So

of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of circumstance. This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its echoes of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and sun-flowers,--this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare swamped stretch of the man's years, their solitary bit of enchantment. They were bare years, the forty he had known: Fate had drained them tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in ;-the duty was done now. McKinstry, a mild, common-face man, had gone through it for nearly half a century, pleasantly, never called it heroism. It was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with a great sigh of relief-to see that duty was, after all, a lean, meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be nearest and best. Faith, love, and so happiness, these were words of more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. McKinstry stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him. A man, with an adult's blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and patient habit be claimed work and happiness, his right. Of course it came, and tangibly. Into every life God sends an actual messenger to widen and lift it above itself: puerile or selfish the messenger often is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it and all that it touches. We call that love, you remember. A secular affair, according to McKinstry's education, as much as marketing. So when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in there, with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear, were gaining an undue weight in his life-held to be plain, all the fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty, aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never known-he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege: how could he talk of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he worshipped? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard, he used to watch the flutter of the little girl's white dress, as she passed by to "meeting." He could not help it that his great limbs trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast and hold her there forever. But he felt guilty and ashamed that it was so; not knowing that Christ, seeing the pure thrill in his heart, smiled just as he did long ago when Mary brought the beloved disciple to him.

He never had told little Lizzy that he loved her-hardly told himself. Why, he was fortyfive; and a year or two ago she was sledding down the street with her brothers, a mere yellow haired baby. He remembered the first time he had noticed her-one Christmas eve; his mother and Sarah were alive then. An Italian

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woman had come into the village with a broken hand-organ-a poor, starving wretch; and Gurney's little girl went with her from house to house in the snow, singing Christmas carols, and handling the tambourine. Everybody said, Why, you little tot!" and gave her pieces of silver. Such a wonderful voice she had even then, and looked so chubby and pretty in her little blue cloak and hood; and going about with the woman was such a pure-hearted thing to do. She danced once or twice that day, striking the tambourine he remembered; the sound of it seemed to put her in a sort of ecstasy, laughing till her eyes were full of tears, and her tangled hair fell all about her red cheeks. She could not help but do it, he believed; for at other times she was shy, terrified, if one spoke to her; but he wished he had not seen her dance then, though she was only a child: dancing, he thought, was as foul and effective a snare as ever came from hell. After that day she used often to come to the farm to see his mother and Sarah. They tried to teach her to sew, but she was a lazy little thing, he remembered, with an indulgent smile. And he was "Uncle Dan." So now she was grown up, quite a woman in those years, when she had been with her kinsfolk in New York, she had been taught to sing. Well, well! McKinstry reckoned music as about as useful as the crackling of thorns under a pot; so he never cared to know, what was the fact, that this youngest daughter of Gurneys had one of the purest contralto voices in the States. She came home, grown, but just as shy; only tired, needing care: no one could look in Lizzy Gurney's face without wishing to comfort and help the child. The Gurneys were so wretchedly poor, that might be the cause of her look. She was a woman now. Well, and then? Why, nothing then. He was Uncle Dan still, of whom she was less afraid than of any other living creature : that was all. Thinking, as he stood with Paul Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly-made havelock that morning. "You're always so kind to me," she said. "So I am kind to her," he thought, his quiet blue eyes growing duller behind their spectacles; so I will be."

The Doctor opened the gate, and went in, turning into the shrubbery, and seating himself under a sycamore.

"Don't wait for me, McKinstry," he said. "I'll sit here and smoke a bit. Here comes the aforesaid Joseph."

He did not light his cigar, however, when the other left him; took off his hat to let the wind blow through his hair, the petulant heat dying out of his face, giving place to a rigid settling, at last, of the fickle features.

A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort of salutation. To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some passion we know nothing of, he looked like a bloated spider coming out of the cell where his victims were. "Gorging himself, while they and the country

suffer the loss," he muttered. But Paul was a hot-brained young man. We should only have seen a vulgar, commonplace trickster in politics, such as the people make pets of. "Such men as Schuyler Gurney get the fattest offices. God send us a monarchy soon!" he hissed under his breath, as the gate closed after the politician. By which you will perceive that Dr. Blecker, like most men fighting their way up, was too nearsighted for any abstract theories. Liberty, he thought, was a very poetic, millennium-like idea for stump-speeches and college-cubs, but he grap pled with the times, the States were too chaotic untaught a mass for self-government; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny; he would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome discipline. The Doctor was born in one of the Border States; men there, it is said, have a sort of hand-to-mouth politics; their daily bread of rights is all they care for; so Paul seldom looked into to-morrow for anything. In other ways, too, his birth had curdled his blood into a sensuous languor. To-night, after McKinstry had entered the house, and he was left alone, the quaint old garden quiet, the air about him clear, pure, and perfumed, the stars distant and lonely, his limbs bedded in the clinging moss, he was rested for the moment, happy like a child, with no subtile-sensed questionings why. The sounds of the village could not penetrate there; the content, the listless hush of the night was with him; the delicious shimmer of the trees in the starlight, the low call of the pigeon to its mate, even the fall of the catalpa-blossoms upon his hand, thrilled him with unreasoning pleasure: a dull consciousness that the earth was alive and well, and he was glad to live with the rest.

Something in Blecker's nature came into close rapport with the higher animal life. If he had been born with money, and lived here in these stagnating hills, or down yonder on some lazy cotton-plantation, he would have settled down before this into a genial, child-loving, arbitrary husband and master, fond of pictures and horses, his house in decent taste, his land pleasuregiving, his wines good. By this time he would have been Judge Blecker, with a portly voice, flushed face, and thick eyelids. But he had scuffled and edged his way in the thin air of Connecticut as errand-boy, daguerreotypist, teacher, doctor;-so he came into the Gurney garden that night, shrewd, defiant, priding himself on detecting shams. His waistcoat and trousers were of coarser stuff than suited his temperament; a taint of vulgarity in his talk, is whiskers untrimmed, the meaning of his fac compacted, sharpened. It was many a year since a tear had come into his black eyes; yet ears belonged there, as much as to a woman's. Only for a few moments, therefore, he was contented to sit quiet in the soft gloaming: then he puffed his cigar impatiently, watching the house. Waiting for some one: with no fancies about the old fort, like McKinstry. An over-full house, with an unordered, slipshod

life, hungry, clinging desperately in its poverty to an old prestige of rank, one worker inside patiently bearing the whole selfish burden. Well, there was the history of the anxious, struggling, middle class of America: why need he have been goaded so intolerably by this instance? Paul's eyes were jaundiced: he sat moodily watching the lighted window off in the darkness, through which he could catch glimpses of the family-room within: he called it a pitiful tragedy going on there; yet it seemed to be a cheerful and hearty life. This girl Grey, whom he looked on as one might on some victim from whose lungs the breath was drawn slowly, was fresh, careless, light-hearted enough. Going to and fro in the room, now carrying one of the children, she sang it to sleep with no doleful ditty, such as young women fresh from boarding-school affect, but with a ringing, cheery song. You might be sure that Baby would wake laughing to-morrow morning after it. He could see her shadow pass and repass the windows; she would be out presently; she was used to come out always after the hot day's flurry-to say her prayers, he believed; and he chose to see her there in the dark and coolness to bid her good-bye. He waited-not patiently.

Grey, trotting up and down, holding by the chubby legs and wriggling arms of Master Pen, sang herself out of breath with "Roy's Wife," and stopped short.

"I'm sure, Pen, I don't know what to do with you"-half ready to cry. "Dixie,' now, Sis."

Pen was three years old, but he was the baby when his mother died; so Sis walked him to sleep every night: all tender memories of her who was gone, clinging about the little fat lump of mischief in his white night-gown. A wiry voice spoke out of some corner:

"Yer'd hev a thumpin' good warmin', Mars' Penrose, ef ole Oth hed his will o' yer! It 'ud be a special 'pensation ob de Lord fur dat chile!"

Pen prospected his sister's face with the corner of one blue eye. There was a line about the freckled cheeks and baby-mouth of "Sis" that sometimes agreed with Oth on the subject of dispensations, but it was not there to-night.

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No, no, uncle. Not the last thing before he goes to bed. I always try, myself, to see something bright and pretty for the last thing, and then shut my eyes, quick-just as Pen will do now: Quick! there's my sonny boy!"

Nobody ever called Grey Gurney pretty; but Pen took an immense delight in her now; shook and kicked her for his pony, but could not make her step less firm or light; thrust his hands about her white throat; pulled the fine reddish hair down; put his dimpling face to hers. A thin, uncertain face, but Pen knew nothing of that; he did know, though, that the skin was fresh and dewy as his own, the soft lips very ready for kisses, and the pale hazel eyes just as straightforward-looking as a baby's. Children and dogs believe in women like Grey

Gurney. Finally, from pure exhaustion, Pen, cuddled up and went to sleep.

It was a long, narrow room where Grey and the children were, covered with rag-carpet (she and the boys and old Oth had made the balls for it last winter): well lighted, for Father Gurney had his desk in there to-night. He was working at his catalogue of Sauroidichnites in Pennsylvania. A tall, lean man, with hooknose, and peering, protuding, blue eyes. Captain McKinstry sat by him, turning over Brogniart; his brain, if one might judge from the frequency with which he blew his nose, evidently the worse from the wear since he came in; glancing with an irresolute awe from the book to the bony frame of the old man in his red dressing-gown, and then to the bony carcasses of the birds on the wall in their dusty plumage.

"Like enough each to t'other," old Oth used to mutter; "on'y dem birds dere forgot to eat, an' Mars' Gurney neber will, gorry knows dat!"

"If you could, Captain McKinstry"—it was the old man who spoke now, with a sort of whiffle through his teeth-"if you could? A chip of shale next to this you brought this evening would satisfy me. This is evidently an original fossil foot-mark: no work of Indians. I'll go with you"-gathering his dressing-gown about his lank legs.

"No," said the Captain, some sudden thought bringing gravity and self-reliance into his face. "My little girl is going with Uncle Dan. It's the last walk I can take with her. Go, child, and bring your bonnet."

Little Lizzy (people generally called her that) got up from the door-step where she sat, and ran up-stairs. She was one of those women who look as if they ought to be ordered and taken care of. Grey put a light shawl over her shoulders as she passed her. Grey thought of Lizzy always very much as a piece of fine porcelain among some earthen crocks, she being a very rough crock herself. Did not she have to make a companion in some ways of old Oth? When she had no potatoes for dinner, or could get no sewing to pay for Lizzy's shoes (Lizzy was hard on her shoes, poor thing!) she found herself talking it over with Oth. The others did not care for such things, and it would be mean to worry them, but Oth liked a misery, and it was such a relief to tell things sometimes! The old negro had been a slave of her grandfather's until he was of age; he was quite helpless now, having a disease of the spine. But Grey had brought him to town with them, "because, you know, uncle, I couldn't keep house without you, at all-I really couldn't."

So he had his chair covered with sheepskin in the sunniest corner always, and Grey made over her father's old clothes for him on the machine. Oth had learned to knit, and inade "hisself s'ficiently independent, heelin' an' ribbin' der boys' socks, an' keepin' der young debbils in order," he said.

It was but a cheap machine Grey had, but a

sturdy little chap; the steel band of it, even the wheel, flashed back a jolly laugh at her as she passed it, slowly hushing Pen, as if it would like to say, "I'll put you through, Sis!" and looked quite contemptuously at the heaps of white calico piled up beside it. The boys' shirts, you know-but wasn't it a mercy she had made enough to buy them before cotton went up? There were three of the boys asleep now, legs and arms adrift over the floor, pockets gorged with half-apples, bits of twine instead of suspenders, other surreptitious bits under their trousers for straps. There were the twins, girls of ten, hungering for beaux, pickles, and photographic albums. They were gone to a party in the village. "Sis" had done up their white dresses; and such fun as they had with her, putting them on to hide the darns! She made it so comical that they laughed more than they did the whole evening.

Grey had saved some money to buy them ribbon for sashes, but Joseph had taken it from her work-basket that morning to buy cigars. One of the girls had cried, and even Grey's lips grew scarlet; her blood maddened. This woman was neither an angel nor an idiot, Paul Blecker. Then-it was such a trifle! Poor Joseph! he had been her mother's favourite, was spoiled a little. So she hurried to his chamber-door with his shaving-water, calling, "Brother!" Grey had a low, always pleasant voice, I remember; you looked in her eyes, when you heard it, to see her laughing. The ex-Congressman was friendly, but dignified, when he took the water. Grey presumed on her usefulness; women seldom did know their place.

There was yet another girl busy now, convoying the lubberly hulks of boys to bed-a solid, Dutch-built little clipper, Loo by name. Loo looked upon Grey secretly as rather silly (she did all the counting for her: Grey hardly knew the multiplication table); she always, however, kept her opinions to herself. Tugging the boys after her in the manner of a tow-boat, she thumped past her father and "that gype, McKinstry, colloguing over their bits of rock," indignation in every twist of her square shoulders.

"Fresh air," she said to Grey, jerking her head emphatically toward the open door. "I will, Looey."

"Looey! Pish!”

It was no admiring glance she bestowed on the slight figure that came down the stairs, and stood timidly waiting for McKinstry.

"You're going, Captain ?" the old man's nose and mind starting suddenly up from his folio. "Lizzy-eh? Here's the bit of rock. In the coal formation, you say? Impossible, then, to be as old as the batrachian track that"

A sudden howl brought him back to the present era. Loo was arguing her charge up to bed by a syllogism applied at the right time in the right place. The old man held his hand to his ears with a patient smile, until McKinstry was out of hearing.

"I know, father"—stroking his hair as she might a child's, trimming the lamp, and bringing his slippers, while he held out his feet for her to put them on-" I know."

Then when he took up the pen, she went out in the cool night.

"I do what I can," said he, earnestly, looking at the catalogue, with his head to one side. It was Oth's time-now or never. "Debbil de bit yer do! Ef yer did what yer could, Mars' Si, dar 'ud be more 'n one side o' sparerib in de cellar fur ten hungry mouths. We've gone done eat dat pig o' Miss Grey's from head ter tail. An' pigs in June 's a disgrace ter Christians, let alone Presbyterians like

us."

The old man glanced at him. Oth's spine gave his tongue free licence.

"I'll discharge him," faintly. "Scharge yerself," growled Oth, under his breath.

So the old man went back to his batrachians, and Oth ribbed Pen's sock in silence; the old fort stood at last as quiet in the moonlight as if it were thinking over all of its long-ago Indian s eges.

Grey's step was noiseless, going down the tan-bark path. She drew long breaths, her lungs being choked with the day's work, and threw back the hair from her forehead and throat. There was a latent dewiness in the air that made the clear moonlight as fresh and invigorating as a winter's morning. Grey stretched out her arms in it, with a laugh, as a child might. You would know, to look at her hair, that there was a strong poetic capacity in that girl below her simple Quaker character; as it lay in curly masses where the child had pulled it down, there was no shine, but clear depth of colour in it: her eyes the same; not black, flashing, as women's are who effuse their experience every day for the benefit of bystanders; this girl's were pale hazel, clear, meaningless at times; but when her soul did force itself to the light, they gave it free utterance. Women with hair and eyes like those, with passionate lips and strong muscles like Grey Gurney's, are children, single-natured all their lives, until some day God's test comes: then they live tragedies, unconscious of their deed.

The night was singularly clear, in its quiet: only a few dreamy trails of grey mist, asleep about the moon: far off on the crest of the closing hills, she fancied she could see the wind stir in the trees that made a feathered shadow about the horizon. She leaned on the stile, looking over the sweep of silent meadows and hills and slow-creeping water-courses. The whole earth waited, she fancied, with newer life and beauty than by day: going back, it might be, in the pure moonlight, to remember that dawn when God said, "Let there be light."

The girl comprehended the meaning of the night better, perhaps, because of the house she had left. Every night she came out there. She left the clothes and spareribs behind her, and a something, a Grey Gurney it might have been, came back to her in the coolness and rest, the nearer she drew to the pure old earth. She never went down into those mossy hollows, or among the shivering pines, with a soiled, tawdry dress; she wore always the clear, primitive colours, or white it was the girl's only bit of self-development. This night she could see McKinstry's figure, as he went down the path through the rye-field. He was stooping, leading Lizzy by the hand, as a nurse might an infant. Grey thrust the currant-bushes aside eagerly; she could catch a glimpse of the girl's face in the colourless light. It always had a pallid tinge, but she fanced it was red now with healthy blushes: her eyes were on the ground: in the house they looked out from under their heavy brows on their daily life with a tired coldness that made silly Grey ashamed of her own light-heartedness. The man's common face was ennobled with such infinite tenderness and pain, Grey thought the help that lay therein would content her sister. It was time for the girl's rest to come; she was sick of herself and of life. So the tears came to Grey's eyes, though to the very bottom of her heart she was thankful and glad.

"She has found home at last!" she said; and, maybe; because something in the thought clung to her as she sauntered slowly down the garden-alleys, her lips kept moving in a childish fashion of hers. "A home at last-at last!" that was what she said.

Paul Blecker, too, waiting back yonder, among the trees, saw McKinstry and his companion, and read the same story that Grey did, but in a different fashion. "The girl loves him." There were possibilities, however, in that woman's curious traits, that Blecker, being a physician and a little of a soul-fancier, saw: nothing in McKinstry's formal, orthodox nature ran parallel with them; therefore he never would know them. As they passed Blecker's outlook through the trees, his half-shut eye ran over her-the despondent step, the lithe, nervous limbs, the manner in which she clung for protection to his horny hand. "Poor child!". the Doctor thought. There was something more in the girl's face, that people call gentle and shy: a weak, uncertain chin; thin lips, never still an instant, opening and shutting like a starving animal's; grey eyes, dead, opaque, such as Blecker had noted in the spiritual mediums in New England.

"I'm glad it is McKinstry she loves, and not me," he said.

He turned, and forgot her, watching Grey coming nearer to him. The garden sloped down to the borders of the creek, and she stood on its edge now, looking at the uneasy curdling of the black water and the pearly glint of moonlight. Thinking of Lizzy, and the strong love that held her; feeling a little lonely, maybe, and

quiet, she did not know why; trying to wrench her thoughts back to the house, and the clothes, and the spareribs. Why! he could read her thoughts on her face, as if it were a baby's! A homely, silly girl they called her. He thanked God nobody had found her out before him. Look at the dewy freshness of her skin! how pure she was! how the world would knock her about if he did not keep his hold on her! But he would do that; to-night he meant to lay his hand upon her life, and never take it off-absorb it in his own. She moved forward into the clear light: that was right. There was a broken bole of a beech-tree covered with lichen: she should sit on that presently, her face in open light, he in the shadow, while he told her. Watching her with hot breath where she stood, then going down to her :

"Is Grey waiting to bid her friend goodbye?”

She put her hand in his, her very lips trembling with the sudden heat, her untrained eyes wandering restlessly.

"I thought you would come to me, Doctor Blecker."

"Call me Paul," roughly. "I was coarser born and bred than you. I want to think that matters nothing to you."

She looked up proudly.

"You know it matters nothing. I am not vulgar."

"No, Grey. But it is curious, but no one ever called me Paul, as boy or man. It is a sign of equality; and I've always had, in the melée, the underneath taint about me. You are not vulgar enough to care for it. Yours is the highest and purest nature I ever knew. Yet I know it is right for you to call me Paul. Your soul and mine stand on a plane before God." The childish flush left her face; the timid woman-look was in it now. He bent nearer. "They stand there alone, Grey." She drew back from him, her hands nervously catching in the thick curls.

"You do not believe that?" his breath clogged and hot. "It is a fancy of mine? not true? It is true." He caught the whisper, his face growing pale, his eyes flashing. "Then you are mine, child! What is the meaning of these paltry contradictions? Why do you evade me from day to day?"

"You promised me not to speak of this again"-weakly.

"Pah! You have a man's straightforward, frank instinct, Grey; and this is cowardly paltry, as I said before. I will speak of it again. To-night is all that is left to me."

He seated her upon the beech-trunk. One could tell by the very touch and glance of the man how the image of this woman stood solitary in his coarser thoughts, delicate, pure: a disciple would have laid just such reverential fingers on the robe of the Madonna. Then he stood off from her, looking straight into her hazel eyes. Grey, with all her innocent timidity, was the cooler, stronger, maybe of the two: the poor Doctor's passionate nature, buffetted from

them.

"I don't know for what," she moaned. "He did it. He is good."

:

He watched the slow change in her face it made his hands tremble as they held hers. No longer a child, but a woman whose soul the curse had touched. Miriam, leprous from God's hand, might have thus looked up to Him without the camp. Blecker drew her closer. Was He would defend her against she not his own? even this.

"What has been done to you, child?” She shook herself free, speaking in a fast, husky whisper.

"Do not touch me, Dr. Blecker. It was no school-girl's whim that kept me from you. I am not like other women. I am not worthy of any man's love."

"I think I know what you mean," he said gravely. "I know your story, Grey. They made you live a foul lie once. I know it all. You were a child then."

She had gone still further from him, holding by the trunk of a dead tree her face turned towards the water. The bleak sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man's brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare face to face. For the everyday, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to God. He knew that. It was this woman that stood before him now-looking back, out of the inbred force and purity within her, the indignant man's sense of honour that she had, on the lie they had made her live;