no one at the door of the sombre house where her carriage stops--no one until she has passed up stairs into a darkling parlor.

There she is received by the man whom she has so often described to Deighton--a man of thin, erect form, a high and narrow forehead, regular and imperturbable features, fixed and filmy black eyes, a mechanical carriage, an icy demeanor.

At sight of her he slightly bowed--then he advanced slowly to her and took her hand: he seemed to be hesitating whether he should give her any further welcome.

"You need not kiss me," she said, her eyes fixed on the floor. "You do not wish to do it."

He sighed, as if he too were unhappy, or at least weary; but he drew his hand away and resumed his walk up and down the room.

"So you chose to pass your summer in a village?" he presently said, in the tone of a man who has ceased to rule, but not ceased to criticise. "I hope you liked it."

"I told you in my letters that I liked it," she replied in an expressionless monotone.

"And I told you in my letters that I did not like it. It would have been more decent in you to stay in Portland, among the people whom I had requested to take care of you. However, you are accustomed to have your own way. I can only observe that when a woman will have her own way, she ought to pay her own way."

A flush, perhaps of shame, perhaps of irritation, crossed her hitherto pale face, but she made no response to the scoff, and continued to look at the floor.

After a few seconds, during which neither of them broke the silence, she seemed to understand that the reproof was over, and she quietly quitted the room.

The man pushed the door to violently with his foot, and said in an accent of angry scorn, "That is what is now called a wife."

Well, we have reached the mystery: we have found that it was a crime.

In the working of social laws there occur countless cases of individual hardship. The institution of marriage is as beneficent as the element of fire; yet, like that, it sometimes tortures when it should only have comforted.

The sufferer, if a woman, usually bears her smart tamely--with more or less domestic fretting and private weeping indeed, but without violent effort to escape from her bed of embers. Divorce is public, ugly and brutal: her sensibility revolts from it. Moreover, mere unhappiness, mere disappointment of the affections, does not establish a claim for legal separation. Finally, there is woman's difficulty of self-maintenance--the fact that her labor will not in general give her both comfort and position.

What then? Unloved, unable to love, yet with an intense desire for affection, and an immense capacity for granting it, her heart is tempted to wander beyond the circle of her duty. A flattering shape approaches her dungeon-walls; a voice calls to her to come forth and be glad, if only for a moment; there seems to be a chance of winning the adoration which has been her whole life's desire; there is an opportunity of using the emotions which are burning within her. Shall she burst open the gate on which is written LEGALITY?

Evidently the temptation is mighty. Laden with a forsaken, wounded and perhaps angry heart, she is so easily led into the belief that her exceptional suffering gives her a right to exceptional action! She feels herself justified in setting aside law, when law, falsifying its purpose, violating its solemn pledge, brings her misery instead of happiness. She will not, or cannot, reflect that special hardships must occur under all law; that it is the duty of the individual to bear such chance griefs without insurrection against the public conscience; that entire freedom of private judgment would dissolve society.

Too often--though far less often than man does the like--she makes of her sorrow an armor of excuse, and enters into a contest for unwarrantable chances of felicity. Only, in general, she is so far conscious of guilt, or at least so far fearful of punishment, as to carry on her struggle in the darkness. Few, however maddened by suffering, openly defy the serried phalanx of the world. Still fewer venture the additional risk of defying it under the forms of a legality which they have ventured to violate.

Why is it that so few women, even of a low and reckless class, have been bigamists? It is because the feminine soul has a profound respect, a little less than religious veneration, for the institution of marriage; because it instinctively recoils from trampling upon the form which consecrates love; because in very truth it regards the nuptial bond as a sacrament. I believe that the average woman would turn away from bigamy with a deeper shudder than from any other stain of conjugal infidelity.

But there are exceptions to all modes of feeling and of reasoning.

Here is Alice Duvernois: she is a woman of good position, of intellectual quickness, of unusual sensitiveness of spirit; yet she has thought out this woeful question differently from the great majority of her sex. To her, thirsty for sympathy and love, bound to a man who gives her neither, grown feverish and delirious with the torment of an empty heart, it has seemed that the sanctity of a second marriage will somehow cover the violation of a first.

This aberration we can only explain on the ground that she was one of those natures--mature in some respects, but strangely childlike in others--whom most of us love to stigmatize as unpractical, and who in fact never become quite accustomed to this world and its rules.

On the very evening of her arrival home she put to her husband a question of infantile and almost incredible simplicity. It was one of the many observations which made him tell her from time to time that she was a fool.

"What do they do," she asked, "to women who marry two husbands?"

"They put them in jail," was his cool reply.

"I think it is brutal," she broke out indignantly, as if the iron gates were already closing upon her, and she were contesting the justice of the punishment.

"You are a pretty simpleton, to set up your opinion against that of all civilized society!" was the response of incarnate Reason.

From that moment she trembled at her danger, and quivered under the remorse which terror brings. At times she thought of flying, of abandoning the husband who did not love her for the one who did; but she was afraid of being pursued, afraid of discovery. The knowledge that society had already passed judgment upon her made her see herself in the new light of a criminal, friendless, hunted and doomed. The penalty of her illegal grasp after happiness was already tracking her like a bloodhound.

Yet when she further learned that her second marriage was not binding because of the first, her heart rose in mutiny. Faithful to the only love that there had been for her in the world, she repeated to herself, a hundred times a day, "It is binding--it is!"

She was in dark insurrection against her kind; at times she was on the point of bursting out into open defiance. She stared at Duvernois, crazy to tell him, "I am wedded to another."

He noticed the wild expression, the longing, wide-open eyes, the parted and eager lips, the trembling chin. At last he said, with a brutality which had become customary with him, "What are you putting on those airs for? I suppose you are imagining yourself the heroine of a romance."

With a glare of pain and scorn she walked away from him in silence.

It is shocking indeed to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion. She was so constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband's against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt and aversion. In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime. To be understood, to be accepted at her full worth, was one of the most urgent demands of her nature.

The life of this young woman, not only within but without, was strange indeed. She fulfilled that problem of Hawthorne's--an individual bearing one character, living one life in one place, and a totally different one in another place--upon one spot of earth angelic, and upon another vile.

Stranger still, her harsher qualities appeared where her manner of life was lawful, and her finer ones where it was condemnable. At Northport she had been like sunlight to her intimates and like a ministering seraph to the poor. In New York she avoided society: she had no tenderness for misery.

The explanation seems to be that love was her only motive of feeling and action. Not a creature of reason, not a creature of conscience--she was only a creature of emotion, an exaggerated woman.

Unfortunately, her husband, methodical in life, judicial in mind, contemptuous of sentiment, was an exaggerated man. Here was a beating heart united to a skeleton. The result of this unfortunate combination had been a wreck of happiness and defiance of law.

Duvernois had not a friend intelligent enough to say to him, "You must love your wife; if you cannot love her, you must with merciful deception make her believe that you do. You must show her when you return from business that you have thought of her; you must buy a bouquet, a toy, a trifle, to carry home to her. If you do these things, you will be rewarded; if not, you will be punished."

But had there been such a friend, Duvernois would not have comprehended him. Ho would have replied, or at least he would have thought, "My wife is a fool. She is not worth the money that I now spend upon her, much less the reflection and time that you call upon me to spend."

Two such as Alice and Duvernois could not live together in peace. Notwithstanding her old dread of him, and notwithstanding the new alarm with which she was filled by the discovery that she was a felon, she could not dissemble her feelings when she looked him in the face. Sometimes she was silently contemptuous--sometimes (when her nerves were shaken) openly hostile. Rational, impassive, vigorous as he was, she made him unhappy.

The letters of Leighton were at once a joy and a sorrow. She awaited them impatiently; she went every day to the delivery post-office whither she had directed them to be sent; she took them from the hands of the indifferent clerk with a suffocating beating of the heart. Alone, she devoured them, kissed them passionately a hundred times, sat down in loving haste to answer them. But then came the necessity of excusing her long absence, of inventing some lie for the man she worshiped, of deterring him from coming to see her.

During that woeful winter of terror, of aversion, of vain longing, her health failed rapidly. A relentless cough pursued her, the beautiful flame in her cheek burned freely, and a burst of blood from the lungs warned her that her future was not to be counted by years.

She cared little: her sole desire was to last until summer. She merely asked to end her hopeless life in loving arms--to end it before those arms should recoil from her in horror.

No discovery. Her husband was too indifferent toward her to watch her closely, or even to suspect her. As early in June as might be she obtained permission to go to the seaside, and with an eagerness which would have found the hurricane slow she flew to Northport.

Leighton received her with a joy which at first blinded him to her enfeebled health.

"Oh, how could you stay so long away from me?" were his first words. "Oh, my love, my darling wife! thank you for coming back to me."

But after a few moments, when the first flush and, sparkle of excitement had died out of her cheeks and eyes, he asked eagerly, "What is the matter with you? Have you been sick?"

"I am all well again, now that I see you," she answered, putting out her arms to him with that little start of love and joy which had so often charmed him.

It absolutely seemed that in the presence of the object of her affection this erring woman became innocent. Her smile was as simple and pure as that of childhood: her violet eyes reminded one of a heaven without a cloud. It must have been that, away from punishment and from terror, she did not feel herself to be guilty.

But the day of reckoning was approaching. She had scarcely begun to regain an appearance of health under the stimulus of country air and renewed happiness, when a disquieting letter arrived from Duvernois. In a tone which was more than usually authoritative, he directed her to meet him at Portland, to go to Nahant and Newport. Did he suspect something?

She would have given years of life to be able to show the letter to Leighton and ask his counsel. But here her punishment began to double upon her: the being whom she most loved was precisely the one to whom she must not expose this trouble--the one from whom she was most anxious to conceal it.

In secret, and with unconfided tears, she wrote a reply, alleging (what was true) that her feeble health demanded quiet, and praying that she might be spared the proposed journey. For three days she feverishly expected an answer, knowing the while that she ought to go to Portland to meet Duvernois, should he chance to come, yet unable to tear herself away from Leighton, even for twenty-four hours.

In the afternoon of the third day she made one of her frequent visits of charity. At the house of a poor and bed-ridden widow she met, as she had hoped to meet, her husband. When they left the place he took her into his gig and carried her home.

It was a delicious day of mid June: the sun was setting in clouds of crimson and gold; the earth was in its freshest summer glory. In the beauty of the scene, and in the companionship of the heart which was all hers, she forgot, or seemed to forget, her troubles. One hand rested on Leighton's arm; her face was lifted steadily to his, like a flower to the light; her violet eyes were dewy and sparkling with happiness. There were little clutches of her fingers on his wrist whenever he turned to look at her. There were spasms of joy in her slender and somewhat wasted frame as she leaned from time to time against his shoulder. Arrived at the house, she was loth to have him leave her for even the time required to take his horse to the stable.

"Come soon," she said--"come as quick as you can. I shall be at the window. Look up when you reach the gate. Look at the window all the way from the gate to the door."

In an instant, not even taking off her bonnet, she was sitting by the window waiting for him to appear.

A man approached, walking behind the hedge of lilacs which bordered the yard, and halted at the gate with an air of hesitation. She turned ghastly white: retribution was upon her. It was Duvernois.

With that swift instinct of escape which sensitive and timorous creatures possess, she glided out of the room, through the upper hall, down a back stairway, into the garden behind the house, and so on to an orchard already obscure in the twilight. Here she paused in her breathless flight, and burst into one of her frequent coughs, which she vainly attempted to smother.

"I was already dying," she groaned. "Ah, why could he not have given me time to finish?"

From the orchard she could faintly see the road, and she now discovered Leighton returning briskly toward the house. Her first thought was, "He will look up at the window, and he will not see me!" Her next was, "They will meet, and all will be known!"

Under the sting of this last reflection she again ran onward until her breath failed. She had no idea where she should go: her only purpose was to fly from immediate exposure and scorn--to fly both from the man she detested and the man she loved. Her speed was quickened to the extent of her strength by the consideration that she was already missed, and would soon be pursued.

"Oh, don't let them come!--don't let them find me!" she prayed to some invisible power, she could not have said what.

Mainly intent as she was upon mere present escape from reproachful eyes, she at times thought of lurking in the woods or in some neighboring village until Duvernois should disappear and leave her free to return to Leighton. But always the reflection came up, "Now he knows that I have deceived him; now he will despise me and hate me, and refuse to see me; now I can never go back."

In such stresses of extreme panic and anguish an adult is simply a child, with the same overweight of emotions and the same imperfections of reason. During the moments when she was certain that Leighton would not forgive her, Alice made wild clutches at the hope that Duvernois might. There were glimpses of the earlier days of her married life; cheering phantoms of the days when she believed that she loved and that she was beloved--phantoms which swore by altars and bridal veils to secure her pardon.

She imagined Duvernois overtaking her with the words, "Alice, I forgive your madness: do you also forgive the coldness which drove you to it?"

She imagined herself springing to him, reaching out her hands for reconciliation, putting up her mouth for a kiss, and sobbing, "Ah, why were you not always so?"

Then of a sudden she scorned this fancy, trampled it under her weary, aching feet, and abhorred herself for being faithless to Leighton.

At last she reached a sandy, lonely coast-road, a mile from the village, with a leaden, pulseless, corpselike sea on the left, and on the right a long stretch of black, funereal marshes. Seating herself on a ruinous little bridge of unpainted and wormeaten timbers, she looked down into a narrow, sluggish rivulet, of the color of ink, which oozed noiselessly from the morass into the ocean. Her strength was gone: for the present farther flight was impossible, unless she fled from earth--fled into the unknown.

This thought had indeed followed her from the house: at first it had been vague, almost unnoticed, like the whisper of some one far behind; then it had become clearer, as if the persuading fiend went faster than she through the darkness, and were overtaking her. Now it was urgent, and would not be hushed, and demanded consideration.

"If you should die," it muttered, "then you will escape: moreover, those who now abhor you and scorn you, will pity you; and pity for the dead is almost respect, almost love."

"Oh, how can a ruined woman defend herself but by dying?" She wept as she gazed with a shudder into the black rivulet.

Then she thought that the water seemed foul; that her body would become tangled in slimy reeds and floating things; that when they found her she would be horrible to look upon. But even in this there was penance, a meriting of forgiveness, a claim for pity.

Slowly, inch by inch, like one who proposes a step which cannot be retraced, she crept under the railing of the bridge, seated herself on the edge of the shaky planking and continued to gaze into the inky waters.

A quarter of an hour later, when the clergyman of Northport passed by that spot, returning from a visit to a dying saint of his flock, no one was there.

We must revert to the two husbands. Duvernois had long wondered what could keep his wife in a sequestered hamlet, and immediately on her refusal to join him in a summer tour he had resolved to look into her manner of life.

At the village hotel he had learned that a lady named Duvernois had arrived in the place during the previous summer, and that she had been publicly married to a Doctor Leighton. He did not divulge his name--he did not so much as divulge his emotions: he listened to this story calmly, his eyes fixed on vacancy.

At the door of the boarding-house he asked for Mrs. Duvernois, and then corrected himself, saying, "I mean Mrs. Leighton."

He must have had singular emotions at the moment, yet the servant-girl noticed nothing singular in his demeanor.

Mrs. Leighton could not be found. None of the family had seen her enter or go out: it was not known that she had been in the house for an hour.

"But there comes Doctor Leighton," remarked the girl as the visitor turned to leave.

Even in this frightful conjuncture the characteristic coolness of Duvernois did not forsake him: after a moment's hesitation and a quick glance at his rival, he said, "I do not know him: I will call again."

On the graveled walk which led from the yard gate to the doorstep the two men met and passed without a word--the face of the one as inexpressive of the strangeness and horror of the encounter as the mind of the other was unconscious of them.

Leighton immediately missed Alice. In a quarter of an hour he became anxious: in an hour he was in furious search of her.

Somewhat later, when Duvernois came once more to the house, accompanied by a fashionably-dressed youth, who, as it subsequently appeared, was his younger brother, he found the family and the neighborhood in wild alarm over the disappearance of Mrs. Leighton. The two at once returned to the hotel, procured saddle-horses and joined in the general chase.

It was ten o'clock at night, and the moon was shining with a vaporous, spectral light, when the maddest of chances brought the two husbands together over a body which the tide, with its multitudinous cold fingers, had gently laid upon the beach.

Leighton leaped from his horse, lifted the corpse with a loud cry, and covered the white wet face with kisses.

Duvernois leaned forward in his saddle, and gazed at both without a word or a movement.

"Oh, what could have led her to this?" groaned the physician, already too sure that life had departed.

"Insanity," was the monotoned response of the statue on horseback.

The funeral took place two days later: the coffin-plate bore the inscription, "Alice Leighton, aged 23." Duvernois read it, and said not a word.

"If you don't claim her as your wife," whispered the brother, "you may find it difficult to marry again."

"Do you think I shall want to marry again?" responded the widower with an icy stare.

He was aware that he had lost a shame and a torment, and not aware that she might have been an honor and a joy, if only he had been able to love.

J. W. de Forest.

"How Mother Did It."

The year 1839--that is, the year in which I was born--is of no manner of importance to myself or anybody else. The year 1859--that is, the year in which I began to live (Charlie and I got married that year)--is of considerable importance to myself and to somebody else. The two decades forming the interim between those years constitute my Dark Age, in which I teethed and measled and whooping-coughed, and went to school, and wore my hair in two long pig-tails, and loved molasses candy, and regarded a school-room as purgatory, a ball-room as heaven--when I sang and danced and grew as the birds and grasshoppers and flowers sing and dance and grow, because they having nothing else to do.

Then came my Golden Age. That means, then came Charlie into my life, when I felt for the first time that there was music in the birds' voices and perfume in the flowers--that there was light in the heavens above and on the earth beneath, for God was in heaven and Charlie was on earth--when I, who had all along been hardly more than a human grasshopper, became the happiest of happy women--so much happier, I thought, than I deserved. For who was I, and what great thing had I ever done, that I should be crowned with such a crown of glory as--Charlie? why should I, insignificant I, be so blest among women as to be taken to wife by Charlie?

I was insanely sentimental enough to rather resent the fact that Charlie was prosaically well off: his circumstances were distressingly easy. It would have been so much nicer, so deliciously romantic, if there had been an opportunity afforded me to show how ready, nay, eager, I was to sacrifice friends, home and country for his dear sake. But Charlie didn't want me to sacrifice my friends; nor did it require any great amount of heroism to exchange my modestly comfortable home for his decidedly luxurious one; and as for country, nothing on earth could have induced Charlie to leave his own country, much less his own parish, much less his own plantation. So we were married without any talk of sacrifice on either side, and moved quietly enough from father's small plantation to Charlie's large one.

There was but one drawback to the perfectness of my happiness: there was so little hope of my ever having an opportunity to air those magnanimous traits of character upon the possession of which I so plumed myself. I felt sure that I could meet the most adverse circumstances with the most smiling patience, but circumstances obstinately refused to be adverse. I was inwardly conscious that the most trying emergency could not shake my heroic but purely feminine fortitude; but, alas! my fortitude was likely to rust while waiting for the emergency. Injury and wrong should be met with sublime dignity, but the most wildly speculative imagination could not look upon Charlie's placidly handsome face and convert him into a possible tyrant.

To tell how the longed-for opportunity to exercise my powers of endurance, and my dignity, and all the rest of it, did finally come about, and to tell how I bore the test, is the object of this paper.

For the first six months of our married life, Charlie and I were simply ridiculously happy--selfishly happy too. We resented a neighbor's visit as an act of barbarous invasion, and the necessity of returning such visits was acknowledged with a sublimity of resignation worthy of pictorial representation in that exquisite parlor manual, Fox's Book of Martyrs. If Charlie left the house for an hour or two, I looked upon his enforced absence as a cruel dispensation of Providence, which I did not bear with "fortitude and sublime dignity," but pouted over like the ridiculous baby I was. Bare conjugal civility required that on leaving the house Charlie should kiss me three times, and on returning six times: anything short of that I should have considered a pre-monitory symptom of approaching separation. If Charlie had ever been so savage as to call me plain "Lulie," I should have felt certain he was sick and tired of me, and was repenting of having married me instead of that spectacled bas-bleu, Miss Minerva Henshaw, who read Buckle and talked dictionary. I believe I was intoxicated with my own happiness, and was a little nonsensical because I was so happy.

Fortunately for the comfort of both Charlie and myself, his domestic cabinet consisted of a marvelously well-trained set of servants, who were simply perfect--as perfect in their way as Charlie was in his. They had been trained by Charlie's mother, who had been the head of affairs in his house up to the hour of her death--an event which had occurred some dozen years before my first meeting with Charlie. Everybody said she had been a celebrated housekeeper, and Charlie's devotion to her had been the talk of the country-side. There were people malicious enough to say that if Charlie's mother had never died, he would never have married, but I take the liberty of resenting such an assertion as a personal insult; for, although I don't doubt the dear old lady was a perfect jewel in her way, yet, looking at the portrait of her which hangs over our parlor mantelpiece, I see the face of a hard, determined-looking woman with cold gray eyes and rigidly set mouth, in a funny-looking black dress, neither high-necked nor low-necked, having a starchy white ruffle round the edge, in vivid white contrast to the yellow skin; with grizzly, iron-gray curls peeping out from under a cap that is fearfully and wonderfully made, with a huge ruffled border radiating in a circumference of several feet, while its two black-and-white gauze ribbon strings lie in rigid exactness over her two rigidly exact shoulders. Looking on this portrait, I do not thank anybody for saying that it was only because death chose that shining mark that I had found favor in Charlie's eyes.

We had been married, I suppose, about six months, when, sitting one evening over a cozy wood-fire in our cozy little parlor, just under the work of art I have described at such length, Charlie committed his first matrimonial solecism. He yawned, actually gaped--an open-mouthed, audible, undeniable yawn!

Glancing up at him from my work (which consisted of the inevitable worked slippers without which no woman considers her wifehood absolutely asserted), I caught him in the act. "Are you tired, Charlie?" I asked in accents of wifely anxiety.

Tired! Poor fellow! he ought to have been, for he had ridden all over the plantation that day, had written two business letters, and smoked there's no telling how many cigars, and had only taken one little cat-nap after dinner.

He was leaning back in his arm-chair, with his eyes fixed in mournful meditation upon his mother's portrait (at least I thought so), when I asked him if he was tired, and I fancied he was thinking sad thoughts of the mother who had not been dead so very long as never to trouble the thoughts of the living; so, laying down my slippers, I crossed the rug and perched myself on Charlie's knee.

"Talk to me about her, Charlie dear."

"About whom, little one?" asked Charlie, turning his eyes toward me with a little lazy look of inquiry.

"About your mother, Charlie: weren't you thinking about her just now?"

"I don't know--maybe I was. Dear mother! you don't find many women like her now-a-days."

Reader, that was my first glimpse of Charlie's hobby. And from the luck-less moment when I so innocently invited him to mount it, up to the time when I forcibly compelled him to dismount from it, I had ample opportunity to exercise my "smiling patience, sublime dignity and heroic fortitude." Whether or not I improved my opportunities properly, I will leave you to judge for yourself. But for two whole years "how mother did it" seemed to be the watchword of Charlie's existence, and was the bête noir of mine.

So long as Charlie and I were in Paradise the house kept itself, and very nicely it did it too, but by the time we were ready to come back to earth the perfect servants, who had been taking such good care of themselves, and our two daft selves into the bargain, were found to be sadly demoralized. The discovery came upon us gradually. I think my husband noticed the decadence as soon as I did, but I wasn't going to invite his attention to the fact; and he, I suppose, thought that I thought that everything was just as it should be.

One of Charlie's inherited manias was for early rising--a habit which would have been highly commendable and undeniably invaluable in a laboring man, but which struck me, who had an equally strong mania for not rising early, as extremely inconvenient and the least little bit absurd. Charlie got up early simply because "mother did it" before him; and after he had risen at earliest dawn and dressed himself, he had nothing better to do than walk out on the front gallery, locate himself in a big wicker chair, tilt his chair back and elevate his feet to the top of the banisters, and stare out over the cottonfields. This position he would maintain, probably, about twenty minutes. Then the pangs of hunger would render him restless, and he would draw out his watch to note the time of day. The next step in the formula would bring him back to my room door while I was still sleepily trying to reconnect the broken links of a dream, from which vain effort he would startle me into wide-awake reality by a stentorian "Lulie, Lulie! Come, wife--it's breakfast-time."

Upon which, instead of "heroic fortitude," I would treat him to a little cross "Please yell at the cook, Charlie, and not at me. I'm sure if people will get up at such unearthly hours, they should expect to be kept waiting for their breakfast."

Then the spirit of unrest would impel Charlie toward the back door, where I would hear him commanding, exhorting, entreating.

Mentally registering a vow to give my husband a dose of Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup on the coming night, I would relinquish all hope of another nap, get up and dress myself, and join my roaring lion on the front gallery, where we would both sit meekly waiting for the allied forces of kitchen and dining-room to decide upon the question of revictualing us.

"Lulie," said Charlie to me one morning at the breakfast-table, "things are getting all out of gear about this house, somehow or other."

I put down the coffee-pot with a resigned thump and asked my lord, with an injured air, to please explain himself.

"Well, when mother was alive I never knew what it was to sit down to my breakfast later than six o'clock in summer or seven in winter."

"How did she manage it, Charlie?" I asked, very meekly.

"Why, by getting up early herself. No servant on the face of the globe is going to get up at daybreak and go to work in earnest when she knows her mistress is sound asleep in bed. I will tell you how mother did: she had a pretty good-sized bell, that she kept on a table by her bedside, and every morning, as soon as her eyes were open, she would give such a peal with that old bell that all the servants on the premises knew that 'Mistress was awake and up,' and bestirred themselves accordingly. There was no discount on mother: that was the way she made father a rich man, too."

"But, Charlie, you're already a rich man, and why on earth should we get out of bed at daybreak just because your mother and father did so before us?"

"Of course, Lulie," said Charlie, the least little bit coldly, "I have no desire in the world to force you to conform to my views: I only told you how mother did it."

Reader, you know how I loved Charlie, and after that I out-larked the lark in early rising; and although Charlie and I did little more than gape in each other's faces for an hour or two, and wish breakfast would come, and wonder what made them take so long, he was perfectly satisfied that we were both on the road that was to make us healthier, wealthier and wiser.

Among other points on which my husband and I were mutually agreed was a liking for good strong coffee, and we also held in common one decided opinion, and that was, that our coffee was gradually becoming anything but good and strong.

Charlie broached the subject first. "Lulie, our coffee is getting to be perfectly undrinkable," said he one morning, putting his cup down with a face of disgust.

"It is indeed, Charlie: it's perfectly villainous. Milly ought to be ashamed of herself: I shall speak to her again after breakfast."

"Maybe you don't give out enough coffee?" suggested Charlie.

"I don't know how much Milly takes," I replied, innocently.

"Takes! Do you mean to say that you don't know how much coffee goes out of your pantry, Lulie? I don't wonder we never have any fit to drink!"

If I had been of an argumentative turn, I would have asked Charlie to explain how giving the cook carte blanche in the matter of quantity should have had such a disastrous effect in the matter of quality. But I was not of an argumentative turn, so I took no notice of his queer logic.

"Why should I bother about every spoonful of coffee, Charlie? You assured me, when I first came here, that every servant you had was as honest as you or I, and I'm sure Milly knows better than I do how much coffee she ought to take."

"Well," said Charlie with a sigh of mock resignation, "that may be the way they do things now-a-days, but I remember exactly how mother managed to have good coffee." Here the hobby broke into a brisk canter: "I recollect she had a little oval wooden box, that held, I suppose, about a quart--or two, maybe--of roasted coffee, and that box stood on the mantelpiece in her room; and every morning, as soon as her bell rang, Milly would come with a cup and spoon, and mother would measure out two table-spoonfuls of coffee with her own hands and give it to the cook, and the cook knew better than not to have good coffee, I can tell you."

"Are you sure it was only two spoonfuls, Charlie?"

"I am sure," responded Charlie, solemnly.

As good-luck would have it, while rummaging in the store-room a day or two after that coffee talk, I came upon a little old oval wooden box, the lid of which I detached with some difficulty, and as the scent of the roses hung round it still, I had no difficulty in identifying my treasure-trove with the wooden box that had played such a distinguished part in the good old times when cooks "knew better than not to have good coffee, I can tell you."

Hoping that some relic of my dead predecessor might prove more awe-inspiring to contumacious Milly than my own despised monitions, I exhumed the wooden box, had it thoroughly cleansed, filled with roasted coffee and placed upon my mantelpiece, giving Milly orders to come to me hereafter, every morning, for the coffee.

Charlie gave me a grateful little kiss when he saw the old box in the old place, either as a reward for my amiable endeavor to do things as mother did, or because he took the old wooden box for an outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that was to move Milly to make good coffee.

But somehow or other, in spite of the unsightly old wooden box on my mantelshelf, the coffee didn't improve in the least. Maybe the charm failed to work because Charlie had forgotten which end of the mantelpiece his mother used to keep it on, or I used the wrong spoon. I'm inclined to lay it on the spoon myself, but there's no telling.

The first cotton-picking season that came round after my marriage seemed to afford Charlie no end of opportunities for riding his hobby at a fast and furious pace. It seemed as if there was no end to the things that mother used to do at that important season. I suppose she really was a wonderful woman, and I humbly hope that by the time I have lived as long as she did, and get to looking as she does in her portrait, and can wear a wonderful-looking cap with the wonderful composure she wore it with, and have little iron-gray curls hanging round my iron-gray visage, I may be only half as wonderful.

"Would I see to the making of the cotton sacks? That was one thing mother always did." Thus Charlie.

Of course I would: why should I object to doing anything that would forward my husband's interests? Besides, I was actually pining for some healthful occupation: I was tired of playing at living. I resolved on a brilliant plan. I would out-mother mother, for she only saw to the making of the sacks: I would make them myself, every one of them, on my sewing-machine. If I couldn't make cotton-sacks on it, what was the use of having it?

Charlie had informed me that he would send me down seven or eight women from the quarters to make the sacks. I informed him with a flourish that I should need but one: I should want her to cut the sacks out. Charlie thanked me, and Martha and I and "Wheeler & Wilson" made the sacks.

Was I to blame that the wretched things burst in twenty places at once the first time they were used? Was I to blame that two women were kept busy mending my sacks until they ceased to be sacks? Charlie might think so, but I did not.

He reported the failure of my cotton-sack experiment with very unbecoming levity, as it struck me, accompanying his report with a somewhat unjust comment upon new-fangled notions, such as sewing-machines, etc., etc., winding up with--"Now, when mother was alive" (I fairly winced), "the house was not considered too good for the darkies to sit on the back gallery with their work and make the sacks right under mother's eye--sewing them with good strong thread, too, that was spun for the purpose. I can remember the old spinning-wheel: it used to sit right at that end of the gallery."

Like Captain Cuttle, I "made a note of it" for future use.

I often had occasion to wonder, during the early years of my married life, how it happened that the son of such an exceptionally perfect woman as I was compelled to presume my respected mother-in-law to have been, should have grown up with such shockingly disorderly habits as had my Charlie. The wretched creature would stalk into my bed-room--which I was particularly dainty about--fresh from shooting or fishing, with pounds of mud clinging to his boots, bristling all over with cockleburs, his hands grimed with gunpowder; and helping himself to water from my ewer, he would begin dabbling in my china basin until he had reduced its originally pure contents into a compound of mud and ink, and would wind up by making a finish of my fresh damask towel, and throwing it on the bed or a chair instead of returning it to the rack, as he should have done.

"Charlie," said I one day, saucily inviting a dose of "what mother did," "what did mother used to do when you came into her room and turned it into a pig-stye, and then left it for her to clean up again?"

"She never let me do it," said Charlie with a laugh. "I'll tell you how she did. She had a tin basin on a shelf on the back gallery, and one of those great big rolling towels that lasted about a week; and after her washstand was fixed up in the morning, we knew better than to upset it, I can tell you."

"Very well, sir: I intend you shall know better than to upset mine, I'll show you."

In fact, things had come to that pass that I had mentally resolved to "show" Charlie a great many things. I firmly believed that the secret of the power that Charlie's mother had exercised over her household, and still exercised over him in memory, lay in the fact that she made them all afraid of her: so I firmly resolved that they should all be afraid of me, poor little me! It is true, I was but twenty, and she was fifty; I was but a pocket edition of a woman, and she was a Webster Unabridged; I had little meek blue eyes, that dropped to the ground in the most shamefaced manner if a body did but look at me, and she had hard, cold gray eyes, that not only looked straight at you, but right through you. Still, I hoped, notwithstanding these trifling drawbacks, to make myself very awe-inspiring by dint of a grand assumption of spirit.

To put it into very plain language, I resolved to bully Charlie off his hobby. He had thrown his mother at my head (figuratively speaking, of course) until, if she had been present in propria persona, I should have been tempted to try Hiawatha's remarkable feat with his grandmother, and throw her up against the moon. But as I could not revenge myself upon her personally, I began to lay deep and subtle plans for inducing Charlie to leave her to her repose.

As the veritable bell which, in the days when "mother did it," had acted as a sort of Gabriel's trump, was still extant, minus clapper and handle, I was enabled to provide myself with its fac-simile. Armed with this instrument of retribution, I laid me down to sleep by Charlie's side, gloating in anticipation over my ripening scheme of vengeance.

It was a rare thing for me to wake up before Charlie, but I did manage to do so on the morning in question, by dint, I think, of a powerful mental resolution to that effect made the night before. I raised myself very softly, so as not to disturb my husband's gentle slumbers, and, possessing myself of my big bell, I laid on with a will, raising such a clatter in the quiet morning air that Charlie fairly bounded into the middle of the room before he in the least comprehended where it came from.

"In the name of God, Lulie, what is the meaning of that?" he exclaimed, looking at me as if he half doubted my sanity.

"That's the way mother did it, Charlie," I replied placidly enough, and, replacing my big bell on the table, I settled myself on my pillow once more, ostensibly to go to sleep again--in reality to have my laugh out in a quiet fashion, for it was enough to have made the very bed-posts laugh to see Charlie's funny look of astonishment and indignation. But of course he couldn't say a word, you know.

For two more mornings I clattered my bell about his precious old head, and then he paid me to quit, and after that began riding his hobby at a little slower gait.

The next direct intimation he gave that his faith in inherited ideas was growing shaky was a plaintive little request that I would not stick so close to the old wooden box, but give out enough coffee to ensure him something to drink for his breakfast.

Now, I had no wish that my husband should drink bad coffee just because Providence had seen fit to remove his mother from this sublunary sphere: I merely wanted to cure him of telling me how mother did it; so as soon as he thus tacitly acknowledged that his suggestion had not been a success, I took matters into my own hands, and proved to him that coffee could be made as well by young wives as by old mothers.

In the due revolution of the seasons King Cotton donned his royal robes of ermine once more, and sacks again became the one thing needful. It was the very rainiest, wettest, muddiest picking-season that had ever been seen. In pursuance of my plan, I had seven or eight women down from the quarters, and a spinning-wheel also, which was set to humming right under our bed-room window.

The rainy weather had kept Charlie in the house, and he was lounging on a couch in my room, enjoying a pleasant semi-doze, when the monotonous whirr-r-r of the spinning-wheel first attracted his attention. "Lulie," he asked, rising into a sitting posture, "what is that infernal noise on the back gallery?"

"The spinning-wheel, Charlie. They are spinning thread to make the sacks with," I answered, without looking up from my work.

"Oh!" and Charlie subsided for a while. "Ahem! Lulie, my dear, how long is that devilish spinning to be kept up?"

"Devilish! Why, Charlie, that's the way mother did it."

"Well," said Charlie, scratching his head and looking foolish, "I know she did, Lulie, but I'll be confounded if I can stand it much longer."

"Why, Charlie, you used to stand it when mother did it," I answered maliciously.

"I was hardly ever about the house in those days, Lulie: I suppose that was why I didn't mind it."

"Why weren't you about the house much in those days, Charlie?"

"Because you weren't in it, you witch, I suppose."

This was such a decided triumph over the old lady of the portrait that I could afford to be amiable; so, giving him a spasmodic little hug and an energetic little kiss, I went out and stopped the spinning nuisance immediately.

After that the hobby went slower and slower, feebler and feebler. One more energetic display of my bogus spirit and "the enemy was mine."

Winter came on in its duly-appointed time, bringing with it the usual quantity of wild ducks and more than the usual degree of severe cold. Charlie was an inveterate duck-shooter, and with the return of the season came the return of mud and dirt in my bowls.

I determined to do as mother did. A tin basin made its appearance on the back gallery, four yards of crash sewed together at the end were made to revolve over the roller, and by way of forcing the experiment to a successful issue orders were given that my own pitchers should be filled only after nightfall.

I was sitting in my bed-room sewing away, in placid unconsciousness of outside cold and discomfort, when Charlie got home from his first hunt of the season.

"No water, Lulie?" and the monster took hold of my nice pitcher with a pair of muddy, half-frozen hands.

"On the gallery, dear, just where mother used to keep it;" and I smiled up at him angelically.

With a muttered something or other, poor Charlie bounded out to the back gallery. He came back in a minute, his hands as muddy and cold as ever.

"Look here, Lulie: the water's all frozen in that confounded tin basin out there."

"I'll have it thawed out for you," I said sweetly, rising as I spoke.

"I say, wifey"--and the great, handsome fellow came close up to me with his mud and his burs--"do you think it's exactly fair, when a fellow's been out all the morning shooting ducks for your dinner, to make him stand out on the gallery such a day as this and scrub the mud off his frozen hands?"

"That's the way mother did," was all my answer.

"Look here, Lulie, I cry quits. If you'll only let a body off this once, you may keep house on your own plan, little lady, and I'll never tell you how mother did it again so long as I live."

"Well, then, don't, that's a dear," I replied, "for you'll only make me dislike her memory, without doing any good. Just be patient with me, Charlie, and maybe after a while I'll be as good a housekeeper as your mother was before me. The mistake you and all other men make is, in comparing your wives at the end of their first year of housekeeping with your mothers, whose housekeeping you knew nothing about until it was of ever so many years' duration. I'm young yet, but I'm improving in that matter every day, Charlie."

With which little moral lecture I gave Charlie a kiss, and some water to wash the mud from his poor red hands.

Moral.--My dear girls, don't you ever marry a man that cannot take his affidavit he never had a mother, unless it is expressly stipulated in the marriage contract that he is never to tell you how his mother did it.

J. R. Hadermann.

The Red Fox:

A Tale of New Year's Eve.

It was New Year's Eve, 184-. I and my two little boys, children of five and seven, were alone in the house. My husband had been unexpectedly called away on business, and the servant had gone to her friends to spend the coming holiday.

It was drawing toward night. The cold shadows of the winter twilight were already falling. A dull red glow in the west told where the sun was going down. Over the rest of the sky hung heavy gray clouds. A few drops of rain fell from time to time, and the wind was rising, coming round the corner of the house with a long, mournful howl like that of a lost hound.

I am not a very nervous person, but I did not like the idea of spending by myself the long evening that would come after the children's bed-time.

We were living then in a very new place in Michigan, which I shall call Maysville. My husband, an ex-army officer, had resigned the sword for the saw-mill. Our house was the oldest in the village, which does not speak much for its antiquity, as five years before Maysville had been unbroken forest. The house stood outside the cluster of houses that formed the little settlement: it was a quarter of a mile to our nearest neighbor.

Now, Maysville calls itself a city, has an academy and a college, and a great quantity of church in proportion to its population. Then, we "went to meeting" in a little white-painted, pine box of a thing, like a barn that had risen in life. The stumps stood about the street: the cows wandered at will and pastured in the "public square," an irregular clearing running out into indefinite space. Here also the Indians would encamp when they came to town from their reservation about five miles away, and here also, I regret to say, they would sometimes get drunk, and add what Martha Penney calls "a revolving animosity to the scenery." The squaws, however, would generally secure the knives and guns before the quarrelsome stage was reached. Not unfrequently the ladies would bring the weapons to Mrs. Moore or myself to hide away till their lords and masters should be sober. Then, feeling secure that no great harm could happen, they would look on with the utmost placidity at the antics of their better halves until they dropped down to sleep off their liquor.

There were no Indians in town that night, however, and if there had been, I was not at all afraid of them, for we were on excellent terms with the whole reservation. My feeling about staying alone was merely one of those unreasonable sensations that sometimes overtake people of ill-regulated minds.

I went to the door and looked out at the gray, angry sky. It was not cold, but chill. The wind howled and shivered among the leafless branches: everything promised a storm.

I was not at all sorry to see Mr. and Mrs. Moore drive up in their light buggy, with their two high-stepping, little brown horses. Mrs. Moore had in her arms a bundle in a long blue embroidered cloak--a baby, in short. She and her husband firmly believed this infant to be the most beautiful, most intelligent and altogether most charming creature which the world had ever seen. They had been married three years, and little Carry was their first child.

Mr. and Mrs. Moore were by no means ordinary people. Mrs. Moore--born Minny or Hermione Adams--was a very small woman, exceedingly pretty, with light brown curly hair, dark blue eyes and a complexion like an apple blossom.

Mr. Moore was the son of a Seneca mother and Cherokee father, with not a drop of white blood in his veins. So he thought, at least, but I never could quite believe it, because he could and did work, and never so much as touched even a glass of wine. His parents had died when he was very young, and he had been brought up and educated by a missionary, a gentle, scholarly old Presbyterian minister, whose memory his adopted son held in loving reverence.

The story of our acquaintance with Richard Moore is too long to be told here. Four years before he had come with us from the Pawnee country. He had married Minny Adams with the full consent of her parents and the opposition of all her other friends. Contrary to all prophecies, and with that inartistic disregard of the probable which events often show, they had been very happy together.

Mr. Moore--otherwise Wyanota--was a civil engineer, and stood high in his profession.

"Look here, mamma," he said as he drove up. "Will you take in the wife and the small child for to-night? I must go away."

"Certainly," said I, overjoyed. "But where are you going, to be caught in a storm?"

"Oh, they have got into a fuss with the hands over on the railroad, and have sent for me. I might have known Robinson wouldn't manage when I left him?"

"Why not?"

"English!" said Wyn, most expressively. "No one can stand the airs he puts on."

Now, such airs as Mr. Moore possessed--and they were neither few nor far between--were not put on, but were perfectly natural to him.

"Can't you come in and get your tea?" I asked as he handed me the baby and helped his wife down.

"No: I must go over directly and compose matters. Good-bye, little woman: by-bye, baby! Do you know, we think she's beginning to say 'papa?'" said Wyn, proudly; and then he kissed his wife and child and drove away.

I carried the infant phenomenon into the house and took off its wrappings. She was my namesake, and I loved the little creature, but I can't say she was a pretty baby. She was a soft, brown thing, with her father's beautiful southern eyes and her mother's mouth, but otherwise she certainly was not handsome. She was ten months old, but she had a look of experience and wisdom in her wee face that would have made her seem old at twenty years. She sat on my lap and watched me in a meditative way, as though she were reviewing her former estimate of my character, and considering whether her opinions on that subject were well founded. There was something quite weird and awful in her dignity and gravity.

"Isn't she a wise-looking little thing?" said Minny. "She makes me think sometimes of the fairy changeling that was a hundred and fifty years old, and never saw soap made in an egg-shell."

"This baby never would have made such a confession of ignorance, you may depend. She would not have acknowledged that anything lay out of the range of her experience. Take your chicken till I get tea, for I am my own girl to-night."

We had a very merry time over the tea-table and in washing up the dishes. Until the boys went to bed we were in something of a frolic with them and the baby, and it was not till the little one was asleep in her crib and Ed and Charley were quiet in bed that we noticed how wild the weather was getting.

The rain, which had at first fallen in pattering drops, was now driving in sheets before a mighty wind, which roared through the woods back of the house with a noise like thunder. The branches of the huge oaks in the front yard creaked and groaned as only oak boughs can. The house shook, the rain lashed the roof, and the wind clawed and rattled the blinds like some wild creature trying to get in.

"I hope Wyn is safe under shelter,'' said Mrs. Moore.

"He will have reached the end of his journey long before this. I hope he will have no trouble with the men, but he is not apt to. I pity poor Mr. Robinson. When Wyn chooses, his extreme politeness is something quite awful."

"I will say for my husband," observed Mrs. Moore, "that when he sets himself to work to be disagreeable, he can, without doing one uncourteous thing, be more aggravating than any one I ever saw in my life."

"It is perfectly evident that he never tries his airs on you, or you would not speak so. Hear the wind blow!"

"It is no use listening to the weather. The house will stand, I suppose. Have you got your work? Then let me read to you. It will seem like old times, before I was married."

Minny Moore was in some respects a very remarkable woman. Though little Carry was her first baby, she could talk on other subjects. She did not expect you to listen with rapture to the tenth account of how baby had said "Da-da," or thrill with agony over the tale of an attack of wind. She had been her husband's friend and companion before the baby was born: she did not entirely throw him over now that it had come. She had always been fond of reading, and she continued to keep up her interest in the world outside of her nursery. She thought that as her daughter grew up her mother would be as valuable as a guide and friend if she did not wholly sink the educated woman in the nurse-maid and seamstress. These habits may have been "unfeminine," but they certainly made Mrs. Moore much more agreeable as a companion than if she had been able to talk of nothing but the baby's clothes, teeth and ailments.

I took out my work, and Minny began to read Locksley Hall, which was then a new poem on this side the water. I had never heard it before, and I must confess I was much affected--more than I should be now. Mrs. Moore, however, chose to say that she thought Amy had made a most fortunate escape, that she had no doubt but the hero would have been a most intolerable person to live with, and that their marriage, had it come to pass, would have ended in Amy's taking in sewing to support both herself and her husband. As for the Squire, why we had no word for his character but his disappointed rival's, and his drinking might be all a slander. As to his snoring, why poets might snore as well as other people. If he loved his wife "somewhat better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse," "Why what more," said Mrs. Moore, "could any woman ask of a man given to horses and hunting? If Calvin Bruce ever cares more for a woman than he does for his brown pointer and his fast trotter, she may think herself happy indeed."

At that instant a sudden and furious blast rushed out of the woods, and tore and shook at the four corners of the house as if to wrench it from its foundations.

"It's quite awful to hear the wind scream like that," said Minny. "It is like the banshee. Hark! is not that some one knocking at the back door?"

I listened, and amid the rattling and shaking of blinds and timbers I heard what sounded like a hurried, impatient knock at the side door. "Who can it be on such a wild night?" I said, and took the candle and went to open the door. I set the light in the hall, for I knew the wind would blow it out. In spite of this precaution, however, the flame was extinguished, for as I drew back the bolt and lifted the latch the blast threw the door violently back on its hinges, and rushed into the hall as though exulting in having finally made an entrance.

"Pretty bad weather, mamma," said some one in the softest, sweetest voice, like a courteous flute, and there entered my old friend the Black Panther.

This gentleman measured seven feet in his moccasins, and as he stood in our little entry he looked gigantic indeed. He closed the door with some difficulty, and I relit the candle.

"You are quite wet through," I said, for the water dripped from his blanket and woolen hunting-frock. He carried his rifle in his hand, and I thought the old man looked very tired and sad, and even anxious.

"You all well?" he asked, earnestly.

"Certainly. The captain has gone away, and Minny and the baby are here for the night. My dear friend, where have you been in this weather? There is a good fire in the kitchen. Come and get dry there, and let me make you a cup of hot coffee and get you something to eat."

Here Minny came out into the hall and held up her hands in sunrise.

"Oh, uncle," she said, calling him by the name she had used toward him since her childhood, "how could you come out in all this rain, and bring on your rheumatism? How do you think any one is ever going to find dry clothes for such a big creature as you?"

The Panther gave a little grunt and a smile. He was used to Minny's lectures, and he followed us both into the kitchen, where she made him sit down by the fire and took off his wet blanket, waiting on him like a daughter, and scolding him gently meanwhile. The old gentleman had of late years been subject to rheumatism, and it was too likely that this exposure would bring on another attack. The Panther patted her two little hands between his own. Like most of his race, he had beautiful hands, soft and rounded even in his old age, with long taper fingers that had, I dare say, taken more than one scalp in their time.

"Pooh!" said he, lightly. "You think old Ingin melt like maple sugar? You well?" he asked, anxiously.

"Quite so."

"And little one?"

"As well as a little pig, fast asleep in the other room."

"Where your husband?"

"Gone over to the railroad on business."

"And yours?" he asked, turning to me.

"Gone to Carysville. Do you know anything about him? is anything the matter?" I asked, a little alarmed at his persistent questioning and an indefinite something in the old man's tone and manner.

"Oh no," said he, earnestly. "I come right over from our place."

"Walked from the reservation in this storm!" said I. "What could have made you do such a thing?"

"Nothing--just to see you. Not very strange come see two nice women," said the old gentleman, with a little complimentary bow.

The Panther was somewhat vain of his knowledge of what he called "white manners," but I never saw a white man who could be so gently dignified, so courteous, so altogether charming in manner, as the old chief when he chose. He hardly knew one letter from another, but he had had sixty-five years of experience in war and council. Many a man "got up regardless of expense" in college and society might have taken lessons in deportment from this old Pottawatomie. He had known Minny from her childhood. Her father's farm had been the first clearing in all that part of the country. Deacon Adams had always been on excellent terms with the Indians, and his little daughter had found her earliest playmates among their children. The Panther had carried Minny in his arms when she was a baby; and as his own family of boys and girls died one after another, he clung closer to the child who had been their pet as well as his own.

The Panther was one of those big, soft, easy men who seem made to be ruled by one woman or another. He was greatly respected in his tribe, and had much influence. When they had been a nation he had been one of their most distinguished warriors, and his word had been law. He had always maintained toward the "young men" a somewhat imperious manner. He had conducted himself with dignity and decision in all his visits to Washington, where he had been a great lion, and in all his dealings with the United States he had shown much wisdom and ability. But report said that when once within the domestic circle and before his squaw, the diplomatist and warrior was exceedingly meek. He bore his wife's death with resignation, but he had never married again. He loved Minny Adams better than anything on earth, and the girl had great influence over him. She, in her turn, was very fond of him. From her earliest years he had been her friend, confidant and admirer. He looked so fierce and dangerous, and was so kind and simple, that the alliance between the girl and himself was very much like that between a little child and a big mastiff--the child protected and leader, the dog protector and led.

Minny made flannel shirts for him, and he wore them: she trimmed his moccasins, and the dainty cambric ruffles which he wore when in grand costume were got up by her hands. The Panther, however, did not often appear in full dress. She tried to teach him to read, and she did get him through the alphabet, but he greatly preferred hearing stories read to learning to do it for himself, and was especially fond of the Arabian Nights, which he quite believed. She even coaxed him to go to church with her, and might have made a convert of him but for the interference of an exceedingly silly young clergyman. The Panther rather liked to hear the Bible, but I fear he was more attracted by the sound than the sense: his favorite chapter was the story of David and Goliah. He used to say that "Ingin religion was good for Ingin, and white religion was good for white man." However, he never offered the least opposition to the missionary who had settled among his people: indeed, he rather patronized that gentleman.

He and Wyanota were excellent friends. It was good to see the deference and respect with which the younger man treated the elder. I always said that it was the Panther who made the match between Minny and Mr. Moore. Their house was one of his homes, and he was a frequent guest at our own. He petted and spoiled my two children: he was very soft and kind to me, whom he called "Mamma," after Wyn's example, and he considered that my husband "understood good manners"--a compliment which he did not pay to every one.

A dear little daughter whom we had lost had been very fond of him: the child had died in his arms. I was alone at the time, and the old man's sympathy was such a comfort to me in my trouble that for his own sake, as well as for our little girl's, he had become very dear to us.

For an Indian, the Panther might be called almost a sober character. He was seldom drunk more than four or five times a year, and when he was, he always was very careful to keep out of the way of his white friends until he was sober, when he would lecture the young men on the evils of intemperance in most impressive fashion. He was a good deal of an orator, possessing a voice of great sweetness and power; and though he was such an immense creature, all his movements were light and graceful as those of a kitten. He could speak perfectly good, even elegant, English when he chose, but he did not always choose, and generally omitted the pronouns; but his voice, manner and gestures in speaking were perfectly charming when he was in a good temper. When he was not, he was somewhat awful, but it was only under great provocation that he became savage. In general, he was an amiable, kind, lazy creature, whom it was very easy to love.

I could not but wonder that night, as I set out the table and made the coffee, what had brought the Panther so far in such wild weather. He did not seem like himself. He was usually very conversable, and would chat away by the hour together, in a fashion half shrewd, half simple, often very interesting; but now he was silent and distrait.

"Carry," said Mrs. Moore, "are there not some of Wyn's things here yet in that old trunk in your lumber-room?"

"Yes. Perhaps you can find something the chief can put on, and bring down a pair of the captain's socks and slippers."

"Oh, never mind, never mind," said the damp giant.

"But I will mind," said the little woman; and she went out and soon returned with the things, which she insisted he should go and put on.

"Well, always one woman or another," said the Panther in a tone of resignation: "always squaw git her own way. You see that little girl, mamma? Could squeeze her up just like a rabbit. Always she order me round since she so high, and I just big fool enough let her;" and he went into the next room, and presently came out arrayed in dry garments, as to his upper man at least. I set the table with the best I had in the house, and Minny and I sat down to get a cup of coffee with our guest.

At any other time the old gentleman would have purred and talked over this little feast like an amiable old cat, but now he was rather silent; and I noticed that in the pauses of the wind he would stop as though listening for some expected sound. I began to think he was concealing from me some misfortune or danger, and the same thought was evidently in Minny's mind, for she watched him anxiously.

When we went back into the parlor the Panther walked to the baby's crib, and stood for a moment looking at the sleeping child with a tenderness which softened his whole aspect. Then he asked for the little boys.

"They are fast asleep in the next room," I said. "Go and look at them, and you will be sure."

The Panther smiled, but he went into my room, which opened from the parlor, and bending down softly kissed the two little faces resting on the same pillow.

I drew a large chair to the fire for him, and Minny filled his pipe, for I had "followed the drum" too long to object to smoking. The giant stretched his length of limb before the fire, but he did not seem quite at ease, even under the influence of the tobacco. He looked a little troubled and anxious, and lifted his head once or twice with a sudden motion, like a dog who has misgivings that something is wrong out-doors.

The baby stirred in her sleep, and the chief began gently to rock the cradle. "'Spose she order me about too, by and by," he said, "like her mother."

"Oh, you like to make that out," said Minny, "because you are such a great big, strong man. If you were a little bit of a creature, you would always be standing on your dignity to make yourself look tall. The last time Wyn and I were at Detroit we went to church, and I heard the very smallest man I ever saw preach a tremendous sermon about the man being the head of the woman, insisting mightily on the respect we all owe to the other sex. When we came out I asked Wyn what he thought, and he said he thought it was exactly such a sermon as such a very tiny man might be expected to preach."

"Ah! and he heard you both, my dear," said I; "and he says Mr. Moore has no element of reverence in his character!"

Here the Panther dropped his pipe, and starting from his chair looked like his namesake just ready for a spring, as the sharp, quick bark of a little dog was heard from the nearest house.

"Only dog," he said in a tone of relief, and resumed his smoking.

"Uncle," said Minny, "I do wish you would tell me what the matter is, or what you are listening for. You make me think there is something wrong."

I looked up and seconded Minny's request.

"'Spose I tell you, you think it all Ingin nonsense," he said, looking a little embarrassed.

"Even if I did, sir, I should feel more comfortable," I said.

"Yes, do tell us, please," said Minny, earnestly.

"Well, then," said the old man, speaking with an effort, "last night went out after a coon--up in the woods right back of here--"

"Yes: well?"

"And went up on that little hill over your pasture, and then," said the old man lowering his voice and speaking with great earnestness, "hear red fox bark--one, two, three times out loud, and then again farther off. There, now!"

I was greatly relieved at finding that I was threatened by nothing worse than the oracle of the red fox. I knew the Indian superstition that if this animal is heard to bark anywhere near a dwelling, he foretells death within twenty-four hours to some one beneath its roof.

"But," said I, "the red fox is only a sign for Indians. He does not bark for white people, and you were not under a roof at the time, so it cannot apply to you."

"Don't know!" said the Panther, shaking his head. "Never know that sign fail. Then here this little woman and this baby--all the same as Ingin now."

Minny looked a little troubled. In spite of his reading, his college education and mathematics, Wyanota had sundry queer notions and superstitions, about which he very seldom spoke, but which nevertheless had some weight with him, and it is possible that he had in some degree communicated his ideas to his wife.

"I don't believe in signs," said Minny, but nevertheless she looked annoyed.

"So I thought," said the chief with a little smile. "Know mamma here think it all nonsense, or else come over this morning to tell her. Then think she not believe it and not mind, and so keep quiet. Then storm come up and wind blow, and couldn't stand it; so set out and walk over here to take care of her; and she--maybe she laugh at me?"

"No indeed, sir," said I, greatly touched by the anxious affection which had brought the old man so far in such weather. "How good you are to me! You mean to stay here to-night of course, and in the morning you will see that the red fox was simply barking for his own amusement; but I am sorry he drove you to take such a toilsome walk, though we are glad to have you here."

"My business take care of you when your men gone. Got no one my own blood," he said, rather sadly: "boys dead, girl dead, squaw dead--no one but you two care much for old man."

Minny went and kissed him softly. "You know I belong to you," she said, "and baby has no grandfather but you."

"Ah! your father!" said the Panther, rocking the cradle. "He and I always good friends. 'Member when you come, your mother she got no milk for you, poor little starved thing! My squaw she lose her baby--nice little boy too," said the old man, with a sigh--"she tell your mother she nurse you; so she did. You git fat and rosy right off. You all the same one of us after that. No spoil your pretty white skin, though," said the Panther, patting Minny's cheek with his brown fingers. "Seem just like that happen yesterday: now you got baby yourself. Ah! your father--mighty well pleased he be 'spose he see that little one."

"How often I wish he could!" said "Minny with a sigh, for both her father and mother were dead.

"You 'pend upon it, he comfortable somewhere," said the chief, consolingly. "Deacon Adams, he real good man. Look here, mamma! Like to ask you question. You say when we die white man go to one place, Indian go to another--"

"I don't say so, sir. I don't pretend to know all this world by heart, much less the other."

"Well, that what Indian say, any way. Now 'spose that so, what come of half-breed, eh?"

"What do you think?" I asked, for neither Minny nor I could venture an opinion on this abstruse point.

"Don't know," said the old man. "Saw young Cherokee in Washington: he marry pretty little schoolmistress go down there to teach, and their little boy die. Then that young man feel bad, and he fret good deal 'bout where that baby gone to, and he ask me, and I no able tell him. Guess me find out when get there: no use to trouble till then, You make these?" he asked, changing the subject, and looking with admiration at the captain's embroidered slippers which I had lent him.

"Yes. They were pretty when they were new. I'll make you a pair just like them, if you wish. Shall I?"

The old gentleman looked greatly delighted, for he was as fond of finery as any girl, and took no small pride in adorning his still handsome person.

I brought out all my embroidery-patterns, and the giant took as much pleasure as a child in the pretty painted pictures and gay-colored wools and silks. I made all the conversation I could over the slippers, willing to divert him from the melancholy which seemed to have taken possession of his mind. Over my work-basket he brightened a little, and chatted away quite like himself, and listened with pleasure to Minny's singing. We did not rise to go to bed till eleven o'clock, which was a very late hour for Maysville. When the Panther spent the night at our house, as was frequently the case, he never would go regularly to bed, but would take his blanket and lie down before the kitchen fire. With great politeness he insisted on getting the wood ready for morning, a thing he never would have dreamed of doing for a woman of his own race.

As he came back into the kitchen from the shed he took up his rifle, which he had set down by the door. As he did so an angry look came over his face. "Look here," he said: "somebody been spoil my rifle!"

I looked at the piece in surprise, for the lock was broken. "It cannot have been done since you came," I said. "There is no one in the house but ourselves."

"Of course not, of course not!" said the Panther, eager to show that he had no suspicion of his friends.

"Did you stop anywhere on your way?"

"Yes," said he with some slight embarrassment. "Stop at Ryan's," mentioning a low tavern on the borders of the reservation, which was a terrible thorn in the side of all the missionary's efforts. "Stop a minute light my pipe, but no drink one drop," he added with great earnestness; "but they ask me good deal."

"Did you put your gun down?"

"Guess so," he said after a moment's reflection. "Yes, know did put it down a minute or two."

"Then that was when the mischief was done, you may be sure. This lock was never broken by accident. It must have been a mere piece of spite because you would not stay. I wonder you did not notice it when you came out."

"In a hurry, and kept the buckskin over it, not to git it wet. Wish knew who did that," said he, with a look not good to see. "Guess not do it again."

"I am very sorry, but it can easily be mended."

I spread out on the floor for him the comfortable and blankets I had brought for his use, and hung up his woolen hunting-frock, now quite dry.

As I took it into my hand, I felt something very heavy in the pocket.

"I hope you have nothing here that will be spoiled with wet?" I said.

"Oh, nothing but money," said the chief, carelessly. "Mean to tell Minny to take some of it and buy clothes for me."

He took out as he spoke a handful of loose change--copper, silver and two or three gold-pieces--and a roll of bills a good deal damp, and put it all into my apron. I counted the money and found there were seventy-five dollars. Strong indeed must have been the attraction which had brought the old man away from the tavern-fire in his sober senses with such a sum of money in his pocket.

"Just got that," he said. "Part from Washington, part sell deer-skins."

There was no need to tell me that it had not been long in his possession. Money in the Panther's hands was like water in a sieve.

"You give me five dollars, give the rest to Minny," he said; and as this was by much the wisest arrangement for him, I did as he wished.

"You got captain's gun?" he asked me. "Never like to go to sleep without something to catch up: hit somebody 'spose somebody come."

"I am sorry to say the captain has his rifle with him, and I lent the shotgun to Jim Brewster this afternoon."

He looked annoyed, but he went out into the woodshed and returned with the axe, which was new and sharp. "Have something, anyway," he said, doggedly.

"Why, what do you think can possibly happen?"

"Don't know. Always like to have something to catch up. Good-night, mamma. You go to sleep."

I went to bed and fell asleep almost on the minute, but I could not have slept long when I was wakened by the noise of the wind against the shutters. The rain had ceased, but the blast was still roaring without. Minny and her child were in a room which opened out of the parlor opposite my own. The lamp which was burning there threw a dim light into my chamber, and showed me each familiar object and my little boys asleep beside me.

Some one says that between the hours of one and four in the morning the human mind is not itself. I fully believe it. In those hours you do not "fix your mind" on melancholy subjects--they fix themselves upon you. If you turn back into the past, there comes up before you every occasion on which you made a fool of yourself, every lost opportunity, every slight injury you ever experienced. If you look at the future, you see nothing but coming failure and disappointment. The present moment connects itself with every tale you ever heard or read of ghosts, murder, vampires or robbers.

That night, either because of the wind or because I had taken too strong coffee, I fell into "the fidgets," as this state of mind is sometimes called, and selected for immediate cause of discomfort the Panther's presentiment about the red fox. Who could explain the mysterious way in which animals are warned of approaching danger? Perhaps the old science of divination was not so entirely a delusion; and then I remembered all the old stories in Roman history of people who had come to grief by neglecting the oracles. The old idea that whatever incident is considered as an omen will be such in reality, seemed to me at that hour of the night not wholly an unreasonable theory.

I had known, to be sure, some fifty presentiments which came to nothing, but then I had known as many as three which had been verified: perhaps the present case might be one of the exceptions to the rule. Then I remembered all the stories in Scott's Demonology, which I had lately read, and quite forgot all the arguments intended to disprove them.

[Illustration: The Attack on the "Panther."]

I thought of the broken gun-lock: I thought it not improbable that the Panther had, when at Ryan's, mentioned that he was coming to our house, and that it was very likely he had let it appear that he carried his money with him. Ryan's was one of the worst places in all the State. I remembered that the money was in the house, and I began to wish, like the Panther, that I had something to "catch up." Then there were so many noises about! I heard footsteps, which you will always hear if you listen for them on a windy night. When our petted old cat jumped from his place on the parlor sofa to lie down before the fire, I started up in bed in a sudden fright.

I must have been in this uncomfortable state of mind and body for the best part of an hour before I remembered that in a drawer in the front parlor lay two little old-fashioned pistols, unloaded but in good order.

I had grown so excited and uneasy that I felt as if I could not rest unless I got up, found those pistols and loaded them, though nobody had ever heard of a burglary in Maysville, and half the time the doors were left unlocked at night. Rather despising myself for my nervousness, but yielding to it nevertheless, I rose, put on my dressing-gown and slippers, lit my candle and went to find the two little pistols. I stepped very softly, not to disturb Minny, for I should have been quite ashamed then to have her know my cowardice. I looked in at the door as I passed. She was sound asleep, with her baby on her arm. The baby, however, was broad awake, but lying perfectly still, with her little finger in her mouth. Her eyes shone in the lamplight as she turned them on me--not startled like another child, but simply questioning. The little creature looked so unnaturally wise and self-possessed that I was reminded perforce of a wild tale Wyanota had once told me about a remote ancestress of his who had married some sort of a wood-demon. The legend ran that Wyanota's family was descended from the offspring of this marriage, and I think Wyn more than half believed the story.

I passed on, and going into the next room found the pistols, carried them back to my own chamber, and loaded them carefully. I was quite accustomed to the use of firearms. There had been times in my life when I never sat down to my work or went to rest without having rifle or pistol within easy reach of my hand. When I had loaded the weapons, I put them on the table by my bed and lay down again. My excitement seemed to have subsided, and I was just falling asleep when I heard a door in the kitchen violently burst open. I thought the wind had done it, and waited a moment to hear if the Panther would rise and shut it.

The next instant there was a shot, a wild cry as of mingled pain and fury, the sound of a heavy fall and a struggle. Before I had well realized that the noise was in the house, I found myself at the kitchen door with my pistols in my hand. I was greatly startled, but my one idea was to help my old friend. The miserable door resisted me for a moment. Seconds passed that seemed hours. When at last I tore it open, I saw a man in his shirt sleeves lying dead on the floor, his head shattered apparently by a blow from the axe: another, a large, powerful Irishman, was kneeling on the Panther's breast, with his hands at the old man's throat.

I sprang forward, but something swifter than I darted past me with a savage cry, and, tearing and biting with claws and teeth, flung itself full at the ruffian's face and naked throat. It was our big old brindle cat, Tom, roused from his place before the fire. The unexpected fierceness of Tom's assault took the man quite by surprise. Before he could tear the creature away I had the pistol at his head.

"If you move," I said, "I'll kill you;" for, as I saw that my old friend was hurt, wrath took the place of fear.

He gave in directly. Indeed the cat, a large, powerful animal, had almost scratched his eyes out. In the most abject tones the fellow implored me to let him go.

"Don't you do it, mamma," said the Panther, faintly.

"I don't mean to," I said.

Under the kitchen stairs was a dark closet with a strong outside bolt. I ordered the man into this place. He obeyed, and I drew the bolt upon him. His face and throat were streaming with blood from Tom's teeth and claws.

All this passed in much less time than it takes to tell it. Roused by the noise, the children, and Minny with the baby in her arms, were already in the kitchen.

"Oh, my dear, my poor darling!" said Minny, kneeling by the old man's side, "you are hurt!"

"Yes," he said, quietly, "pretty considerable bad. Charley, you fasten that door;" for the door into the shed, which had been secured only by a button, was wide open. "You get the hammer and two, three big nails, and drive 'em in," he continued. "Maybe more them darn scamps round."

Charley obeyed directions in a way which did him credit. Little Ned, with wide, surprised eyes, clung to me in silence; little Carry, seeing her mother in tears, put up a piteous lip and sobbed in her unbaby-like, sorrowful fashion; the old cat, in great excitement, went purring and talking from one to another.

"Tell me where you are hurt," I said, holding the chief's hand.

He had been shot through the stomach with a great, old-fashioned smooth-bore musket, which lay on the floor--a gun not carrying less than twenty-five to the pound. I had seen gunshot wounds before, and I knew that this was serious. It did not bleed much externally, but the edges of the wound were torn and discolored.

"That fellow dead?" asked the Panther.

"Yes indeed!" for the man's head was split like a walnut.

The old warrior looked gratified. "Mamma," he said, touching his hunting-knife, "you take that fellow's scalp."

"Don't think of such a thing," I said, not so much shocked as I might have been had I not lived on the Indian frontier. "Do you know who they are?"

"See them to Ryan's. Guess they some folks that mizzable railroad bring into this country. 'Spect they follow me. Mamma," said the Panther, looking up into my face, "tell you, red fox not bark for nothing. Better be old man than you."

"Oh, my dear old friend, if you had only not come to us to-night! It was all your love for us that has done this, but I pray God you may get well. Charley, do you think you can go for Doctor Beach?"

"Yes, mamma," said the boy, though he turned pale.

"No, no," said the Panther. "You no send that little fellow out in the dark. Besides, no good. You go wrap yourselves up. You two, you git bad cold."

At that moment we heard the sound of wheels and horses' feet.

"Go, Charley," said Minny. "Stop whoever it is, and tell them what has happened."

Charley ran out, and soon returned with Dr. Beach, who, happily for us, had been out on one of those errands which are always rousing doctors from their beds.

Dr. Beach was a burly, rough-mannered sort of man, but he could be very kind and tender in the exercise of his profession. He wasted no time in questions, but looked grave when he saw how the old man was hurt.

"Needn't tell me," said the Panther, quietly. "Know it's the end. Kill one of 'em, anyhow!" he concluded in a tone of calm satisfaction.

"And I wish with all my heart you had killed the other," said the doctor, bitterly. "He got off, I suppose."

The Panther showed his white teeth in a laugh. "No," he said, pointing to me: "she got him--she and the cat. Pretty well for one little squaw and pussy-cat. Mamma, you keep that kitty always."

"Where is the scoundrel?" asked the doctor.

"Shut up in that closet."

Here the man within cried out that he was "kilt" already, and should be hung if we did not let him go.

"I hope you will, with all my heart," said the doctor.

With some difficulty we helped the Panther into the parlor and laid him on the sofa.

He told us the story in a few words. He had been asleep when the door was burst open. The man whom he had killed had fired the shot. He had kept his feet to strike one blow with the axe, and the other man had sprung upon him as he fell.

The doctor did what little he could to ease his patient, and then went away, but soon returned with some men from the village, who were quite ready to lynch the criminal when they heard what he had done. They took the man away, however, and I am happy to say he afterward received the heaviest sentence the law would allow. He confessed that, knowing the chief had a large sum in his possession, himself and his companion had broken the lock of the rifle, intending to waylay the old man and shoot him in the woods. They had not, however, been able to overtake him till he reached the clearing, and then, fearing to encounter him, they had followed him at a distance and watched him enter our house. Knowing that the captain was gone, they had waited until all was quiet, and then made their entrance as described.

The Panther asked that some one might go to the reservation and send over three of his friends, whom he named. He was very anxious to see Wyanota, and Calvin Bruce, who had come with the doctor, instantly volunteered to take his trotting mare and do both errands. The chestnut did her work gallantly, though unhappily in vain, for the old man did not live to see his friends.

"Don't you fret, you two," he said, softly, as Minny and I watched over him. "Great deal the best way for old Ingin. Die like a man now: not cough myself to death, like an old dog. Minny, little girl, you tell your husband be good to our people, well as he can. Not much of our nation left now--not good for much, either," he added; "but you tell him and the captain stand their friends, won't you?"

"Indeed, indeed they will," said Minny in tears.

A Methodist clergyman of some kind, who preached in Maysville at that time, hearing what had happened, came in to offer his services and to pray with the dying man. The Panther thanked him courteously, but he clung to the simple creed of his fathers and his belief that "Ingin religion was good for Ingin;" and Mr. Lawrence had the sense and feeling not to disturb him by argument.

"Want your Charley to have my rifle," he said to me. "Nobody left of our people but my cousin's son, and he most a mizzable Ingin. You 'member that, please," he said to Mr. Lawrence, who sat quietly at the head of the sofa. "Do you think," he asked wistfully of the clergyman, "that I ever see these two again where I go?" The minister--Heaven bless him!--answered stoutly that he had not a doubt of it. "All right, then," said the Panther, quietly. "Now, mamma, you see red fox know, after all."

Minny brought her baby for him to kiss. Little Carry's dark eyes were full of tears, for, like most babies, she felt the influence of sorrow she could not understand. She did not scream, as another child would, but hid her face on her mother's bosom and sobbed quietly, like a grown-up woman. My two little boys, understanding all at once that their old friend was going away, burst out crying.

"Hush! hush!" he said, gently. "You be good boys to your mother. Say 'good-bye.'"

We kissed him, keeping back the lamentations which we knew would trouble him.

"Good-bye," he said, softly, and then he spoke some few words in his own tongue, as Minny told me afterward, about going to his lost children. Then a smile came over his face, a look of sweet relief and comfort softened the stern features, the hand that had held mine so close slowly relaxed; and with a sigh he was gone.

The old minister gently closed his eyes. "My dear," said Mr. Lawrence to Minny, who was in an agony of grief, "God knows, but it was His Son who said, 'Greater love hath no man than this--that a man lay down his life for his friends!'"

When we buried the old chief we wrote those words on the stone we placed over his grave.

Since then the New Year's Eve brings back to me very vividly the memory of the augury that so strangely accomplished its own fulfillment.

Clara F. Guernsey.

Louie.

The great river was flowing peacefully down to the sea, opening its blue tides at the silver fretting of the bar into a shallow expanse some miles in width, a part of which on either side overlay stretches where the submerged eel-grass lent a tint of chrysoprase to the sheathing flow, and into which one gazed, half expecting to see so ideal a depth peopled by something other than the long ribbons of the weed streaming out on the slow current--the only cool sight, albeit, beneath the withering heat of the day across all that shining extent. Far down the shores, on the right, a line of low sand-hills rose, protecting the placid harbor from sea and storm with the bulwark of their dunes, whose yellow drifts were ranged by the winds in all fantastic shapes, and bound together by ropes of the wild poison-ivy and long tangles of beach-grass and the blossoming purple pea, and which to-day cast back the rays of the sun as though they were of beaten brass. Above these hills the white lighthouse loomed, the heated air trembling around it, and giving it so vague and misty a guise that, being by itself a thing of night and storm and darkness, it looked now as unreal as a ghost by daylight. On the other side of the harbor lay the marshes, threaded by steaming creeks, up which here and there the pointed sails of the hidden hay-barges crept, the sunshine turning them to white flames: farther off stood a screen of woods, and from brim to brim between swelled the broad, smooth sheet of the river, coming from the great mountains that gave it birth, washing clean a score of towns on its way, and loitering just here by the pleasant old fishing-town, whose wharves, once doing a mighty business with the Antilles and the farther Indies, now, in the absence of their half dozen foreign-going craft, lay at the mercy of any sand-droger that chose to fling her cable round their capstans. A few idle masts swayed there, belonging to small fishers and fruiters, a solid dew of pitch oozing from their sides in the sun, but not a sail set: a lonely watchman went the rounds among them, a ragged urchin bobbed for flounders in the dock, but otherwise wharves and craft were alike forsaken, and the sun glared down on them as though his rays had made them a desert. The harbor-water lay like glass: now and then the tide stirred it, and all the brown and golden reflections of masts and spars with it, into the likeness of a rippled agate. Not one of the boats that were ordinarily to be seen darting hither and yon, like so many water-bugs, were in motion now; none of the white sails of the gay sea-parties were running up and swelling with the breeze; none of the usual naked and natatory cherubs were diving off the wharves into that deep, warm water; the windows on the seaward side of the town were closed; the countless children, that were wont to infest the lower streets as if they grew with no more cost or trouble than the grass between the bricks, had disappeared in the mysterious way in which swarms of flies will disappear, as if an east wind had blown them; but no east wind was blowing here. In all the scene there was hardly any other sign of life than the fervent sunbeams shedding their cruel lustre overhead: the river flowed silent and lonely from shore to shore; the whole hot summer sky stretched just as silent and lonely from horizon to horizon; only the old ferryman, edging along the bank till he was far up stream, crossed the narrower tide and drifted down effortless on the other side; only an old black brig lay at anchor, with furled sail and silent deck, in the middle channel down below the piers, and from her festering and blistering hull it was that all the heat and loneliness and silence of the scene seemed to exude--for it was the fever-ship.

It was a different picture on the bright river when that brig entered the harbor on the return of her last voyage, to receive how different a welcome! But pestilence raged abroad in the country now, and the people of the port, who had so far escaped the evil, were loth to let it enter among them at last, and had not yet recovered from the recoil of their first shock and shiver at thought of it in their waters--waters than which none could have fostered it more kindly, full as they were in their shallow breadth of rotting weeds and the slime of sewers. Perhaps the owner of some pale face looked through the pane and thought of brother or father, or, it may be, of lover, and grew paler with pity, and longed to do kind offices for those who suffered; but the greater part of all the people hived upon the shores would have scouted the thought of going out with aid to those hot pillows rocking there upon the tide, and of bringing back infection to the town, as much as though the act had been piracy on the high seas. And they stayed at home, and watched their vanes and longed for an east wind--an east wind whose wings would shake out healing, whose breath would lay the destroying fever low; but the east wind refused to seek their shores, and chose rather to keep up its wild salt play far out on the bosom of its mid-sea billows.

Yes, on that return of the last voyage of the brig the stream had swarmed with boats, flags had fluttered from housetops and staffs, piers and quays had been lined with cheering people, all flocking forth to see the broken, battered little craft; for the brig had been spoken by a tug, and word had been brought to the wharves, and had spread like wild-fire through the town, that, wrecked in a tempest and deserted by the panic-stricken crew, the steadfast master and a boy who stood by him had remained with her, had refitted her as best they might when the storm abated, and had brought her into port at last through fortunate days of fair weather and slow sailing. The town was ringing with the exploit, with praise of the noble faithfulness of master and boy; and now the river rang again, and no conquering galley of naval hero ever moved through a gladder, gayer welcome than that through which the little black brig lumbered on her clumsy way to her moorings.

But though all the rest of the populace of the seaport had turned out with their greetings that day, there was one little body there who, so far from hurrying down to shore or sea-wall with a waving handkerchief, ran crying into a corner; and it was there that Andrew Traverse, the person of only secondary importance in the river scene, rated as a boy on the brig's books, but grown into a man since the long voyage began,--it was there he found her when the crowd had let him alone and left him free to follow his own devices.

"It's the best part of all the welcome, I declare it is!" said he, standing in the doorway and enjoying the sight before him a moment.

"Oh, Andrew," cried the little body with a sob, but crouching farther away into the corner, "it was so splendid of you!"

"What was so splendid of me?" said he, still in the doorway, tall and erect in the sunshine that lay around him, and that glanced along his red shirt and his bronzed cheek to light a flame in the black eyes that surveyed her.

"Standing by him so," she sobbed--"standing by the captain when the others left--bringing home the ship!"

"It's not a ship--it's a brig," said Andrew, possibly too conscious of his merit to listen to the praise of it. "Well, is this all? Ain't you going to shake hands with me? Ain't you glad to see me?"

"Oh, Andrew! So glad!" and she turned and let him see the blushing, rosy face one moment, the large, dark, liquid eyes, the tangled, tawny curls; and then overcome once more, as a sudden shower overcomes the landscape, the lips quivered again, the long-lashed eyelids fell, and the face was hidden in another storm of tears. And then, perhaps because he was a sailor, and perhaps because he was a man, his arms were round her and he was kissing off those tears, and the little happy body was clinging to him and trembling with excitement and with joy like a leaf in the wind.

Certainly no two happier, prouder beings walked along the sea-wall that night, greeted with hearty hands at every step, followed by all eyes till the shelter of deepening dusk obscured them, and with impish urchins, awe-struck for once, crying mysteriously under their breath to each other, "That's him! That's the feller saved the Sabrina! That's him and her!" How proud the little body was! how her heart beat with pleasure at thought of the way in which all men were ready to do him honor! how timidly she turned her eyes upon him and saw the tint deepen on his cheek, the shadow flash into light in his eye, the smile kindle on his lips, as he looked down on her--glad with her pride and pleasure, strong, confident, content himself--till step by step they had left the town behind, wandering down the sandy island road, through the wayside hedge of blossoming wild roses and rustling young birches, till they leaned upon the parapet of the old island bridge and heard the water lap and saw the stars come out, and only felt each other and their love in all the wide, sweet summer universe.

Poor Louie! She had always been as shy and wary as any little brown bird of the woods. It was Andrew's sudden and glorious coming that had surprised her into such expression of a feeling that had grown up with her until it was a part of every thought and memory. And as for Andrew--certainly he had not known that he cared for her so much until she turned that tearful, rosy face upon him in welcome; but now it seemed to him that she had been his and he hers since time began: he could neither imagine nor remember any other state than this: he said to himself, and then repeated it to her, that he had loved her always, that it was thought of her that had kept him firm and faithful to his duty, that she had been the lodestar toward which he steered on that slow homeward way; and he thanked Heaven, no doubt devoutly enough, that had saved him from such distress and brought him back to such bliss. And Louie listened and clung closer, more joyful and more blest with every pulse of her bounding heart.

After all, sudden as the slipping into so divine a dream had been, it had need to be full as intense and deep, for it was only for a little while it lasted. A week's rapt walking in these mid-heavens, where earth and care and each to-morrow was forgotten, and there broke in upon them the voice of the Sabrina's owner seeking for Andrew Traverse.

Of course such conduct as that of one who preferred to do his utmost to save a sinking ship rather than seek safety with her flying crew, was something too unusual to go unrewarded: it must be signalized into such a shining light that all other mariners must needs follow it. And if the sky had fallen, Andrew declared, he could have been no more surprised than he was when he found himself invited with great ceremony to a stately tea-drinking at the house of the owner of the Sabrina. "Now we shall catch larks," said he; and dressed in a new suit, whose gray tint set off the smoothness of his tanned cheek with the color sometimes mantling through the brown, he entered the house with all the composure of a gentleman used to nothing but high days and holidays. Not that either the state or ceremony at Mr. Maurice's required great effort to encounter with composure--trivial enough at its best, wonderful though it was to the townsfolk, unused to anything beyond. But Andrew had seen the world in foreign parts, and neither Mr. Maurice's mansion-house and gardens, nor his gay upholstery, nor his silver tea-service, nor his condescending manners, struck the least spark of' surprise from Andrew's eyes, or gave them the least shadow of awe.

"This is some mistake," said the owner graciously, after preliminary compliment had been duly observed. "How is it that you are rated on the books as a boy--you as much a man as you will ever be?"

"A long voyage, sir, slow sailing and delays over so many disasters as befell us, three years out in the stead of a year and a half--all that brings one to man's estate before his reckoning."

"But the last part of the time you must have done able seaman's service?"

"The captain and I together," said Andrew with his bright laugh. "We were officers and crew and passengers, cox'n and cook, as they say."

"A hard experience," said Mr. Maurice.

"Oh, not at all, but worth its weight in gold--to me, at least. Why, sir, it taught me how to handle a ship as six years before the mast couldn't have done."

"Good! We shall see to what purpose one of these days. And you have had your share of schooling, they tell me?"

"All that the academy had to give, sir."

"And that's enough for any one who has the world to tussel with. How should you like to have gone through such hard lines, Frarnie?" turning to his daughter, a pale, moon-faced girl, her father's darling.

"Were you never afraid?" she asked in her pretty simpering way.

"Not to say afraid," answered Andrew, deferentially. "We knew our danger--two men alone in the leaky, broken brig--but then we could be no worse off than we were before; and as for the others--"

"They got their deserts," said Mr. Maurice.

"The poor fellows left us in such a hurry that they took hardly any water or biscuit; and at the worst our fate could not be so bad as theirs, under the hot sun in those salt seas."

"Well, well!" said Mr. Maurice, who loved his own ease too much to like to hear of others' dis-ease. And to turn the conversation from the possible horrors into which it might lapse, he invited his guest out into his gardens, among his grapehouses, his poultry and his dogs. It was a long hour's ramble that they took there, well improved on both sides, for Andrew of course knew it to be for his interest to please the brig's owner; and Mr. Maurice, who prided himself on having a singularly keen insight into character, studied the young man's every word and gesture, for it was not often that he came across such material as this out of which to make his captains; and to what farther effect in this instance be pursued his studies might have been told, by any one keener than himself, through the tone of satisfaction with which, on re-entering the parlor, he bade his daughter take Andrew down the rooms and tell him the histories of the surprising pictures there. For Mr. Maurice, one of the great fortunes of the seaport, being possessed by a mania of belief that every youth who cast tender eyes upon his daughter cast them not on her, but on her future havings and holdings, had long since determined to select a husband for her himself--one who evinced no servile reverence for wealth, one whom he could trust to make her happy. "And here," he said, "I am not sure but that I have him."

When Andrew went in to see Louie a moment on his way home that night, he was in great spirits over the success of his visit, and, dark as it was, made her blush the color of the rose over the low doorway where they stood when he asked how she would like to go captain's wife next voyage. And then he told her of Mr. Maurice's scrutiny and questioning, and the half hint of a ship of his own to sail some day, and of the pale-faced Miss Frarnie's interest, and of the long stroll down the parlors among the pictures, the original of one of which he had seen somewhere in the Mediterranean, when he and a parcel of sailors went ashore and rambled through the port, and looked in at a church, where, in the midst of music and incense and a kneeling crowd, they were shearing the golden locks off of young girls and making nuns of them. And Andrew forgot to tell of the way in which Miss Frarnie listened to him and hung upon his words: indeed, how could he? Perhaps he did not notice it himself; but if he had had a trifle more personal vanity, and had seen how this pale young girl--forbidden by a suspicious father much companionship with gallants--had forgotten all difference of station and purse, and had looked upon him, nobly made, handsome, gay, knowing far more than she did, much as upon a young god just alighted by her side a moment,--if Andrew had been aware of this, and had found any words in which to repeat it, then Louie might have had something to startle her out of her blessedness, and pain might have come to her all the sooner. But since the pain would have been as sharp then as at any future time, it was a pitying, pleasant Fate that let her have her happiness as long as might be. For Louie's love was a different thing from the selfish passion that any clown may feel: she had been happy enough in her little round of commonplace satisfactions and tasks before Andrew came and shed over her this great cloud of delight--happy then just in the enjoyment of that secret love of hers that went out and sought him every night sailing over foreign sunlit waters, and hovered like a blessing round his head; and now that he had come and folded her about and about with such warm devotion, it was not for the new happiness he gave her that she loved him, but in order to make his own happiness a perfect thing; and if her heart's blood had been needed for that, it would have been poured out like water. The pale-faced Frarnie--if question could be of her--might never know such love as that: love with her could be a sentiment, a lover one who added to her pleasure, but a sacrifice on her part for that lover would have been something to tell and sing for ever, if indeed it were possible that such a thing should be made at all.

So day by day the spell deepened with Louie, and for another week there was delightful loneliness with this lover of hers--strolls down through the swampy woods hunting for moss to frame the prints he had brought home uninjured, and which were to be part of the furnishing of their future home; others across the salt meadows for the little red samphire stems to pickle; sails in the float down river and in the creeks, where the tall thatch parted by the prow rustled almost overhead, and the gulls came flying and piping around them: here and there, they two alone, pouring out thought and soul to each other, and every now and then glancing shyly at those days, that did not seem so very far away, when they should be sailing together through foreign parts; for Louie's father, the old fisherman, was all her household, and a maiden aunt, who earned her livelihood in nursing the sick and attending the dead, would be glad to come any day and take Louie's place in the cottage.

At the end of the week, Mr. Maurice sent for Andrew to his counting-room; and after that, on one device or another, he had him there the greater part of every day, employing him in a score of pleasant ways--asking his advice as to the repairs of the Sabrina, taking him with him in his chaise jogging through the shipyard, where a new barque was getting ready for her launching, examining him the while carefully from time to time after his wont; at last taking him casually home to dinner with him one day, keeping him to tea the next, and finally, fully satisfied with the result of his studies in that edition of human nature, giving him the freedom of the family as much as if he had been the son of the house.

"I've some plans ahead for you, my boy," said he one day with a knowing shake of the head; and Andrew's innocent brain began to swim straightway between the new barque and the Sabrina.

"Look at him!" said Mr. Maurice to his wife one evening as Andrew walked in the garden with Miss Frarnie. "My mind's made up about him. He's the stuff for a sea-captain, afraid neither of wind nor weather nor the face of clay--can sail a ship and choose her cargo. He's none of your coxcombs that go courting across the way: he's a man into the core of his heart, and as well bred as any gentleman that walks; though Goodness knows how he came by it."

"These sea-coast people," said his wife, reflectively (she was inland-born herself), "see the world and learn."

"Well, what do you say to it? I don't find the flaw in him. If Heaven had given me a son, I'd have had him be like this one; and since it didn't, why here's my way to circumvent Heaven."

"Oh, my dear," said the wife, "I can't hear you talk so. And besides--"

"Well? Besides what?"

"I think it is always best to let such things take their own course. We did."

"Of course we did," laughed Mr. Maurice. "But how about our fathers and mothers?"

"I mean," said Mrs. Maurice, "not to force things."

"And who intends to force them? It's plain enough the young fellow took a fancy to our Frarnie the first time he laid eyes on her, isn't it?"

"I mean," said Mrs. Maurice again, "that if Frarnie should have the same fancy for him, I don't know that there'd be any objection. He is quite uncommon--quite uncommon when you consider all things--but I don't know why you want to lead her to like any one in particular, when she has such a nice home and is all we have."

"Girls will marry, Mrs. Maurice. If it isn't one, it will be another. So I had rather it should, be one, and that one of my own choosing--one who, will use her well, and not make ducks and drakes of her money as soon as we are gone where there's no returning, and without a 'thank you' for your pains. Look at them now! Should you imagine they thought there was any one else on earth but each other at this moment? They're fond of each other, that's plain. They'd be a remarkable-looking couple. What do you think of it?"

"Frarnie might have that India shawl that I never undid, to appear out in," said Mrs. Maurice, pensively, continuing her own reflections rather than directly replying. "And I suppose we needn't lose her really, for she could make her home with us."

And so the conspiracy advanced, its simple victims undreaming of its approach--Louie sighing faintly to think she saw so little of Andrew now, but content, since she was sure it was for his best interest to make the friendship of the Sabrina's owner; Andrew fretting to see how all this necessary submission to superiors kept him from Louie, but more than half compensated with the dazzling visions that danced before his eyes of the Sabrina in her new rig--of the barque coming down for her masts and sails from her launching.

The Sabrina had been so badly injured by her disasters that it took much more time to repair her than had at first been thought. "I'm going to stand by the old brig," said Andrew to some one--by accident it was in Mr. Maurice's hearing. "But if I'd known it was going to take so long to have her whole again, I should have made a penny in taking a run down the bay, for I had an offer to go second mate on the Tartar."

"I'll go one better than that," said Mr. Maurice then. "Here's the Frarnie, nearly ready to clear for New Orleans and Liverpool, with your old captain. You shall go mate of her. That'll show if you can handle a ship. The Sabrina won't be at the wharf till the round voyage is over and the Frarnie coming up the stream again. What say you?"

Of course what Andrew said was modest thanks--what he felt was a rhapsody of delight; and when he told Louie that night, what she said was a sob, and what she felt was a blank of fright and foreboding. Oh what should she do? cried the selfish little thing--what should she do in the long, long, weary days with Andrew gone? But then in a moment she remembered that this was the first step toward going master of that craft in which her bridal voyage was to be taken. "And what a long step it is, Andrew!" she cried. "Was the like of it ever known before? What a long, long step it would be but for that bitter apprenticeship when you and the captain brought the wreck home!"

"Ay," said Andrew, proudly: "I served my time before the mast then, if ever any did."

"And I suppose with the next step you will be master of the Sabrina? Oh, I should so like it!"

"I don't know," said Andrew, more doubtfully than he had used to speak. "I'm afraid the owners will think this is enough. This is a great lift. I'll do my best to satisfy them, though; for I'd rather sail master of the Sabrina than of the biggest man-of-war afloat."

"We used to play round her when we were children," said Louie, encouragingly. "Don't you remember leading me down once to admire the lady on her stern?--like a water-witch just gilded in the rays of some sunrise she had come up to see, you said."

"Yes; and we used to climb her shrouds, we boys, and get through the lubber-hole, before we could spell her name out. She's made of heart of oak: she'll float still when the Frarnie is nothing but sawdust. We used to watch for her in the newspapers--we used to know just as much about her goings and comings as the owner did. Somehow--I don't know why--I've always felt as if my fate and fortune hung upon her. It used to be the top of my ambition to go master of her. It is now. I couldn't make up my mind to leave her when the others did that cruel morning after the wreck; and when the captain said he should stay by her, my heart sprang up as if she had been a living thing, and I stayed too. And I'd rather sail her than a European steamer to-day--that I would, by George!"

"Oh, of course you will," said the sympathizing voice beside him.

"I don't know," said Andrew again, more slowly and reflectively. "I've the idea--and I can't say how I got it--that there's some condition or other attached to my promotion--that there's something Mr. Maurice means that I shall do, and if I don't do it I don't get my lift. It can't be anything about wages: I don't know what it is!"

"Perhaps," said Louie, innocently, and without a glimpse of the train her thoughtless words fired--"perhaps he means for you to marry Frarnie!" laughing a little laugh at the absurd impossibility.

And Andrew started as if a bee had stung him, and saw it all. But in a moment he only drew Louie closer, and kissed her more passionately, and sat there caressing her the more tenderly while they listened to a thrush that had built in the garden thicket, mistaking it for the wood, so near the town's edge was it, and so still and sunny was the garden all day long with its odors of southernwood and mint and balm; and he delayed there longer, holding her as if now at least she was his own, whatever she might be thereafter.

As he walked home that night, and went and sat upon the wharf and watched the starlit tide come in, he saw it all again, but with thoughts like a procession of phantoms, as if they had no part even in the possible things of life, and were indeed nothing to him. How could they have any meaning to him--to him, Louie's lover? What would the whole world be to him, what the sailing of the Sabrina, without Louie? And then a shiver ran across him: what would Louie be to him without the sailing of the Sabrina! for that, indeed, as he had said, was the top of his ambition, and that being his ambition, perhaps ambition, was as strong with him as love.

But with this new discovery on Andrew's part of Mr. Maurice's desires, Andrew could only recall circumstances, words, looks, hints: he could not shape to himself any line of duty or its consequences: enough to see that Mr. Maurice fancied his simple and thoughtless attentions to Frarnie to be lover-like, and, approving him, looked kindly on them and made his plans accordingly; enough to see that if he should reject this tacit proffer of the daughter's hand, then the Sabrina was scarcely likely to be his; and that in spite of such probability, the first and requisite thing in honor for him to do was to tell Mr. Maurice of his marriage engagement with Louie, and then, if the man had neither gratitude nor sense enough to reward him for his assistance in saving the brig, to trust to fortune and to time, that at last makes all things even. As he sat there listening to the lapping of the water and idly watching the reflected stars peer up and shatter in a hundred splinters with every wash of the dark tide, he could not so instantaneously decide as to whether he should make this confession or not. "What business is it of Maurice's?" he said to himself. "Does he think every one that looks at his scarecrow of a daughter--" But there he had need to acknowledge to himself his injustice to Miss Frarnie, a modest maiden who had more cause to complain of him than he of her, since he had done his best to please her, and her only fault lay in being pleased so easily. She was pleased with him: he understood that now, though his endeavors to enlist her had been for a very different manifestation of interest. Perhaps it flattered him a little: he paused long enough to consider what sort of a lot it would be if he really had been plighted to Frarnie instead of Louie. Love and all that nonsense, he had heard say, changed presently into a quiet sort of contentment; and if that were so, it would be all the same at the end of a few years which one he took. He felt that Frarnie was not very sympathetic, that her large white face seldom sparkled with much intelligence, that she would make but a dull companion; but, for all that, she would be, he knew, an excellent housewife: she would bring a house with her too; and when a man is married, and has half a dozen children tumbling round him, there is entertainment enough for him, and it is another bond between him and the wife he did not love too well at first; and if she were his, his would be the Sabrina also, and when the Sabrina's days were over perhaps a great East Indiaman, and with that the respect and deference of all his townsmen: court would be paid to him, his words would be words of weight, he would have a voice in the selection of town-officers, he would roll up money in the bank, and some day he should be master of the great Maurice mansion and the gardens and grapehouses. It was a brilliant picture to him, doubtless, but in some way the recollection of two barelegged little children digging clams down on the flats when the tide was out, with the great white lighthouse watching them across the deserted stretches of the long bent eel-grass, rose suddenly and wiped the other picture out, and he saw the wind blowing in Louie's brown and silken hair and kissing the color on her cheeks; he saw the shy sparkle of her downcast eyes, lovely and brown then as they were now; and as he stood erect at last, snapping his fingers defiantly, he felt that he had bidden Mr. Maurice's ships and stocks and houses and daughter go hang, and had made his choice rather to walk with Louie on his arm than as master of the Sabrina.

It was a good resolution; and if he had but sealed it by speaking next day to Mr. Maurice of his engagement, there would not have been a word to say. But, though he valiantly meant to do it, it was not so easy, after all, as he had thought, and so he put it off for a more convenient season, and the season did not come, and the day of sailing did. And the outfit that went on board the Frarnie was made and packed by the hands of Mrs. Maurice and her daughter--such an outfit as he had never dreamed of; such warm woolens for the storms, such soft linens for the heats, such finery for port, such dainties and delicacies as only the first mate of the Frarnie could think to have. And as for Louie, it was no outfit, no costly gift of gold or trouble either, that she could give him: she had nothing for him but a long, fine chain woven of her own hair, and she hung it round his neck with tears and embraces and words that could not be uttered and sighs that changed to sobs, and then came lingering delay upon delay, and passionate parting at the last. But when the crew had weighed anchor and the sails were swelling and the waves beyond the bar crying out for them, Miss Frarnie and her mother could still be seen waving their handkerchiefs from an upper window; and half blind with the sorrow and the pain he choked away from sight, and mad with shame to think he had found no way but to accept their favors, Andrew felt that their signal must be answered, and sullenly waved his own in reply; and then the pilot was leaving the barque, and presently the shore and all its complications, and Louie crying herself sick, were forgotten in the excitement of the moment and its new duties.

"Didn't say a word of love to Frarnie, eh?" remarked Mr. Maurice in answer to his wife's communications that evening. "A noble lad, then! I like him all the better for it. He shall have her all the sooner. He won't abuse our confidence: that's it. He'll wait till he's bridged over the gap between them. The first mate of a successful voyage is a better match for my daughter than the boy who stayed by the Sabrina, brave as he was. He's fond of her? Don't you think so? There's no doubt about that? None at all! All in good time--all in good time. I'll speak to him myself. They're going to write to each other? I thought so."

Short as the trip was that the Frarnie made in that favorable season, it seemed to Louie an interminable period; but from the cheerful, hopeful smile upon her lips no one would ever have known how her heart was longing for her lover as she went about her work; for the little housekeeper had quite too much to do in keeping the cottage clean, the garden weedless, the nets mended, to be able to neglect one duty for any love-sick fancies it might be pleasant to indulge. From morning till night her days were full in bringing happiness to others: there was her father to make comfortable; there were the sick old women, of whom her aunt brought word, to concoct some delicacy for--a cup of custard, to wit, a dish of the water-jelly she had learned how to make from the sea-moss she gathered on the beach, a broiled and buttered mushroom from the garden; there were the canaries and the cat to be cared for, and the dog that Andrew left with her to feed and shower caresses on; and there was the parrot's toilet to be made and her lesson to be taught, and the single jars of preserves and pickles and ketchups to be put up for winter, and the herbs to be dried: there were not, you may see, many minutes to be wasted out of that busy little life in castle-building or in crying. One day there came a letter with Victoria's head and the Liverpool stamp upon it: she knew it by heart presently, and wore it next her heart by night and day; and even if she had known that Miss Frarnie Maurice received one in the same handwriting by the same mail, it would hardly have made much difference to her; and one day the Sabrina, all freshly coppered and painted and repaired, with new masts and sails, and so much else that it was not easy to say what part of her now represented the old brig, came round to her old wharf and began to take in cargo. Louie ran down one evening with her father, and went all over her from stem to stern, only one old sailor being aboard; and she could have told you then every rope from clew to ear-ring; and, as if it were all the realization of a dream, a thousand happy, daring thoughts of herself and Andrew then filled her fancy like birds in a nest; and so swiftly after that did one day flow into another for Louie that the Frarnie lay in the mid-stream once more before she had more than begun to count the days to that on which her Liverpool letter had promised that she should see its writer come walking into her father's cottage again.

But she never did see him come walking into her father's cottage again. That promised day passed and the night, and another--a long, long day that seemed as if it would never quench its flame in sunset, and a night that seemed as if it would never know the dawning; but the threshold of the fisherman's cottage Andrew Traverse crossed no more.

For Mr. Maurice, on his notable errand of circumventing Heaven, had been ahead of Fate, and had gone down on the pilot-boat to meet the Frarnie--with no settled designs of course, but in his own impatient pleasure; and, delighted with the shipmaster's report and with the financial promise of the voyage, the cargo, the freights, and ventures and all, had greeted Andrew with a large-hearted warmth and after a manner that no churl could withstand; and unwilling to listen to any refusal, had taken Andrew up to the mansion-house with him the moment the ship had touched the wharf.

"You don't ask after her?" said Mr. Maurice when they were alone in the chaise together. And knowing well enough what he meant, Andrew blushed through all his bronze--knowing well enough, for had he not gone below in a mighty hurry and tricked himself out in his best toggery so soon as he understood there was no escape from the visit? Louie would have been glad enough to see him in his red shirt and tarpaulin!

"Oh, you scamp!" said Mr. Maurice, quickly then detecting the blush. "Don't say a word! I've been there myself: I know how you're longing to see her; and she's been at the window looking through the glass every half hour, the puss!"

"Mr. Maurice," began Andrew, half trembling, but wholly resolved, he thought--although it must be confessed that with time, and distance, and Frarnie's effusive letters and flattering prospects on the other hand, Louie's image was not so bright at that moment as it had been at others, and for that very reason Andrew was taking great credit to himself for his upright intentions--credit enough to tide him over a good deal of baseness if need were,--"Mr. Maurice--" he began; and there he paused to frame his sentence more suitably, for it was no easy thing to tell a man that he was throwing his child at one who did not care for her, and that man the disposer of his fortunes.

But Mr. Maurice saved him any such trouble. "I know all you're going to say," he exclaimed. "I understand your hesitation, and I honor you for it. But I'm no fool, and there's no need to have you tell me that you want my Frarnie, for I've known that long ago."

"Mr. Maurice!"

"Yes, I have," answered the impulsive gentleman. "Mrs. Maurice and I talked it over as soon as we saw which way the wind lay; but of course we decided to say nothing till we were sure, quite sure, that it was Frarnie and not her prospects--"

"Oh, sir, you--"

"Tush, tush! I know all about it now. But it becomes a father to be wary," continued the other, taking the words from Andrew's lips in spite of himself, and quite wary enough not to mention that in Frarnie's easily-excited favor a young scapegrace was very likely to supplant Mr. Andrew if things were not brought to a point at once. "It was my duty to look at all sides," he said, without stopping for breath. "Now I know you, and I see you'd rather give the girl the go-by for ever than have her think you wanted her because she was her father's daughter, and not some poor fisherman's."

"Indeed, indeed--" began Andrew again, leaning forward, his cheeks crimson, his very hands shaking.

"Of course, my boy," interrupted his companion as before--"of course. Don't say a word: you're welcome to her at last. I never thought I'd surrender her to any one so freely; but if I were choosing from all the world, Andrew, I don't know any one I'd choose sooner for my son. She's a sensible girl, my Frarnie is, at bottom. We know her heart: it's a good heart--only the froth of all young girls' fancies to be blown off. And the Sabrina always was a pet of mine, and, though I've said nothing of it, I've meant her for Frarnie's husband this many a day." And before Andrew, in his flurry and embarrassment and bewilderment, could enunciate any distinct denial of anything or avowal of anything else, the chaise was at the door, and Mrs. Maurice was waiting for him with extended hands, and Frarnie was standing and smiling behind, half turned to run away. And Mr. Maurice cried out: "Captain Traverse of the Sabrina, my dear! Here, Frarnie, Frarnie! none of your airs and graces! Come and give your sweetheart an honest kiss!" And Andrew, doubting if the minister were not behind the door and he should not find himself married out of hand, irresolute, cowardly, too weak to give up the Sabrina and that sweet new title just ringing in his ears, was pushed along by Mr. Maurice's foolish, hearty hand till he found himself bending over Frarnie with his arm around her waist, his lips upon her cheek, and without, as it seemed to him, either choice or volition on his part. But as he looked up and saw the portraits of the girl's grandfathers, where they appeared to be looking down at him stern and questioning, a guilty shame over the wrong he was doing their child smote him sorely: he saw that he had allowed the one instant of choice to slip away; the sense came over him that he had sealed his own doom, while a vision of Louie's face, full of desolation and horror, was scorching in upon his soul; and there, in the moment of betrothal, his punishment began. He stole down to the Sabrina's wharf that evening, after the moon had set, and looking round to see that it was quite forsaken at that hour, he took from his neck a long, slender hair-chain to drop over into the deep water there; but as he held the thing it seemed suddenly to coil round his hand with a caress, as if it were still a part of Louie's self. He stamped his foot and ground his heel into the earth there with a cry and an oath, and put the chain back again whence he had taken it, and swore he would wear it till they laid his bones under ground. And he looked up at the dark lines of the brig looming like the black skeleton of an evil thing against the darkness of the night, and he cursed himself for a traitor to both women--for a hypocrite, a craven, a man sold to the highest bidder. Well, well, Captain Traverse, there are curses that cling! And Louie sat in the gloom at the window of the fisherman's cottage down below the town, and sighed and wondered and longed and waited, but Captain Traverse went back to the Maurices' mansion.

* * *

It is one of the enigmas of this existence how women forgive the wrong of such hours as came to Louie now--hours of suspense and suffering--hours of a misery worse than the worm's misery in blindness and pain before it finds its wings.

At first she expected her lover, and speculated as to his delay, and fretted to think anything might detain him from her; and now she was amazed, and now vexed, and now she was forgiving the neglect, accusing herself and making countless excuses for him; and now imagining a thousand dire mishaps. But as the third day came and he was still away--he who had been always wont to seek her as soon as the craft was made fast to wharf--then she felt her worst forebodings taking bodily shape: he was ill, he had fallen overboard, he had left the vessel at Liverpool and shipped upon another, and a letter would come directly to say so; or else he had been waylaid and robbed and made away with: not once did she dream that he was false to her--to her, a portion of his own life!

How it was with him there were numberless ways in which she might have discovered, for every soul of her acquaintance knew Andrew, and must be aware of the fact if he were missing or ailing, or if any other ill chance had befallen him. But as often as she tried to address one or another passing by the window, her voice failed her and her heart, and she asked no questions, and only waited on. A life of suspense, exclaims some one, a life of a spider! And when we are in suspense, says another, all our aids are in suspense with us. Day after day she stayed continually in the house, looking for him to come, never stirring out even into the garden, lest coming she might miss him. Night after night she sat alone at her window till the distant town-clocks struck midnight--now picturing to herself the glad minute of his coming, the quick explaining words, the bursting tears of relief, the joy of that warm embrace, the touch of those strong arms--now convinced that he would never come, and her heart sinking into a bitter loneliness of despair.

It grew worse with her when she knew that he was really in the town, alive and well; for, from the scuttle in the roof, by the aid of her father's glass, she could see the Sabrina, and one day she was sure that a form whose familiar outlines made her pulses leap was Andrew himself giving orders on the deck there; and after that she tortured herself with conjectures till her brain was wild--chained hand and foot, unable to write him or to seek him in any maidenly modesty, heart and soul in a ferment. Still she waited in that shuddering suspense, with every nerve so tightly strung, that voice or footfall vibrated on them into pain. If Andrew, in the midst of the gayeties by which he found himself accepted of the Maurices' friends, was never haunted by any thought of all this, his heart had grown stouter in one year's time than twenty years had found and left it previously.

But Louie's suspense was of no long duration, as time goes, though to her it was a lifetime. A week covered it--a week full of stings and fevered restlessness--when her father came in one day and said bitterly, thinking it best to make an end of all at once: "So I hear that a friend of ours has been paid off at last. Captain Andrew Traverse of the Sabrina is going to marry his owner's daughter Frarnie. Luck will take passage on that brig!" And when Louie rose from the bed on which she lay down that night, the Sabrina had been a fortnight gone on her long voyage--a voyage where the captain had sailed alone, postponing the evil day perhaps, and at any rate pleading too much inexperience, for all his dazzling promotion, to be trusted with so precious thing as a wife on board during the first trip. He had not felt that hesitation once when portraying the possibilities of the voyage to another.

It was not a long illness, Louie's, though it had been severe enough to destroy for her consciousness both of pain and pleasure. Her aunt had left other work and had nursed her through it; but when, strong and well once more, she went about her old duties, it seemed to her that that consciousness had never returned: she took up life with utter listlessness and indifference, and she fancied that her love for Andrew was as dead as all the rest. The poor little thing, laying this flattering unction to heart, did not call much reason to her aid, or she would have known that there was some meaning in it when she cried all day on coming across an old daguerreotype of Andrew. "It isn't for love of him," she sobbed. "It's for the loss of all that love out of my life that was heaven to me. Oh no, no! I love him no longer: I can't, I can't love him: he is all the same as another woman's husband." But, despite this stout assertion, she could not bring herself to part with that picture: he was not in reality quite the husband of another woman, and till he was indeed she meant to keep it. "He is only promised to her yet, and he was promised first to me," she said for salve to conscience; and meanwhile the picture grew so blurred with conscious tears, and perhaps with unconscious kisses, that it might have been his or another's: Miss Frarnie herself, had she seen it, could not have told whose it was.

Notwithstanding all the elasticity of youth, life became an inexpressibly dull thing to Louie as the year wore into the next--dull, with neither aim nor object, the past a pain to remember, the future a blank to consider. She could live only from day to day, one day like another, till they grew so wearisome she wondered her hair was not gray--the pretty hair that, shorn from her head in her illness, had grown again in a short fleece of silky curls--for it seemed to her that she had lived a hundred years. And because troubles never come alone, and one perhaps makes the other seem lighter and better to be borne, in the thick of a long winter's storm they brought home her father, the old fisherman, drowned and dead.

Captain Traverse knew of the old fisherman's death through the newspapers that found him in his foreign ports--not through Miss Frarnie's letters, for she knew almost nothing of the existence or non-existence of such low people; and therefore, conjecture as he needs must concerning Louie's means of livelihood now, there was no intelligence to relieve any anxiety he might have felt, or to inform him of the sale of the cottage to pay the debt of the mortgage under which it was bought, or of the support that Louie earned in helping her aunt watch with the sick and lay out the dead: he could only be pricked with knowledge of the fact that he had no right to his anxiety, or to the mention of her name even in his prayers--if he said them.

Poor little Louie! A sad end to such a joyous youth as hers had been, you would have said; but, in truth, her new work was soothing to her: her heart was simply in harmony with suffering, with death and desolation, and by degrees she found that comfort from her double sorrows in doing her best to bring comfort to others which it may be she could never have found had she been the pampered darling of some wealthy house. Often, when she forgot what she was doing, Louie made surmises concerning Frarnie Maurice, wondering if she were the noble thing that Andrew needed to ennoble him--if she were really so strong and beautiful that the mere sight of her had killed all thought or memory of an older love; trying to believe her all that his guardian angel might wish his wife to be, and to acknowledge that she herself was so low and small and ignorant that she could only have injured him--to be convinced that it was neither weakness, nor covetousness, nor perjury in Andrew, having met the sun, to forget the shadows; wondering then if Frarnie cared for him as she herself had done, and crying out aloud that that could never be, until the sound of her own sobs woke her from her forbidden dream. But at other times a calm came to Louie that was more pathetic than her wildest grief: it was the acquiescence in what Providence had chosen for Andrew, cost herself what it might--it was the submission of the atom beneath the wheels of the great engine.

It is true that as, late in the night, when all the town was asleep and only silence and she abroad, she walked home by herself from some deathbed whose occupant she had composed decently for the last sleep, she used to wish it were herself lying there on that moveless pillow, and soon to be sheltered from the cruel light by the bosom of the kindly earth. For now, as she passed the birches softly rustling in the night wind, and hurried by, she remembered other times when she had passed them, and had stopped to listen, cared for, protected, with Andrew's arm about her; and now, as the clocks, one after another, remotely chimed the hour, the sound smote her with a familiar sweetness full of pain; and now, as she came along the sea-wall and saw the dark river glimmering widely and ever the same, while its mysterious tide flowed to meet the far-off spark of the lighthouse lantern, she recalled a hundred happy hours when she and Andrew in the boat together had rocked there in soft summer nights, with sunset melting in the stream and wrapping them about with rosy twilight; or those when whispers of the September gales swelled the sail, and the boat flew like a gull from crest to crest of the bar; or those when misty sea-turns crept up stream and folded them, and drowned the sparkle of the lighthouse and the emerald and ruby ray of the channel lights, and left them shut away from the world, alone with each other on the great gray current silently sweeping to the sea--times when she knew no fear, trusting in the strong arm and stout heart beside her, before the river had brought death to her door; when the whole of life seemed radiant and rich--times that made this solitary night walk trodden now seem colder and drearier and darker than the grave--that made her wish it ended in a grave.

And so at length the year slipped by, and spring had come again, and the sap had leaped up the bough and burst into blossom there, and the blood had bubbled freshly in the veins of youth, and hope had once more gladdened all the world but Louie. With her only a dull patience stayed that tried to call itself content, until she heard it rumored among the harbor-people that the Sabrina was nearly due again, and with that her heart beat so turbulently that she had to crush it down again with the thought that, though Andrew every day drew nearer, came up the happy climates of southern latitudes and spread his sails on favoring gales for home, he only hastened to his wedding-day. And one day, at last, she rose to see a craft anchored in the middle channel down below the piers, unpainted and uncleaned by any crew eager to show their best to shore--a black and blistered brig, with furled sails and silent deck; and some men called it the fever-ship, and some men called it the Sabrina.

As the news of the brig's return and of her terrible companion spread through the town, a panic followed it, and the feeling with which she was regarded all along the shore during that day and the next would hardly be believed by any but those who have once been in the neighborhood of a pestilence themselves. Exaggerated accounts of a swift, strange illness, by many believed to be the ancient plague revived again and cast loose through the land from Asiatic ships had reached the old port; and aware that they were peculiarly exposed by reason of their trade, small as it was, the people there had already died a thousand deaths through expectation of the present coming of the fever already raging in other parts. Hitherto, the health-officers, boarding everything that appeared, had found no occasion to give anything but clean papers, and the town had breathed again. But now, when at last it spread from lip to lip that the fever lay at anchor in mid-channel, knees shook and cheeks grew white, and health-officer and port-physician, in spite of the almost instantaneous brevity of their visit to the infected vessel, were avoided as though they were the pestilence themselves, and not a soul in all the town was found to carry a cup of cold water to the gasping, burning men cared for only by those in less desperate strait than themselves, and who, having buried two-thirds of their number in deep-sea soundings, were likely to be denied as much as a grave on shore themselves; while to Mr. Maurice, half wild with perplexity and foreboding and amazement at Miss Frarnie's yet wilder terror,--to him the red lantern hung out by the brig at nightfall magnified itself in the mist into a crimson cloud where with wide wings lurked the very demon of Fever himself.

Not a soul to carry the cup of cold water, did I say? Yes, one timid little soul there was, waiting in a fever of longing herself--waiting that those who had a right to go might do so if they would--waiting till assured that neither Frarnie Maurice nor her parents had the first intention of going, though affianced husband and chosen son lay dying there--waiting in agony of impatience, since every delay might possibly mean death,--one little brave and timid soul there was who ventured forth on her errand of mercy alone. The fisherman's old boat still lay rocking in the cove, and the oars stood in the shed: Louie knew how to use them well, and making her preparations by daylight, and leaving the rest till nightfall, lest she should be hindered by the authorities, she found means to impress the little cow-boy into her service; and after dark a keg of sweet water was trundled down and stored amidships of the boat, with an enormous block of ice rolled in an old blanket; a basket of lemons and oranges was added, a roll of fresh bed-linen, a little box of such medicines as her last year's practice had taught her might be of use; and extorting a promise from the boy that he would leave another block of ice on the bank every night after dark for her to come and fetch, Louie quickly stepped into the boat, lifted the oars, and slipt away into the darkness of the great and quiet river.

When, three days afterward, Captain Traverse unclosed his eyes from a dream of Gehenna and the place the smoke of whose torment goes up for ever, a strange confusion crept like a haze across his mind, tired out and tortured with delirium, and he dropped the aching lids and fell away into slumber again; for he had thought himself vexed with the creak of cordage and noise of feet, stived in his dark and narrow cabin, on a filthy bed in a foul air, if any air at all were in that noisome place, reeking with heat and the ferment of bilge-water and fever-smell; and here, unless a new delirium chained him, a mattress lay upon the deck with the awning of an old sail stretched above it and making soft shadow out of searching sun, a gentle wind was blowing over him, a land-breeze full of sweet scents from the gardens on the shore, from the meadows and the marshes. Silence broken only by a soft wash of water surrounded him; a flake of ice lay between his lips, that had lately been parched and withering, and delicious coolness swathed his head, that had seemed to be a ball of burning fire. The last that he remembered had been a hot, dry, aching agony, and this was bliss: the sleep into which he fell when waking from the stupor that had benumbed his power of suffering--a power that had rioted till no more could be suffered--lasted during all the spell of that fervid noon sun that hung above the harbor and the town like the unbroken seal of the expected pestilence. A strange still town, fear and heat keeping its streets deserted, its people longing for an east wind that should kill the fever, yet dreading lest it should blow the fever in on them; a strange still harbor, its great peaceful river darkened only by that blot where the sun-soaked craft swung at her anchor; a strange still craft, where nothing stirred but one slender form, one little being that went about laying wet cloths upon this rude sailor's head, broken ice between the lips of that one, moistening dry palms, measuring out cooling draughts, and only resting now and then to watch one sleeper sleep, to hang and hear if in that deep dream there were any breathing and it were not the last sleep of all. And in Louie's heart there was something just as strange and still as in all other things throughout that wearing, blinding day; but with her the calm was not of fear, only of unspeakable joy; for if Andrew lived it was she that had saved him, and though he died, his delirium had told her that his heart was hers. "If he dies, he is mine!" she cried triumphantly, forgetting all the long struggle of scruple and doubt, "and if he lives, he shall never be hers!" she cried softly and with that inner voice that no one hears.

And so the heat slipped down with the sun to other horizons, coolness crept in upon the running river's breast with the dusk, dew gathered and lay darkly glittering on rail and spar and shroud as star by star stole out to sparkle in it; and Andrew raised his eyes at length, and they rested long and unwaveringly on the little figure sitting not far away with hands crossed about the knees and eyes looking out into the last light--the tranquil, happy face from which a white handkerchief kept back the flying hair while giving it the likeness of a nun's. Was it a dream? Was it Louie? Or was it only some one of the tormenting phantoms that for so many burning days had haunted him? He tried in vain to ask: his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth; he seemed to be in the power of one of those fierce nightmares where life depends on a word and the word is not to be spoken. Only a vision, then: he closed his lids thinking it would be gone when he lifted them, but he did not want it to be gone, and looked again to find it as before. And by and by it seemed to him that long since, in a far-off dream, he had gathered strength and uttered the one thought of his fever, "Louie, what do you do now?" and she had answered him, as though she thought aloud, "I stroke the dead;" and he had cried out, "Then presently me too, me too! And let the shroud be shotted heavily to bury me out of your sight!" And he was crying it out again, but while he spoke a mouth was laid on his--a warm, sweet mouth that seemed to breathe fresh spirit through his frame--his head was lifted and pillowed on a breast where he could hear the heart beneath flutter like a happy bird, and he was wrapped once more in slumber, but this time slumber sweet as it was deep.

Morning was dawning over the vessel's side, a dream of rosy lustre sifting through the purple and pearly mist, behind which the stars grew large and lost while it moved away to the west in one great cloud, and out of which the river gleamed as if just newly rolled from its everlasting fountains,--morning was dawning with the sweet freshness of its fragrant airs stealing from warm low fields, when Andrew once more lifted his eyes only to find that tranquil face above him still, that happy heart still beating beneath his pillowed head. "Oh, Louie," he sighed, "speak to me--say--have I died?--am I forgiven?--is this heaven?"

"To me, dear--oh to me!" answered she with the old radiant smile that used to make his pulse quicken, and that, ill as he yet was, reassured him as to his earthly latitude and longitude.

"And it was all a dream, then?" he murmured. "And I have not lost you?" He raised his wasted hand and drew from his breast the little hair chain that he had hidden there so long ago. "It was a fetter I could not break," he whispered. "I wrote her all about it long ago. I wrote her father that he should have his vessel back again--and I would take my freedom--and not a dollar's wages for the voyage would I ever draw of him. But I should never have dared see you--for--oh, Louie--how can you ever--"

"Hush, hush, dear!" she breathed. "What odds is all that now? We have our life before us."

"Only just help me live it, Louie."

"God will help us," she answered. And as she spoke a sudden rainbow leaped into the western heaven as if to seal her promise, and as it slowly faded there came a wild salt smell, an air that tingled like a tonic through the veins: the east wind was singing in from sea, bringing the music of breaker and shore, and the fever was blasted by its breath throughout the little Sabrina.

Harriet Prescott Spofford.

Old Sadler's Resurrection:

A Yarn of the Mexican Gulf.

"Talking about ghosts," said the captain, "listen while I spin you a bit of a yarn which dates back some twenty-five years ago, when, but a wee bit of a midshipman, I was the youngster of the starboard steerage mess on board the old frigate Macedonian, then flag-ship of the West India squadron, and bearing the broad pennant of Commodore Jesse Wilkinson.

"It would hardly interest you to tell what a clever set of lieutenants and ward-room officers we had, and how the twenty-three reefers in the two steerage messes kept up a racket and a row all the time, in spite of the taut rein which the first lieutenant, Mr. Bispham, kept over us. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles; and I can see him now, with the flat eagle-and-anchor buttons shining on his blue coat, as he would pace the quarter-deck, eyeing us young gentlemen of the watch, as demurely we planked up and down the lee side, tired enough, and waiting for eight bells to strike to rush below and call our relief. He was an austere man, and, unlike the brave old commodore, made no allowance for our pranks and skylarking.

"Among our crew, made up of some really splendid fellows, but with an odd mixture of 'Mahonese,' 'Dagos,' 'Rock-Scorpions,' and other countrymen, there was an old man-of-war's man named Sadler--a little, dried-up old chap of some sixty years, who had fought under Nelson at Trafalgar, so he said, and had been up and down, all around and criss-cross the world so often that he had actually forgotten where he had been, and so had all his geography lessons, learned by cruising experience, sadly mixed up in his head; which, although small, with a little old, weazened frontispiece, was full of odds and ends of yarns, with which he used to delight us young aspirants for naval honors, as he would spin them to us on the booms on moonlight nights, after the hammocks had been piped down. How well do I remember the old fellow's appearance!--his neat white frock and trowsers, his low-quarter purser's shoes, with a bit of a ribbon for a bow; no socks, save the natural, flesh-tinted ones, a blue star, done in India ink, gleaming on his instep; his broad blue collar, decorated with stars and two rows of white tape, falling gracefully from a neck which, as we youngsters asserted, had received its odd-looking twist from hanging too long by a grape vine, with which the Isle of Pines' pirates had strung him up when he was chasing them under old Commodore Kearney's command. Anyhow, old, sharp-faced, wrinkled and tanned to the color of a sole-leather trunk, the whole cut of his jib told you at once that he was a regular man-of-war's man--one of a class whose faults I can hardly recall while remembering their sense of duty, their utter disregard of danger, and the reliance with which you can lead them on to attack anything, from a hornet's nest to an iron-clad.

"Well, it so happened, one hot day, while cruising in the Gulf of Mexico, that the news came to us that old Sadler was dead; and sure enough it was so, for the old fellow had quietly slipped his moorings, and, as we all hoped, had at last gone to where the sweet little cherub sits up aloft who looks out for the soul of poor Jack. Then, after the doctors had had a shy at him, to see why he had cleared out so suddenly, his remains were taken in charge by his messmates, who rigged the old man out in his muster clothes, sewed him up in his clean white hammock, with an eighteen pound shot at his feet, and reported to the officer of the deck that the body was ready for burial. So, about six bells in the afternoon watch, the weather being very hot, and not a breath of air to ripple the glassy surface of the water, the lieutenant of the watch directed one of the young gentlemen to tell the boatswain to call 'All hands to bury the dead;' and soon fore and aft the shrill whistles were heard, followed by that saddest of all calls to a sailor at sea--'All hands bury the dead!'

"Our good old boatswain, Wilmuth, seemed to linger on the words with a feeling akin to grief at parting with an old shipmate, and as the last man reached the deck, he touched his hat and in a sad sort of way reported, 'All up, sir,' to the first lieutenant, who in his turn reported, 'Officers and men all on deck, sir,' to the commodore, who thereupon gave an order to the chaplain to go on with the services.

"The courses were hauled up, main-topsail to the mast, band on the quarter-deck, colors half-mast, and all hands, officers and men, stood uncovered, looking silently and sadly upon the body as it lay upon the gang-boards in its white hammock, ready for the last rites. Solemnly and most impressively were the services read, and at the words, 'We commit his body to the deep,' a heavy splash was heard, and poor old Sadler had gone to his long home for ever. Some of us youngsters ran up in the lee main rigging to see him go down, and as we watched him go glimmering and glimmering down to a mere speck, we wondered where he was bound, and how long it would take him to fetch Davy Jones' locker on that tack.

"'Pipe down, sir,' says the commodore to Mr. Bispham; 'Pipe down, sir,' says Mr. Bispham to Mr. Alphabetical Gray, who was officer of the deck; 'Pipe down, sir,' says Mr. Gray to the gentleman of the watch; 'Pipe down, sir,' says this youngster to the boatswain; and then such a twitter of pipes followed this order, and all hands were piped down, while poor old Sadler was still off soundings, and going down as fast as the eighteen-pound shot would take him.

"Now, you know that people coming from a funeral on shore always have a gay sort of air, suppressed it may be, but still cropping out; and just so is it with sailors at sea; for, Sadler's body committed to the deep, all hands felt better: the fore and main tacks were hauled aboard, the main yard was filled away, and the jib sheet hauled aft, and we all settled down into every-day life, which, after all, is not half so monotonous on board a man-of-war as you might suppose.

"Well, as I have said, the weather was very hot, the surface of the water was as smooth as a mill-pond, the wind was all up and down the mast, and so the old ship was boxing the compass all to herself, and not making a foot of headway.

"At one bell in the first dog watch, Boyle, the ship's cook, reported the tea-water ready, and after this came the inevitable evening-quarters--and some old man-of-war's men would think the country was going to 'Jemmy Square-toes' stern first if they didn't have quarters--then down hammocks for the night at six bells, and after that just as much of fun, frolic, dance, song and yarn spinning as all hands wanted until eight bells, when the watch was called.

"John Moffitt, the sailing master, the best fellow in the ward-room mess, and a great favorite with the youngsters, was officer of the deck from six to eight o'clock; and my messmate, Perry Buckner, of Scott county, Kentucky, the most dare-devil midshipman of us all, was master's mate of the forecastle; Hammond, Marshall, Smith and I were the gentlemen of the Watch; Rodney Barlow was quartermaster at the 'con;' the lookouts had just been stationed; the men were singing, dancing, spinning yarns and otherwise amusing themselves about the decks, while the old ship was turning lazily around in the splendid moonlight as if admiring herself.

"Discipline, you know, is the very life of a man-of-war, and this must account for what now took place. Tom Edwards, a young foretopman, had the lee lookout, and as seven bells struck he sang out, 'Lee cat-head;' but the last syllable died away on his lips as his eyes rested upon an object--a white object--standing bolt upright in the water before him, about a hundred yards distant and broad off on the lee bow. Suppressing a strong desire to shriek, and recovering himself, he touched his hat and said, 'Mr. Buckner, will you step up here, sir, if you please?'

"'What is she, Edwards?' said Buckner, as he quickly mounted the hammock-rail.

"One look, a dip down, a shiver, and, O Lord! what did he see but old Sadler standing straight as a ramrod, and heading right for the ship!

"It took Buck a full minute to recover himself, and then, with one eye on the lee bow and the other on the quarter-deck, he walked aft and deliberately touching his cap, reported to Moffitt, 'Old Sadler broad off on the lee bow, sir.'

"'The d---- he is!' exclaimed Moffitt; but, checking himself, he said, 'Mr. Hammond, report Sadler's arrival to the commodore; and you, Mr. M----, report it to the first lieutenant, sir.'

"My eyes were as big as saucers as I rushed down the steerage ladder and into the ward-room, where I found the first lieutenant quietly seated reading over the black list; and when, with my heart in my throat, I said, 'Mr. Bispham, old Sadler is on the lee bow, sir,' he serenely replied, 'Very well, Mr. M---- I'll be on deck directly.'

"'O Lord!' said I to myself--'to take a ghost as easily as all that!' Bolting up the ladder on my way back to the deck, and trembling lest I should see the ghost popping his head in through one of the gun-deck ports, I ran into Hammond, who dodged me like a shot.

"When I got on deck the news was all out, for Tom Edwards couldn't stand it any longer, but had just yelled out, 'Ghost ho! ghost ho! Look out! stand from under! here he comes!' and bolted aft, scared out of his wits.

"In ten seconds all hands were on deck--ship's cook, yeoman, 'Jemmy Legs,' 'Jemmy Ducks,' 'Bungs,' Loblolly boy,' captain of the hold, and, by this time, all the officers too, with the midshipmen scuttling up the ladders as fast as their legs and hands could carry them.

"Moffitt had hauled up the courses and squared the main yard, as much to make a diversion as anything else, although the men thought it was to keep old Sadler from boarding us; and as they rushed up on deck they filled the booms; lee rigging, hammock--netting and every available spot from which a sight of the old fellow could be had.

"Very soon they saw that he was not approaching the ship: the old sinner was just turning and turning around in the water, like a fishing-cork, dancing away all to himself, while the moonlight, first on one side, and then on the other, in light and shadow, gave a queer sort of look to his features, sometimes sad and sometimes funny.

"After watching him for a few minutes, Bill Ellis, the second captain of the foretop, hailed him thus: 'Sadler, ahoy! What do you want?'

"No answer being received, one of the mizzentop boys suggested that the old man had come back for his bag and hammock, and that they ought to be thrown overboard to him; but all this was cut short by the appearance of the commodore on the quarter-deck, and upon him all eyes were turned as he stepped upon the port horseblock, where a good view could be had.

"Now, old Jess was as brave an old fellow as ever sailed a ship, but he did not fancy ghosts, and the knowledge that all hands were looking at him to see how he took it made him feel a little nervous; but with a firm voice he called for his night-glass, and when the quartermaster, with a touch of his hat, handed it to him, he quietly arranged the focus, and, as we all supposed, was about to point it at Sadler, who was still dancing away for dear life all to himself. But old Jess was too smart for that: he quietly directed his glass to another quarter, to gain a little time, and, gradually sweeping the horizon, brought it at last, with a tremor of mortal dread, to bear dead upon the ghost. Bless my soul! how the old gentleman shook! But recovering himself, with a big gulp in his throat he turned to the chaplain and said, 'Did you read the full service over him to-day, Mr. T----?'

"'I did, sir, as well as I can remember,' replied Mr. T.

"'Then, sir,' said the commodore, turning to Mr. Bispham and speaking in an authoritative tone, 'we must send a boat and bring him on board.'

"'O Lord! O Lord!--bring a ghost on board!' groaned the men.

"'Silence, fore and aft!' said Mr. Bispham, 'and call away the second cutter.'

"'Away there, you second cutters, away!' sung out the boatswain's mate. But they didn't 'away' one step, and we youngsters could hear the men growling out, 'What does the commodore want with old Sadler? This isn't his place: let the old man rip: he is dead and buried all right. We didn't ship to go cruising after ghosts: we shipped to reef topsails and work the big guns; and if old Jess wants old Sadler on board, he had better go after him himself.' Some said he had come back after his bag and hammock, and the best way was to let him have them, and then he would top his boom and clear out. Others said the purser had not squared off his account; and one of the afterguard was seen to tickle the mainmast and whistle for a breeze, to give the old fellow a wide berth. But it wouldn't do: discipline is discipline; and after a free use of the colt and a good deal of hazing, the boat's crew came aft, the cutter was lowered, and the men, with their oars up and eyes upon the ghost, were waiting the order to shove off, the bow oarsman having provided himself with a boarding-pike to 'fend off,' as he said, if the old man should fight.

"We youngsters knew that somebody else was needed in that boat, and that somebody was a midshipman with his side-arms; but not a boy of us said a word about it, and we were afraid even to catch the first lieutenant's eye, lest he should be reminded that no young officer had, as usual, been ordered to go; but the order came at last. When Moffitt asked the first lieutenant, 'What officer, sir, shall I send in that boat?' we scattered like a flock of birds, but all too late; for Mr. Bispham referred the matter to the commodore, who, with a twinkle in his eye, said, 'Who discovered the ghost, sir?'

"'Midshipman Buckner reported him, sir,' was the reply.

"'Then,' said the commodore, 'by priority of discovery he belongs to Mr. Buckner, who will take charge of the cutter and bring him on board.'

"I heard all this from my place behind the mizzen mast, and you may guess how glad I was not to have been selected; but a groan, a chattering of the teeth, a trembling and shaking of bones close by my side, caused me to look around, and there was poor Buck, with his priority honors thick upon him.

"'Get your side-arms, sir,' said Moffitt: 'take charge of the cutter and carry out the commodore's order.'

"'Ay, ay, sir!' said Buck, but oh with what a change in his voice! As he buckled on his sword I could see what a struggle he was making to feel brave. As he went over the gangway to get into the boat I caught his eye, and if you could have seen that forlorn look you would have pitied him; for there was old Sadler turning and turning in the water, looking first this way, and then the other, and, as Buck thought, just ready to hook on to him and carry him down among the dead men.

"It is no light matter to go up to a ghost, front face, full face, and look him in the eye; but what must it be when you have to go up to him backward, as that cutter's crew had to do while pulling their oars, leaving only Buck and the cox-swain to face him? They just couldn't do it, and at every stroke they would suddenly slew around on their thwarts and look at the old fellow, who seemed to them as big as an elephant, and just ready to clap on to them, boat and all, as soon as they turned to give another stroke. Poor fellows! they made but little headway, and what with catching crabs, fouling their oars, blasting old Sadler's eyes, and denouncing him generally (one fellow fairly yelled outright when the bow oarsman accidentally touched him), they had a hard pull of it; but still they made some progress, and when Buck sang out, 'Way enough,' every oar flew inboard, every man faced suddenly around, and with this the cutter keeled over, and, her bow touching old Sadler on his shoulder, ducked him out of sight for a second, at which all hands shouted, thinking that he had gone for ever; but in a moment more up he popped, fresh as a lark, higher than ever before, and this time right abreast of the stern-sheets, where he bobbed and bowed to Buck, at which, with a yell of terror, all hands went overboard, and, floundering in the water, begged for mercy. The cutter had some little headway, and this of course brought Sadler astern on the other quarter, and then there was a wild rush to get back into the boat, for fear the old fellow was doubling on them to make a grab.

"The commodore, hearing the row and fearing disaster, ordered another boat to the rescue, but ere it reached the spot, Buck had, in some manner, quieted his men, who, seeing the ghost still standing bolt upright in the water and dancing away as if nothing had happened to scare him, manned their oars again and pulled cautiously toward him; while he, with that changeable moonlight grin on his face, was bobbing up and down to the boat's crew, as if Buck were the commodore himself coming to pay him a visit.

"'Stand by, there in the bow, to hook on to him,' sang out Buck.

"'Ay, ay, sir! I'll fix him;' and with that, and a heavy expletive in regard to the old fellow's eyes, the bow oarsman slammed his boarding-pike right into the ghost, just abaft his left leg, and as the sharp steel touched the body, a whizzing sound, like the escape of steam, was heard, and without a word old Sadler vanished from sight for ever."

"But, captain, tell us what really brought the old gentleman back," said one of the auditors.

"Well, just think of that tight white hammock, the light weight of the shot, and the very hot weather--think, too, how easily a fishing-cork is balanced in the water by a very small sinker, and lastly how confined air will buoy up anything--and you have the whole secret of his coming back. Let that air suddenly escape, and you have the secret of his disappearance.

"Buck used to say that 'priority of discovery' was a good thing in the days of Columbus, but if it was to be continued in force in the United States navy, hang him if he should ever report another ghost, even if he should see him walking the quarter-deck with the speaking-trumpet under his arm."

R. D. Minor.