An armful of gads thrown on the still hot embers caused them to blaze up cheerfully, and bring her diminished head-gear into sudden prominence as a shadow. At this a step approached the door.

"Are folk astir here yet?" inquired a voice she knew well.

said

Yes, Mr. Winterborne,' Marty, throwing on a tilt bonnet, which completely hid the recent ravages of the scissors. "Come in !"

The door was flung back, and there stepped in upon the mat a man, not particularly young for a lover, nor particularly mature for a person of affairs-each of which functions he in some degree discharged. There was reserve in his glance, and restraint upon his mouth. He carried a horn lantern which hung upon a swivel, and, wheeling as it dangled, marked grotesque shapes upon the shadier part of the walls.

Mr.

He said that he had looked in on his way down, to tell her that they did not expect her father to make up his contract if he was not well. Melbury would give him another week, and they would go their journey with a short load that day.

"They are done," said Marty, "and lying in the cart-house."

"Done?" he repeated. "Your father has not been too ill to work after all, then?"

She made some evasive reply. "I'll show you where they be, if you are going down," she added.

They went out and walked together, the pattern of the air-holes in the top of the lantern being thrown upon the mist overhead, where they ap peared of giant size, as if reaching the tent-shaped sky. They had no remarks to make to each other, and they uttered none. Hardly anything could be more isolated or more selfcontained than the lives of these two walking here in the lonely hour before day, when grey shades, material and mental, are so very grey. And yet, looked at in a certain way, their lonely courses formed no detached

"That you've done the work yourself.”

"Don't you tell anybody, will you, Mr. Winterborne?" she pleaded by way of answer. "Because I am afraid Mr. Melbury may refuse my work if he knows it is mine."

"But how could you learn to do it? 'Tis a trade." "Trade!" said she. "I'd be bound to learn it in two hours."

"Oh no, you wouldn't, Mrs. Marty." Winterborne held down his lantern, and examined the cleanly split hazels as they lay. "Marty," he said with dry admiration, "your father with his forty years of practice never made a spar better than that. They are too good for the thatching of houses, they are good enough for the furniture. But I won't tell. Let me look at your hands -your poor hands!"

He had a kindly manner of a quietly severe tone; and when she seemed reluctant to show her hands he took hold of one and examined it as if it were his own. Her fingers were blistered.

"They'll get harder in time," she said. "For if father continues ill I shall have to go on wi' it. Now I'll help put 'em up in waggon."

Winterborne without speaking set down his lantern, lifted her as she was about to stoop over the bundles, placed her behind him, and began throwing up the bundles himself. "Rather than you should do it I will," he said. "But the men will be here directly. Why, Marty- whatever has happened to your head? Lord, it has shrunk to nothing-it looks like an apple upon a gate-post!"

THERE was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child. The woodlanders everywhere had already bestirred themselves, rising at this time of the year at the far less dreary hour of absolute darkness. It had been above an hour earlier, before a single bird had untucked his head, that twenty lights were struck in as many bedrooms, twenty pairs of shutters opened, and twenty pairs of eyes stretched to the sky to forecast the weather for the day.

Owls that had been catching mice in the outhouses, rabbits that had been eating the winter-greens in the gardens, and stoats that had been sucking the blood of the rabbits, discerning that their human neighbours were on the move, discreetly withdrew from publicity, and were seen and heard no more that day.

The daylight revealed the whole of Mr. Melbury's homestead, of which the waggon-sheds had been an out

lying erection. It formed three sides of an open quadrangle, and consisted of all sorts of buildings, the largest and central one being the dwelling itself. The fourth side of the quadrangle was the public road.

It was a dwelling-house of respectable, roomy, almost dignified aspect; which, taken with the fact that there were the remains of other such buildings hereabout, indicated that Little Hintock had at some time or other been of greater importance than now, as its old name of Hintock St. Osmond also testified. The house was of no marked antiquity; yet of well-advanced age; older than a stale novelty, but no canonised antique; faded, not hoary; looking at you from the still distinct middle-distance of the early Georgian time, and awakening on that account the instincts of reminiscence more decidedly than the remoter, and far grander, memorials which have to speak from the misty reaches of medievalism. The faces, dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenges of the greatgreat-grandfathers and grandmothers who had been the first to gaze from those rectangular windows, and had stood under that keystoned doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards of to-day. It was a house in whose reverberations queer old personal tales were yet audible if properly listened for; and not, as with those of the castle and cloister, silent beyond the possibility of echo.

The garden-front remained much as it had always been, and there was a porch and entrance that way. But the principal house-door opened on the square yard or quadrangle towards the road, formerly a regular carriage entrance; though the middle of the area was now made use of for stacking timber, faggots, bundles, and other products of the wood. It was divided from the lane by a lichen-coated wall, in which hung a pair of gates, flanked by piers out of the perpendicular, with a round white ball on the top of each.

The building on the left of the

their appearance regularly, and when winter was over disappeared in silence till the season came again.

Here Winterborne had remained after the girl's abrupt departure, to see that the waggon-loads were properly made up. Winterborne was connected with the Melbury family in various ways. In addition to the sentimental relationship which arose from his father having been the first Mrs. Melbury's lover, Winterborne's aunt had married and emigrated with the brother of the timber-merchant many years before-an alliance that was sufficient to place Winterborne, though the poorer, on a footing of social intimacy with the Melburys. As in most villages so secluded as this, intermarriages were of Hapsburgian frequency among the inhabitants, and there were hardly two houses in Little Hintock unrelated by some matrimonial tie or other.

For this reason a curious kind of partnership existed between Melbury and the younger man-a partnership based upon an unwritten code, by which each acted in the way he thought fair towards the other, on a give-andtake principle. Melbury, with his timber and copse-ware business, found that the weight of his labour came in winter and spring. Winterborne was in the apple and cider trade, and his requirements in cartage and other work came in the autumn of each year. Hence horses, waggons, and in some degree men, were handed over to him when the apples began to fall; he in return, lending his assistance to Melbury in the busiest wood-cutting

season, as now.

Before he had left the shed a boy came from the house to ask him to remain till Mr. Melbury had seen him. Winterborne thereupon crossed over to the spar-house where some journeymen were already at work, two of them being travelling spar-makers from White-Hart Lane, who, when

Firewood was the one thing abundant in Little Hintock; and a blaze of gad-ends made the outhouse gay with its light, which vied with that of the day as yet. In the hollow shades of the roof could be seen pale dangling arms of ivy which had crept through the joints of the tiles and were groping in vain for some support, their leaves being dwarfed and sickly for want of sunlight; others were pushing in with such force at the eaves as to lift from their supports the shelves that were fixed there.

Besides the itinerant journey-workers there were also present John Upjohn, engaged in the hollow-turnery trade, who lived hard by; Old Timothy Tangs and young Timothy Tangs, top and bottom sawyers at work in Mr. Melbury's pit outside; Farmer Bawtree, who also kept the cider - house, and Robert Creedle, an old man who worked for Winterborne, and stood warming his hands; these latter having been enticed in by the ruddy blaze, though they had no particular business there. None of them call for any remark, except perhaps Creedle. To have completely described him it would have been necessary to write a military memoir, for he wore under his smockfrock a cast-off soldier's jacket that had seen hot service, its collar showing just above the flap of the frock; also a hunting memoir, to include the topboots that he had picked up by chance; also chronicles of voyaging and shipwreck, for his pocket-knife had been. given him by a weather-beaten sailor. But Creedle carried about with him on his uneventful rounds these silent testimonies of war, sport, and adventure, and thought nothing of their associations or their stories.

Copse-work, as it was called, being an occupation which the secondary intelligence of the hands and arms could carry on without requiring the Sovereign attention of the head, the

minds of its professors wandered considerably from the objects before them; hence the tales, chronicles, and ramifications of family history which were recounted here were of a very exhaustive kind, and sometimes so interminable as to defy description.

Winterborne, seeing that Melbury had not arrived, stepped back again outside the door; and the conversation interrupted by his momentary presence flowed anew, reaching his ears as an accompaniment to the regular dripping of the fog from the plantation boughs around.

The topic at present handled was a highly popular and frequent one-the personal character of Mrs. Charmond, the owner of the surrounding woods and groves.

66

My brother-in-law told me, and I have no reason to doubt it," said Creedle, "that she'd sit down to her dinner with a frock hardly higher than her elbows. 'Oh you wicked woman!' he said to himself when he first see her, 'you go to your church, and sit, and kneel, as if your kneejints were greased with very saint's .anointment, and tell off your hear-usgood-Lords as pat as a business man counting money; and yet you can eat your victuals such a figure as that!' Whether she's a reformed character by this time I can't say; but I don't care who the man is, that's how she went on when my brother-in-law lived there."

"Did she do it in her husband's time?"

"That I don't know-hardly, I should think, considering his temper. Ah !" Here Creedle threw grieved remembrance into physical form by slowly resigning his head to obliquity and letting his eyes water. "That man! Not if the angels of heaven come down, Creedle,' he said, 'shall you do another day's work for me!' Yes

He'd say anything-anything; and would as soon take a winged creature's name in vain as yours or mine! Well, now I must get these spars home-along, and to-morrow,

thank God, I must see about using 'em."

scene.

An old woman now entered upon the She was Mr. Melbury's servant, and passed a great part of her time in crossing the yard between the house-door and the spar-shed, whither she had came now for fuel. She had two facial aspects-one, of a soft and flexible kind, she used indoors when assisting about the parlour or up stairs; the other, with stiff lines and corners, when she was bustling among the men in the spar-house or out-of-doors.

"Ah, Grammer Oliver," said John Upjohn, "it do do my heart good to see a old woman like you so dapper and stirring, when I bear in mind that, after fifty, one year counts as two did afore! But your smoke didn't rise this morning till twenty minutes past seven by my beater; and that's late, Grammer Oliver."

"If you was a full-sized man, John, people might take notice of your scornful meanings. But your growing up was such a scrimped and scanty business that really a woman couldn't feel hurt if you were to spit fire and brimstone itself at her. Here," she added, holding out a spar-gad to one of the workmen, from which dangled a long black-pudding, "here's something for thy breakfast, and if you want tea you must fetch it from indoors."

"Mr. Melbury is late this morning," said the bottom-sawyer.

"Yes. 'Twas a dark dawn," said Mrs. Oliver. "Even when I opened the door, so late as I was, you couldn't have told poor men from gentlemen, or John from a reasonable-sized object. And I don't think maister's slept at all well to-night. He's anxious about his daughter; and I know what that is, for I've cried bucketfuls for my own."

When the old woman had gone Creedle said;—

"He'll fret his heart green if he don't soon hear from that maid of his. Well, learning is better than houses and lands. But to keep a maid at school till she is taller out of pattens

than her mother was in 'em - 'tis tempting Providence."

"It seems no time ago that she was a little playward girl," said young Timothy Tangs.

"I can mind her mother," said the hollow-turner. "Alway a teuny, delicate piece; her touch upon your hand was as soft and cool as wind. She was inoculated for the small-pox and had it beautifully fine, just about the time that I was out of my apprenticeshipay, and a long apprenticeship 'twas. I served that master of mine six years and three hundred and fourteen days."

The hollow-turner pronounced the days with emphasis, as if, considering their number, they were a rather more remarkable fact than the years.

"Mr. Winterborne's father walked with her at one time," said old Timothy Tangs." But Mr. Melbury won her. She was a child of a woman, and would cry like rain if so be he huffed her. Whenever she and her husband came to a puddle in their walks together he'd take her up like a halfpenny doll and put her over without dirting her a speck. And if he keeps the daughter so long at boardingschool he'll make her as nesh as her mother was.

But here he comes."

Just before this moment Winterborne had seen Melbury crossing the court from his door. He was carrying an open letter in his hand, and came straight to Winterborne. His gloom of the preceding night had quite gone.

"I'd no sooner made up my mind, Giles, to go and see why Grace didn't come or write than I get a letter from her Clifton: Wednesday. My dear father,' says she, 'I'm coming home to-morrow (that's to-day), but I didn't think it worth while to write long beforehand.' The little rascal, and didn't she! Now, Giles, as you are going to Sherton market to-day with your apple-trees, why not join me and Grace there, and we'll drive home all together?"

He made the proposal with cheerful energy; he was hardly the same man

as the man of the small dark hours. Ever it happens that, even among the moodiest, the tendency to be cheered is stronger than the tendency to be cast down; and a soul's specific gravity stands permanently less than that of the sea of troubles into which it is thrown.

Winterborne, though not demonstrative, replied to this suggestion with something like alacrity. There was not much doubt that Marty's grounds for cutting off her hair were substantial enough, if this man's eyes had been a reason for keeping it on. As for the timber-merchant, it was plain that his invitation had been given solely in pursuance of his scheme for uniting the pair. He had made up his mind to the course as a duty, and was strenuously bent upon following it

out.

Accompanied by Winterborne he now turned towards the door of the spar-house, when his footsteps were heard by the men as aforesaid.

"Well, John, and Robert," he said, nodding, as he entered. "A rimy morning."

""Tis, sir!" said Creedle, energetically, for not having as yet been able to summon force sufficient to go away and begin work he felt the necessity of throwing some into his speech. don't care who the man is, 'tis the rimiest morning we've had this fall."

"I

"I heard you wondering why I've kept my daughter so long at boardingschool," resumed Mr. Melbury, looking up from the letter which he was reading anew by the fire, and turning to them with the suddenness that was a trait in him. "Hey!" he asked with affected shrewdness. "But you did, you know. Well now, though it is my own business more than anybody else's, I'll tell ye. When I was a boy another boy-the pa'son's son-along with a lot of others, asked me 'Who dragged Whom round the walls of What?' and I said, 'Sam Barrett, who dragged his wife in a chair round the tower corner when she went to be churched.' They laughed at me with such torrents of