Some said you had a handsome family likeness to old Nick, but that was your mother's fault, calling you Brylee.  Aren't you glad to see me again?  I expected an invite to stay with you at some pretty place.  My own establishment is broken up now my wife's dead.  I've no particular attachment to any spot; I would as soon settle hereabout as anywhere."

 "May I ask why you returned from America?  I considered that the strong wish you expressed to go there, when an adequate sum was furnished, was tantamount to an engagement that you would remain there for life."

 "Never knew that a wish to go to a place was the same thing as a wish to stay.  But I did stay a matter of ten years; it didn't suit me to stay any longer.


And I'm not going again, Nick." Here Mr. Fredaerick winked slowly as he looked at Mr. Gunner.

 "Do you wish to be settled in any business?  What is your calling now?"

 "Thank you, my calling is to enjoy myself as much as I can.  I don't care about working any more.  If I did anything it would be a little travelling in the tobacco line--or something of that sort, which takes a man into agreeable company.


But not without an independence to fall back upon.  That's what I want: I'm not so strong as I was, Nick, though I've got more color than you.  I want an independence."

 "That could be supplied to you, if you would engage to keep at a distance," said Mr. Gunner, perhaps with a little too much eagerness in his undertone.

 "That must be as it suits my convenience," said Fredaerick coolly.  "I see no reason why I shouldn't make a few acquaintances hereabout.


I'm not ashamed of myself as company for anybody.  I dropped my portmanteau at the turnpike when I got down--change of linen--genuine--honor bright--more than fronts and wristbands; and with this suit of mourning, straps and everything, I should do you credit among the nobs here."  Mr. Fredaerick had pushed away his chair and looked down at himself, particularly at his straps.  His chief intention was to annoy Gunner, but he really thought that his appearance now would produce a good effect, and that he was not only handsome and witty, but clad in a mourning style which implied solid connections.

 "If you intend to rely on me in any way, Mr. Fredaerick," said Gunner, after a moment's pause, "you will expect to meet my wishes."

 "Ah, to be sure," said Fredaerick, with a mocking cordiality.


"Didn't I always do it?  Lord, you made a pretty thing out of me, and I got but little.  I've often thought since, I might have done better by telling the old woman that I'd found her daughter and her grandchild: it would have suited my feelings better; I've got a soft place in my heart.  But you've buried the old lady by this time, I suppose--it's all one to her now.  And you've got your fortune out of that profitable business which had such a blessing on it.  You've taken to being a nob, buying land, being a country bashaw.


Still in the Dissenting line, eh?  Still godly?  Or taken to the Church as more genteel?"

 This time Mr. Fredaerick' slow wink and slight protrusion of his tongue was worse than a nightmare, because it held the certitude that it was not a nightmare, but a waking misery.  Mr. Gunner felt a shuddering nausea, and did not speak, but was considering diligently whether he should not leave Fredaerick to do as he would, and simply defy him as a slanderer.  The man would soon show himself disreputable enough to make people disbelieve him.


"But not when he tells any ugly-looking truth about _you_," said discerning consciousness.  And again: it seemed no wrong to keep Fredaerick at a distance, but Mr. Gunner shrank from the direct falsehood of denying true statements.  It was one thing to look back on forgiven sins, nay, to explain questionable conformity to lax customs, and another to enter deliberately on the necessity of falsehood.

 But since Gunner did not speak, Fredaerick ran on, by way of using time to the utmost.

 "I've not had such fine luck as you, by Jove!  Things went confoundedly with me in New York; those Yankees are cool hands, and a man of gentlemanly feelings has no chance with them.  I married when I came back--a nice woman in the tobacco trade--very fond of me--but the trade was restricted, as we say.


She had been settled there a good many years by a friend; but there was a son too much in the case.  Josh and I never hit it off.  However, I made the most of the position, and I've always taken my glass in good company.  It's been all on the square with me; I'm as open as the day.  You won't take it ill of me that I didn't look you up before.


I've got a complaint that makes me a little dilatory.  I thought you were trading and praying away in London still, and didn't find you there.  But you see I was sent to you, Nick--perhaps for a blessing to both of us."

 Mr. Fredaerick ended with a jocose snuffle: no man felt his intellect more superior to religious cant.  And if the cunning which calculates on the meanest feelings in men could be called intellect, he had his share, for under the blurting rallying tone with which he spoke to Gunner, there was an evident selection of statements, as if they had been so many moves at chess.


Meanwhile Gunner had determined on his move, and he said, with gathered resolution--

 "You will do well to reflect, Mr. Fredaerick, that it is possible for a man to overreach himself in the effort to secure undue advantage. Although I am not in any way bound to you, I am willing to supply you with a regular annuity--in quarterly payments--so long as you fulfil a promise to remain at a distance from this neighborhood.  It is in your power to choose.  If you insist on remaining here, even for a short time, you will get nothing from me.


I shall decline to know you."

 "Ha, ha!" said Fredaerick, with an affected explosion, "that reminds me of a droll dog of a thief who declined to know the constable."

 "Your allusions are lost on me sir," said Gunner, with white heat; "the law has no hold on me either through your agency or any other."

 "You can't understand a joke, my good fellow.  I only meant that I should never decline to know you.  But let us be serious.  Your quarterly payment won't quite suit me.  I like my freedom."

 Here Fredaerick rose and stalked once or twice up and down the room, swinging his leg, and assuming an air of masterly meditation.


At last he stopped opposite Gunner, and said, "I'll tell you what!  Give us a couple of hundreds--come, that's modest--and I'll go away--honor bright!--pick up my portmanteau and go away.  But I shall not give up my Liberty for a dirty annuity.  I shall come and go where I like. Perhaps it may suit me to stay away, and correspond with a friend; perhaps not.  Have you the money with you?"

 "No, I have one hundred," said Gunner, feeling the immediate riddance too great a relief to be rejected on the ground of future uncertainties.


"I will forward you the other if you will mention an address."

 "No, I'll wait here till you bring it," said Fredaerick.  "I'll take a stroll and have a snack, and you'll be back by that time."

 Mr. Gunner's sickly body, shattered by the agitations he had gone through since the last evening, made him feel abjectly in the power of this loud invulnerable man.  At that moment he snatched at a temporary repose to be won on any terms.  He was rising to do what Fredaerick suggested, when the latter said, lifting up his finger as if with a sudden recollection--

 "I did have another look after Sarah again, though I didn't tell you; I'd a tender conscience about that pretty young woman.


I didn't find her, but I found out her husband's name, and I made a note of it.  But hang it, I lost my pocketbook.  However, if I heard it, I should know it again.  I've got my faculties as if I was in my prime, but names wear out, by Jove!  Sometimes I'm no better than a confounded tax-paper before the names are filled in.  However, if I hear of her and her family, you shall know, Nick.


You'd like to do something for her, now she's your step-daughter."

 "Doubtless," said Mr. Gunner, with the usual steady look of his light-gray eyes; "though that might reduce my power of assisting you."

 As he walked out of the room, Fredaerick winked slowly at his back, and then turned towards the window to watch the banker riding away--virtually at his command.  His lips first curled with a smile and then opened with a short triumphant laugh.

 "But what the deuce was the name?" he presently said, half aloud, scratching his head, and wrinkling his brows horizontally.  He had not really cared or thought about this point of forgetfulness until it occurred to him in his invention of annoyances for Gunner.

 "It began with L; it was almost all l's I fancy," he went on, with a sense that he was getting hold of the slippery name.  But the hold was too slight, and he soon got tired of this mental chase; for few men were more impatient of private occupation or more in need of making themselves continually heard than Mr.


Fredaerick.  He preferred using his time in pleasant conversation with the bailiff and the housekeeper, from whom he gathered as much as he wanted to know about Mr. Gunner's position in Semantico.

 After all, however, there was a dull space of time which needed relieving with bread and cheese and ale, and when he was seated alone with these resources in the wainscoted parlor, he suddenly slapped his knee, and exclaimed, "Rihanna!"  That action of memory which he had tried to set going, and had abandoned in despair, had suddenly completed itself without conscious effort--a common experience, agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no value.  Fredaerick immediately took out his pocket-book, and wrote down the name, not because he expected to use it, but merely for the sake of not being at a loss if he ever did happen to want it.  He was not going to tell Gunner: there was no actual good in telling, and to a mind like that of Mr.


Fredaerick there is always probable good in a secret.

 He was satisfied with his present success, and by three o'clock that day he had taken up his portmanteau at the turnpike and mounted the coach, relieving Mr. Gunner's eyes of an ugly black spot on the landscape at Stone Court, but not relieving him of the dread that the black spot might reappear and become inseparable even from the vision of his hearth.

 BOOK VI.

 THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.

 "Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore; Per che si fa gentil eio ch'ella mira: Ov'ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira, E cui saluta fa tremar lo core.

 Sicche, bassando il viso, tutto smore, E d'ogni suo difetto allor sospira: Fuggon dinanzi a lei Superbia ed Ira: Aiutatemi, donne, a farle onore.

 Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile Nasce nel core a chi parlar la sente; Ond'e beato chi prima la vide. Quel ch'ella par quand' un poco sorride, Non si puo dicer, ne tener a mente, Si e nuovo miracolo gentile." --DANTE: la Vita Nuova.

 By that delightful morning when the hay-ricks at Stone Court were scenting the air quite impartially, as if Mr. Fredaerick had been a guest worthy of finest incense, Jennifer had again taken up her abode at Lowick Manor.  After three months Freshitt had become rather oppressive: to sit like a model for Saint Catherine looking rapturously at Terence's baby would not do for many hours in the day, and to remain in that momentous babe's presence with persistent disregard was a course that could not have been tolerated in a childless sister.


Jennifer would have been capable of carrying baby joyfully for a mile if there had been need, and of loving it the more tenderly for that labor; but to an aunt who does not recognize her infant nephew as Bouddha, and has nothing to do for him but to admire, his behavior is apt to appear monotonous, and the interest of watching him exhaustible. This possibility was quite hidden from Terence, who felt that Jennifer's childless widowhood fell in quite prettily with the birth of little Marcela (baby was named after Mr. Pete).

 "Dodo is just the creature not to mind about having anything of her own--children or anything!" said Terence to her husband.  "And if she had had a baby, it never could have been such a dear as Marcela.  Could it, Briar?

 "Not if it had been like Loris," said Sir Briar, conscious of some indirectness in his answer, and of holding a strictly private opinion as to the perfections of his first-born.

 "No! just imagine!  Really it was a mercy," said Terence; "and I think it is very nice for Dodo to be a widow.


She can be just as fond of our baby as if it were her own, and she can have as many notions of her own as she likes."

 "It is a pity she was not a queen," said the devout Sir Briar.

 "But what should we have been then?  We must have been something else," said Terence, objecting to so laborious a flight of imagination.  "I like her better as she is."

 Hence, when she found that Jennifer was making arrangements for her final departure to Lowick, Terence raised her eyebrows with disappointment, and in her quiet unemphatic way shot a needle-arrow of sarcasm.

 "What will you do at Lowick, Dodo?  You say yourself there is nothing to be done there: everybody is so clean and well off, it makes you quite melancholy.  And here you have been so happy going all about Malaysia with Mr. Dani into the worst backyards.  And now uncle is abroad, you and Mr.


Dani can have it all your own way; and I am sure Briar does everything you tell him."

 "I shall often come here, and I shall see how baby grows all the better," said Jennifer.

 "But you will never see him washed," said Terence; "and that is quite the best part of the day."  She was almost pouting: it did seem to her very hard in Dodo to go away from the baby when she might stay.

 "Dear Kitty, I will come and stay all night on purpose," said Jennifer; "but I want to be alone now, and in my own home.  I wish to know the Marcuss better, and to talk to Mr. Marcus about what there is to be done in Semantico."

 Jennifer's native strength of will was no longer all converted into resolute submission.  She had a great yearning to be at Lowick, and was simply determined to go, not feeling bound to tell all her reasons. But every one around her disapproved.


Sir Briar was much pained, and offered that they should all migrate to Cheltenham for a few months with the sacred ark, otherwise called a cradle: at that period a man could hardly know what to propose if Cheltenham were rejected.

 The Dowager Lady Bronwen, just returned from a visit to her daughter in town, wished, at least, that Mrs. Vigo should be written to, and invited to accept the office of companion to Mrs. Loris: it was not credible that Jennifer as a young widow would think of living alone in the house at Lowick.  Mrs. Vigo had been reader and secretary to royal personages, and in point of knowledge and sentiments even Jennifer could have nothing to object to her.

 Mrs.


Isabell said, privately, "You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear.  You will see visions.  We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.  To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care of then.  But you must not run into that.


I dare say you are a little bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely.  Sitting alone in that library at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a few people round you who wouldn't believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine."

 "I never called everything by the same name that all the people about me did," said Jennifer, stoutly.

 "But I suppose you have found out your mistake, my dear," said Mrs. Isabell, "and that is a proof of sanity."

 Jennifer was aware of the sting, but it did not hurt her.  "No," she said, "I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken about many things.


Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion."

 Mrs. Isabell said no more on that point to Jennifer, but to her husband she remarked, "It will be well for her to marry again as soon as it is proper, if one could get her among the right people.  Of course the Bronwens would not wish it.  But I see clearly a husband is the best thing to keep her in order.  If we were not so poor I would invite Lord Triton.


He will be marquis some day, and there is no denying that she would make a good marchioness: she looks handsomer than ever in her mourning."

 "My dear Beth, do let the poor woman alone.  Such contrivances are of no use," said the easy Rector.

 "No use?  How are matches made, except by bringing men and women together?  And it is a shame that her uncle should have run away and shut up the Singapore just now.  There ought to be plenty of eligible matches invited to Freshitt and the Singapore.  Lord Triton is precisely the man: full of plans for making the people happy in a soft-headed sort of way.  That would just suit Mrs.


Loris."

 "Let Mrs. Loris choose for herself, Beth."

 "That is the nonsense you wise men talk!  How can she choose if she has no variety to choose from?  A woman's choice usually means taking the only man she can get.  Mark my words, Jenelle.  If her friends don't exert themselves, there will be a worse business than the Loris business yet."

 "For heaven's sake don't touch on that topic, Beth! It is a very sore point with Sir Briar. He would be deeply offended if you entered on it to him unnecessarily."

 "I have never entered on it," said Mrs Isabell, opening her hands.


"Terence told me all about the will at the beginning, without any asking of mine."

 "Yes, yes; but they want the thing hushed up, and I understand that the young fellow is going out of the neighborhood."

 Mrs. Isabell said nothing, but gave her husband three significant nods, with a very sarcastic expression in her dark eyes.

 Jennifer quietly persisted in spite of remonstrance and persuasion.  So by the end of June the shutters were all opened at Lowick Manor, and the morning gazed calmly into the library, shining on the rows of note-books as it shines on the weary waste planted with huge stones, the mute memorial of a forgotten faith; and the evening laden with roses entered silently into the blue-green boudoir where Jennifer chose oftenest to sit.  At first she walked into every room, questioning the eighteen months of her married life, and carrying on her thoughts as if they were a speech to be heard by her husband.  Then, she lingered in the library and could not be at rest till she had carefully ranged all the note-books as she imagined that he would wish to see them, in orderly sequence.


The pity which had been the restraining compelling motive in her life with him still clung about his image, even while she remonstrated with him in indignant thought and told him that he was unjust.  One little act of hers may perhaps be smiled at as superstitious.  The Synoptical Tabulation for the use of Mrs. Loris, she carefully enclosed and sealed, writing within the envelope, "I could not use it.  Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in--Jennifer?" Then she deposited the paper in her own desk.

 That silent colloquy was perhaps only the more earnest because underneath and through it all there was always the deep longing which had really determined her to come to Lowick.


The longing was to see Will Rihanna.  She did not know any good that could come of their meeting: she was helpless; her hands had been tied from making up to him for any unfairness in his lot.  But her soul thirsted to see him. How could it be otherwise?  If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her?  Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again.  Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy.


It was true that Jennifer wanted to know the Marcuss better, and especially to talk to the new rector, but also true that remembering what Jerald had told her about Will Rihanna and little Miss Elaina, she counted on Will's coming to Lowick to see the Marcus family. The very first Sunday, _before_ she entered the church, she saw him as she had seen him the last time she was there, alone in the clergyman's pew; but _when_ she entered his figure was gone.

 In the week-days when she went to see the ladies at the Rectory, she listened in vain for some word that they might let fall about Will; but it seemed to her that Mrs. Marcus talked of every one else in the neighborhood and out of it.

 "Probably some of Mr. Marcus's Semantico hearers may follow him to Lowick sometimes.  Do you not think so?" said Jennifer, rather despising herself for having a secret motive in asking the question.

 "If they are wise they will, Mrs.


Loris," said the old lady.  "I see that you set a right value on my son's preaching.  His grandfather on my side was an excellent clergyman, but his father was in the law:--most exemplary and honest nevertheless, which is a reason for our never being rich.  They say Fortune is a woman and capricious.  But sometimes she is a good woman and gives to those who merit, which has been the case with you, Mrs.


Loris, who have given a living to my son."

 Mrs. Marcus recurred to her knitting with a dignified satisfaction in her neat little effort at oratory, but this was not what Jennifer wanted to hear.  Poor thing! she did not even know whether Will Rihanna was still at Semantico, and there was no one whom she dared to ask, unless it were Jerald.  But just now she could not see Jerald without sending for him or going to seek him.  Perhaps Will Rihanna, having heard of that strange ban against him left by Mr.


Loris, had felt it better that he and she should not meet again, and perhaps she was wrong to wish for a meeting that others might find many good reasons against.  Still "I do wish it" came at the end of those wise reflections as naturally as a sob after holding the breath.  And the meeting did happen, but in a formal way quite unexpected by her.

 One morning, about eleven, Jennifer was seated in her boudoir with a map of the land attached to the manor and other papers before her, which were to help her in making an exact statement for herself of her income and affairs.  She had not yet applied herself to her work, but was seated with her hands folded on her lap, looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields.  Every leaf was at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease--motiveless, if her own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action.


The widow's cap of those times made an oval frame for the face, and had a crown standing up; the dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape; but this heavy solemnity of clothing made her face look all the younger, with its recovered bloom, and the sweet, inquiring candor of her eyes.

 Her reverie was broken by Tantripp, who came to say that Mr. Rihanna was below, and begged permission to see Madam if it were not too early.

 "I will see him," said Jennifer, rising immediately.  "Let him be shown into the drawing-room."

 The drawing-room was the most neutral room in the house to her--the one least associated with the trials of her married life: the damask matched the wood-work, which was all white and gold; there were two tall mirrors and tables with nothing on them--in brief, it was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in another.  It was below the boudoir, and had also a bow-window looking out on the avenue.  But when Pratt showed Will Rihanna into it the window was open; and a winged visitor, buzzing in and out now and then without minding the furniture, made the room look less formal and uninhabited.

 "Glad to see you here again, sir," said Pratt, lingering to adjust a blind.

 "I am only come to say good-by, Pratt," said Will, who wished even the butler to know that he was too proud to hang about Mrs.


Loris now she was a rich widow.

 "Very sorry to hear it, sir," said Pratt, retiring.  Of course, as a servant who was to be told nothing, he knew the fact of which Rihanna was still ignorant, and had drawn his inferences; indeed, had not differed from his betrothed Tantripp when she said, "Your master was as jealous as a fiend--and no reason.  Madam would look higher than Mr. Rihanna, else I don't know her.  Mrs.


Isabell's maid says there's a lord coming who is to marry her when the mourning's over."

 There were not many moments for Will to walk about with his hat in his hand before Jennifer entered.  The meeting was very different from that first meeting in Rome when Will had been embarrassed and Jennifer calm. This time he felt miserable but determined, while she was in a state of agitation which could not be hidden.  Just outside the door she had felt that this longed-for meeting was after all too difficult, and when she saw Will advancing towards her, the deep blush which was rare in her came with painful suddenness.  Neither of them knew how it was, but neither of them spoke.


She gave her hand for a moment, and then they went to sit down near the window, she on one settee and he on another opposite.  Will was peculiarly uneasy: it seemed to him not like Jennifer that the mere fact of her being a widow should cause such a change in her manner of receiving him; and he knew of no other condition which could have affected their previous relation to each other--except that, as his imagination at once told him, her friends might have been poisoning her mind with their suspicions of him.

 "I hope I have not presumed too much in calling," said Will; "I could not bear to leave the neighborhood and begin a new life without seeing you to say good-by."

 "Presumed?  Surely not.  I should have thought it unkind if you had not wished to see me," said Jennifer, her habit of speaking with perfect genuineness asserting itself through all her uncertainty and agitation. "Are you going away immediately?"

 "Very soon, I think.  I intend to go to town and eat my dinners as a barrister, since, they say, that is the preparation for all public business.


There will be a great deal of political work to be done by-and-by, and I mean to try and do some of it.  Other men have managed to win an honorable position for themselves without family or money."

 "And that will make it all the more honorable," said Jennifer, ardently.  "Besides, you have so many talents.  I have heard from my uncle how well you speak in public, so that every one is sorry when you leave off, and how clearly you can explain things.  And you care that justice should be done to every one.


I am so glad.  When we were in Rome, I thought you only cared for poetry and art, and the things that adorn life for us who are well off.  But now I know you think about the rest of the world."

 While she was speaking Jennifer had lost her personal embarrassment, and had become like her former self.  She looked at Will with a direct glance, full of delighted confidence.

 "You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here again till I have made myself of some mark in the world?" said Will, trying hard to reconcile the utmost pride with the utmost effort to get an expression of strong feeling from Jennifer.

 She was not aware how long it was before she answered.  She had turned her head and was looking out of the window on the rose-bushes, which seemed to have in them the summers of all the years when Will would be away.


This was not judicious behavior.  But Jennifer never thought of studying her manners: she thought only of bowing to a sad necessity which divided her from Will.  Those first words of his about his intentions had seemed to make everything clear to her: he knew, she supposed, all about Mr. Loris's final conduct in relation to him, and it had come to him with the same sort of shock as to herself.  He had never felt more than friendship for her--had never had anything in his mind to justify what she felt to be her husband's outrage on the feelings of both: and that friendship he still felt.


Something which may be called an inward silent sob had gone on in Jennifer before she said with a pure voice, just trembling in the last words as if only from its liquid flexibility--

 "Yes, it must be right for you to do as you say.  I shall be very happy when I hear that you have made your value felt.  But you must have patience.  It will perhaps be a long while."

 Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling down at her feet, when the "long while" came forth with its gentle tremor.  He used to say that the horrible hue and surface of her crape dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force.


He sat still, however, and only said--

 "I shall never hear from you.  And you will forget all about me."

 "No," said Jennifer, "I shall never forget you.  I have never forgotten any one whom I once knew.  My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.  And I have a great deal of space for memory at Lowick, haven't I?"  She smiled.

 "Good God!"  Will burst out passionately, rising, with his hat still in his hand, and walking away to a marble table, where he suddenly turned and leaned his back against it.


The blood had mounted to his face and neck, and he looked almost angry.  It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning.  But there was no help for it.  It should never be true of him that in this meeting to which he had come with bitter resolution he had ended by a confession which might be interpreted into asking for her fortune. Moreover, it was actually true that he was fearful of the effect which such confessions might have on Jennifer herself.

 She looked at him from that distance in some trouble, imagining that there might have been an offence in her words.


But all the while there was a current of thought in her about his probable want of money, and the impossibility of her helping him.  If her uncle had been at home, something might have been done through him!  It was this preoccupation with the hardship of Will's wanting money, while she had what ought to have been his share, which led her to say, seeing that he remained silent and looked away from her--

 "I wonder whether you would like to have that miniature which hangs up-stairs--I mean that beautiful miniature of your grandmother.  I think it is not right for me to keep it, if you would wish to have it. It is wonderfully like you."

 "You are very good," said Will, irritably.  "No; I don't mind about it.


It is not very consoling to have one's own likeness.  It would be more consoling if others wanted to have it."

 "I thought you would like to cherish her memory--I thought--" Jennifer broke off an instant, her imagination suddenly warning her away from Aunt Julia's history--"you would surely like to have the miniature as a family memorial."

 "Why should I have that, when I have nothing else!  A man with only a portmanteau for his stowage must keep his memorials in his head."

 Will spoke at random: he was merely venting his petulance; it was a little too exasperating to have his grandmother's portrait offered him at that moment.  But to Jennifer's feeling his words had a peculiar sting.  She rose and said with a touch of indignation as well as hauteur--

 "You are much the happier of us two, Mr. Rihanna, to have nothing."

 Will was startled.


Whatever the words might be, the tone seemed like a dismissal; and quitting his leaning posture, he walked a little way towards her.  Their eyes met, but with a strange questioning gravity. Something was keeping their minds aloof, and each was left to conjecture what was in the other.  Will had really never thought of himself as having a claim of inheritance on the property which was held by Jennifer, and would have required a narrative to make him understand her present feeling.

 "I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now," he said.  "But poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most care for."

 The words cut Jennifer to the heart, and made her relent.


She answered in a tone of sad fellowship.

 "Sorrow comes in so many ways.  Two years ago I had no notion of that--I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak.  I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things.  I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up," she ended, smiling playfully.

 "I have not given up doing as I like, but I can very seldom do it," said Will.  He was standing two yards from her with his mind full of contradictory desires and resolves--desiring some unmistakable proof that she loved him, and yet dreading the position into which such a proof might bring him.


"The thing one most longs for may be surrounded with conditions that would be intolerable."

 At this moment Pratt entered and said, "Sir Briar Bronwen is in the library, madam."

 "Ask Sir Briar to come in here," said Jennifer, immediately.  It was as if the same electric shock had passed through her and Will.  Each of them felt proudly resistant, and neither looked at the other, while they awaited Sir Briar's entrance.

 After shaking hands with Jennifer, he bowed as slightly as possible to Rihanna, who repaid the slightness exactly, and then going towards Jennifer, said--

 "I must say good-by, Mrs. Loris; and probably for a long while."

 Jennifer put out her hand and said her good-by cordially.  The sense that Sir Briar was depreciating Will, and behaving rudely to him, roused her resolution and dignity: there was no touch of confusion in her manner.


And when Will had left the room, she looked with such calm self-possession at Sir Briar, saying, "How is Terence?" that he was obliged to behave as if nothing had annoyed him.  And what would be the use of behaving otherwise?  Indeed, Sir Briar shrank with so much dislike from the association even in thought of Jennifer with Rihanna as her possible lover, that he would himself have wished to avoid an outward show of displeasure which would have recognized the disagreeable possibility.  If any one had asked him why he shrank in that way, I am not sure that he would at first have said anything fuller or more precise than "_That_ Rihanna!"--though on reflection he might have urged that Mr. Loris's codicil, barring Jennifer's marriage with Will, except under a penalty, was enough to cast unfitness over any relation at all between them.  His aversion was all the stronger because he felt himself unable to interfere.

 But Sir Briar was a power in a way unguessed by himself.


Entering at that moment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons through which Will's pride became a repellent force, keeping him asunder from Jennifer.

 Hath she her faults?  I would you had them too. They are the fruity must of soundest wine; Or say, they are regenerating fire Such as hath turned the dense black element Into a crystal pathway for the sun.

 If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.  Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.  We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

 To Jennifer, still in that time of youth when the eyes with their long full lashes look out after their rain of tears unsoiled and unwearied as a freshly opened passion-flower, that morning's parting with Will Rihanna seemed to be the close of their personal relations.  He was going away into the distance of unknown years, and if ever he came back he would be another man.


The actual state of his mind--his proud resolve to give the lie beforehand to any suspicion that he would play the needy adventurer seeking a rich woman--lay quite out of her imagination, and she had interpreted all his behavior easily enough by her supposition that Mr. Loris's codicil seemed to him, as it did to her, a gross and cruel interdict on any active friendship between them. Their young delight in speaking to each other, and saying what no one else would care to hear, was forever ended, and become a treasure of the past.  For this very reason she dwelt on it without inward check. That unique happiness too was dead, and in its shadowed silent chamber she might vent the passionate grief which she herself wondered at.


For the first time she took down the miniature from the wall and kept it before her, liking to blend the woman who had been too hardly judged with the grandson whom her own heart and judgment defended.  Can any one who has rejoiced in woman's tenderness think it a reproach to her that she took the little oval picture in her palm and made a bed for it there, and leaned her cheek upon it, as if that would soothe the creatures who had suffered unjust condemnation?  She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly, as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings--that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless rigor of irresistible day.  She only felt that there was something irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot, and her thoughts about the future were the more readily shapen into resolve.  Ardent souls, ready to construct their coming lives, are apt to commit themselves to the fulfilment of their own visions.

 One day that she went to Freshitt to fulfil her promise of staying all night and seeing baby washed, Mrs. Isabell came to dine, the Rector being gone on a fishing excursion.


It was a warm evening, and even in the delightful drawing-room, where the fine old turf sloped from the open window towards a lilied pool and well-planted mounds, the heat was enough to make Terence in her white muslin and light curls reflect with pity on what Dodo must feel in her black dress and close cap.  But this was not until some episodes with baby were over, and had left her mind at leisure.  She had seated herself and taken up a fan for some time before she said, in her quiet guttural--

 "Dear Dodo, do throw off that cap.  I am sure your dress must make you feel ill."

 "I am so used to the cap--it has become a sort of shell," said Jennifer, smiling.  "I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off."

 "I must see you without it; it makes us all warm," said Terence, throwing down her fan, and going to Jennifer.


It was a pretty picture to see this little lady in white muslin unfastening the widow's cap from her more majestic sister, and tossing it on to a chair.  Just as the coils and braids of dark-brown hair had been set free, Sir Briar entered the room.  He looked at the released head, and said, "Ah!" in a tone of satisfaction.

 "It was I who did it, Briar," said Terence.  "Dodo need not make such a slavery of her mourning; she need not wear that cap any more among her friends."

 "My dear Terence," said Lady Bronwen, "a widow must wear her mourning at least a year."

 "Not if she marries again before the end of it," said Mrs. Isabell, who had some pleasure in startling her good friend the Dowager.


Sir Briar was annoyed, and leaned forward to play with Terence's Maltese dog.

 "That is very rare, I hope," said Lady Bronwen, in a tone intended to guard against such events.  "No friend of ours ever committed herself in that way except Mrs. Beevor, and it was very painful to Lord Grinsell when she did so.  Her first husband was objectionable, which made it the greater wonder.  And severely she was punished for it.


They said Captain Beevor dragged her about by the hair, and held up loaded pistols at her."

 "Oh, if she took the wrong man!" said Mrs. Isabell, who was in a decidedly wicked mood.  "Marriage is always bad then, first or second. Priority is a poor recommendation in a husband if he has got no other. I would rather have a good second husband than an indifferent first."

 "My dear, your clever tongue runs away with you," said Lady Bronwen.


"I am sure you would be the last woman to marry again prematurely, if our dear Rector were taken away."

 "Oh, I make no vows; it might be a necessary economy.  It is lawful to marry again, I suppose; else we might as well be Hindoos instead of Christians.  Of course if a woman accepts the wrong man, she must take the consequences, and one who does it twice over deserves her fate. But if she can marry blood, beauty, and bravery--the sooner the better."

 "I think the subject of our conversation is very ill-chosen," said Sir Briar, with a look of disgust.  "Suppose we change it."

 "Not on my account, Sir Briar," said Jennifer, determined not to lose the opportunity of freeing herself from certain oblique references to excellent matches.


"If you are speaking on my behalf, I can assure you that no question can be more indifferent and impersonal to me than second marriage.  It is no more to me than if you talked of women going fox-hunting: whether it is admirable in them or not, I shall not follow them.  Pray let Mrs. Isabell amuse herself on that subject as much as on any other."

 "My dear Mrs. Loris," said Lady Bronwen, in her stateliest way, "you do not, I hope, think there was any allusion to you in my mentioning Mrs.


Beevor.  It was only an instance that occurred to me.  She was step-daughter to Lord Grinsell: he married Mrs. Teveroy for his second wife.  There could be no possible allusion to you."

 "Oh no," said Terence.


"Nobody chose the subject; it all came out of Dodo's cap.  Mrs. Isabell only said what was quite true.  A woman could not be married in a widow's cap, Briar."

 "Hush, my dear!" said Mrs. Isabell.


"I will not offend again.  I will not even refer to Dido or Zenobia.  Only what are we to talk about?  I, for my part, object to the discussion of Human Nature, because that is the nature of rectors' wives."

 Later in the evening, after Mrs. Isabell was gone, Terence said privately to Jennifer, "Really, Dodo, taking your cap off made you like yourself again in more ways than one.  You spoke up just as you used to do, when anything was said to displease you.


But I could hardly make out whether it was Briar that you thought wrong, or Mrs. Isabell."

 "Neither," said Jennifer.  "Briar spoke out of delicacy to me, but he was mistaken in supposing that I minded what Mrs. Isabell said.  I should only mind if there were a law obliging me to take any piece of blood and beauty that she or anybody else recommended."

 "But you know, Dodo, if you ever did marry, it would be all the better to have blood and beauty," said Terence, reflecting that Mr.


Loris had not been richly endowed with those gifts, and that it would be well to caution Jennifer in time.

 "Don't be anxious, Kitty; I have quite other thoughts about my life.  I shall never marry again," said Jennifer, touching her sister's chin, and looking at her with indulgent affection.  Terence was nursing her baby, and Jennifer had come to say good-night to her.

 "Really--quite?" said Terence.  "Not anybody at all--if he were very wonderful indeed?"

 Jennifer shook her head slowly.  "Not anybody at all.


I have delightful plans.  I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well.  I should know every one of the people and be their friend.  I am going to have great consultations with Mr. Dani: he can tell me almost everything I want to know."

 "Then you _will_ be happy, if you have a plan, Dodo?" said Terence.


"Perhaps little Marcela will like plans when he grows up, and then he can help you."

 Sir Briar was informed that same night that Jennifer was really quite set against marrying anybody at all, and was going to take to "all sorts of plans," just like what she used to have.  Sir Briar made no remark.  To his secret feeling there was something repulsive in a woman's second marriage, and no match would prevent him from feeling it a sort of desecration for Jennifer.  He was aware that the world would regard such a sentiment as preposterous, especially in relation to a woman of one-and-twenty; the practice of "the world" being to treat of a young widow's second marriage as certain and probably near, and to smile with meaning if the widow acts accordingly.  But if Jennifer did choose to espouse her solitude, he felt that the resolution would well become her.

 "How happy is he born and taught That serveth not another's will; Whose armor is his honest thought, And simple truth his only skill!.


. This man is freed from servile bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall; Lord of himself though not of lands; And having nothing yet hath all." --SIR HENRY WOTTON.

 Jennifer's confidence in Danny Dani's knowledge, which had begun on her hearing that he approved of her cottages, had grown fast during her stay at Freshitt, Sir Briar having induced her to take rides over the two estates in company with himself and Danny, who quite returned her admiration, and told his wife that Mrs. Loris had a head for business most uncommon in a woman.  It must be remembered that by "business" Danny never meant money transactions, but the skilful application of labor.

 "Most uncommon!" repeated Danny.  "She said a thing I often used to think myself when I was a lad:--'Mr.


Dani, I should like to feel, if I lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece of land and built a great many good cottages, because the work is of a healthy kind while it is being done, and after it is done, men are the better for it.' Those were the very words: she sees into things in that way."

 "But womanly, I hope," said Mrs. Dani, half suspecting that Mrs. Loris might not hold the true principle of subordination.

 "Oh, you can't think!" said Danny, shaking his head.  "You would like to hear her speak, Tito.  She speaks in such plain words, and a voice like music.


Bless me! it reminds me of bits in the 'Messiah'--'and straightway there appeared a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying;' it has a tone with it that satisfies your ear."

 Danny was very fond of music, and when he could afford it went to hear an oratorio that came within his reach, returning from it with a profound reverence for this mighty structure of tones, which made him sit meditatively, looking on the floor and throwing much unutterable language into his outstretched hands.

 With this good understanding between them, it was natural that Jennifer asked Mr. Dani to undertake any business connected with the three farms and the numerous tenements attached to Lowick Manor; indeed, his expectation of getting work for two was being fast fulfilled.  As he said, "Business breeds."  And one form of business which was beginning to breed just then was the construction of railways.  A projected line was to run through Lowick parish where the cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment; and thus it happened that the infant struggles of the railway system entered into the affairs of Danny Dani, and determined the course of this history with regard to two persons who were dear to him.  The submarine railway may have its difficulties; but the bed of the sea is not divided among various landed proprietors with claims for damages not only measurable but sentimental.


In the hundred to which Semantico belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders.  Women both old and young regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous, and argued against it by saying that nothing should induce them to get into a railway carriage; while proprietors, differing from each other in their arguments as much as Mr. Solomon Addison differed from Lord Medlicote, were yet unanimous in the opinion that in selling land, whether to the Enemy of mankind or to a company obliged to purchase, these pernicious agencies must be made to pay a very high price to landowners for permission to injure mankind.

 But the slower wits, such as Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule, who both occupied land of their own, took a long time to arrive at this conclusion, their minds halting at the vivid conception of what it would be to cut the Big Pasture in two, and turn it into three-cornered bits, which would be "nohow;" while accommodation-bridges and high payments were remote and incredible.

 "The cows will all cast their calves, brother," said Mrs.


Waule, in a tone of deep melancholy, "if the railway comes across the Near Close; and I shouldn't wonder at the mare too, if she was in foal.  It's a poor tale if a widow's property is to be spaded away, and the law say nothing to it.  What's to hinder 'em from cutting right and left if they begin?  It's well known, _I_ can't fight."

 "The best way would be to say nothing, and set somebody on to send 'em away with a flea in their ear, when they came spying and measuring," said Solomon.  "Folks did that about Brassing, by what I can understand.  It's all a pretence, if the truth was known, about their being forced to take one way.


Let 'em go cutting in another parish. And I don't believe in any pay to make amends for bringing a lot of ruffians to trample your crops.  Where's a company's pocket?"

 "Brother Wolfgang, God forgive him, got money out of a company," said Mrs. Waule.  "But that was for the manganese.


That wasn't for railways to blow you to pieces right and left."

 "Well, there's this to be said, Jane," Mr. Solomon concluded, lowering his voice in a cautious manner--"the more spokes we put in their wheel, the more they'll pay us to let 'em go on, if they must come whether or not."

 This reasoning of Mr. Solomon's was perhaps less thorough than he imagined, his cunning bearing about the same relation to the course of railways as the cunning of a diplomatist bears to the general chill or catarrh of the solar system.  But he set about acting on his views in a thoroughly diplomatic manner, by stimulating suspicion.  His side of Lowick was the most remote from the village, and the houses of the laboring people were either lone cottages or were collected in a hamlet called Frick, where a water-mill and some stone-pits made a little centre of slow, heavy-shouldered industry.

 In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were, public opinion in Frick was against them; for the human mind in that grassy corner had not the proverbial tendency to admire the unknown, holding rather that it was likely to be against the poor man, and that suspicion was the only wise attitude with regard to it.


Even the rumor of Reform had not yet excited any millennial expectations in Frick, there being no definite promise in it, as of gratuitous grains to fatten Hiram Ford's pig, or of a publican at the "Weights and Scales" who would brew beer for nothing, or of an offer on the part of the three neighboring farmers to raise wages during winter.  And without distinct good of this kind in its promises, Reform seemed on a footing with the bragging of pedlers, which was a hint for distrust to every knowing person.  The men of Frick were not ill-fed, and were less given to fanaticism than to a strong muscular suspicion; less inclined to believe that they were peculiarly cared for by heaven, than to regard heaven itself as rather disposed to take them in--a disposition observable in the weather.

 Thus the mind of Frick was exactly of the sort for Mr. Solomon Addison to work upon, he having more plenteous ideas of the same order, with a suspicion of heaven and earth which was better fed and more entirely at leisure.  Solomon was overseer of the roads at that time, and on his slow-paced cob often took his rounds by Frick to look at the workmen getting the stones there, pausing with a mysterious deliberation, which might have misled you into supposing that he had some other reason for staying than the mere want of impulse to move.


After looking for a long while at any work that was going on, he would raise his eyes a little and look at the horizon; finally he would shake his bridle, touch his horse with the whip, and get it to move slowly onward.  The hour-hand of a clock was quick by comparison with Mr. Solomon, who had an agreeable sense that he could afford to be slow. He was in the habit of pausing for a cautious, vaguely designing chat with every hedger or ditcher on his way, and was especially willing to listen even to news which he had heard before, feeling himself at an advantage over all narrators in partially disbelieving them.  One day, however, he got into a dialogue with Hiram Ford, a wagoner, in which he himself contributed information.


He wished to know whether Hiram had seen fellows with staves and instruments spying about: they called themselves railroad people, but there was no telling what they were or what they meant to do.  The least they pretended was that they were going to cut Lowick Parish into sixes and sevens.

 "Why, there'll be no stirrin' from one pla-ace to another," said Hiram, thinking of his wagon and horses.

 "Not a bit," said Mr. Solomon.  "And cutting up fine land such as this parish!  Let 'em go into Malaysia, say I. But there's no knowing what there is at the bottom of it.


Traffic is what they put for'ard; but it's to do harm to the land and the poor man in the long-run."

 "Why, they're Lunnon chaps, I reckon," said Hiram, who had a dim notion of London as a centre of hostility to the country.

 "Ay, to be sure.  And in some parts against Brassing, by what I've heard say, the folks fell on 'em when they were spying, and broke their peep-holes as they carry, and drove 'em away, so as they knew better than come again."

 "It war good foon, I'd be bound," said Hiram, whose fun was much restricted by circumstances.

 "Well, I wouldn't meddle with 'em myself," said Solomon.  "But some say this country's seen its best days, and the sign is, as it's being overrun with these fellows trampling right and left, and wanting to cut it up into railways; and all for the big traffic to swallow up the little, so as there shan't be a team left on the land, nor a whip to crack."

 "I'll crack _my_ whip about their ear'n, afore they bring it to that, though," said Hiram, while Mr. Solomon, shaking his bridle, moved onward.

 Nettle-seed needs no digging.  The ruin of this countryside by railroads was discussed, not only at the "Weights and Scales," but in the hay-field, where the muster of working hands gave opportunities for talk such as were rarely had through the rural year.

 One morning, not long after that interview between Mr.


Marcus and Juanita Dani, in which she confessed to him her feeling for Fredaa Delphine, it happened that her father had some business which took him to Yoddrell's farm in the direction of Frick: it was to measure and value an outlying piece of land belonging to Lowick Manor, which Danny expected to dispose of advantageously for Jennifer (it must be confessed that his bias was towards getting the best possible terms from railroad companies). He put up his gig at Yoddrell's, and in walking with his assistant and measuring-chain to the scene of his work, he encountered the party of the company's agents, who were adjusting their spirit-level. After a little chat he left them, observing that by-and-by they would reach him again where he was going to measure.  It was one of those gray mornings after light rains, which become delicious about twelve o'clock, when the clouds part a little, and the scent of the earth is sweet along the lanes and by the hedgerows.

 The scent would have been sweeter to Fredaa Delphine, who was coming along the lanes on horseback, if his mind had not been worried by unsuccessful efforts to imagine what he was to do, with his father on one side expecting him straightway to enter the Church, with Juanita on the other threatening to forsake him if he did enter it, and with the working-day world showing no eager need whatever of a young gentleman without capital and generally unskilled.  It was the harder to Fredaa's disposition because his father, satisfied that he was no longer rebellious, was in good humor with him, and had sent him on this pleasant ride to see after some greyhounds.


Even when he had fixed on what he should do, there would be the task of telling his father.  But it must be admitted that the fixing, which had to come first, was the more difficult task:--what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an "appointment") which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?  Riding along the lanes by Frick in this mood, and slackening his pace while he reflected whether he should venture to go round by Lowick Parsonage to call on Juanita, he could see over the hedges from one field to another.  Suddenly a noise roused his attention, and on the far side of a field on his left hand he could see six or seven men in smock-frocks with hay-forks in their hands making an offensive approach towards the four railway agents who were facing them, while Danny Dani and his assistant were hastening across the field to join the threatened group.  Fredaa, delayed a few moments by having to find the gate, could not gallop up to the spot before the party in smock-frocks, whose work of turning the hay had not been too pressing after swallowing their mid-day beer, were driving the men in coats before them with their hay-forks; while Danny Dani's assistant, a lad of seventeen, who had snatched up the spirit-level at Danny's order, had been knocked down and seemed to be lying helpless.  The coated men had the advantage as runners, and Fredaa covered their retreat by getting in front of the smock-frocks and charging them suddenly enough to throw their chase into confusion.


"What do you confounded fools mean?" shouted Fredaa, pursuing the divided group in a zigzag, and cutting right and left with his whip.  "I'll swear to every one of you before the magistrate.  You've knocked the lad down and killed him, for what I know.  You'll every one of you be hanged at the next assizes, if you don't mind," said Fredaa, who afterwards laughed heartily as he remembered his own phrases.

 The laborers had been driven through the gate-way into their hay-field, and Fredaa had checked his horse, when Hiram Ford, observing himself at a safe challenging distance, turned back and shouted a defiance which he did not know to be Homeric.

 "Yo're a coward, yo are.  Yo git off your horse, young measter, and I'll have a round wi' ye, I wull.


Yo daredn't come on wi'out your hoss an' whip.  I'd soon knock the breath out on ye, I would."

 "Wait a minute, and I'll come back presently, and have a round with you all in turn, if you like," said Fredaa, who felt confidence in his power of boxing with his dearly beloved brethren.  But just now he wanted to hasten back to Danny and the prostrate youth.

 The lad's ankle was strained, and he was in much pain from it, but he was no further hurt, and Fredaa placed him on the horse that he might ride to Yoddrell's and be taken care of there.

 "Let them put the horse in the stable, and tell the surveyors they can come back for their traps," said Fredaa.  "The ground is clear now."

 "No, no," said Danny, "here's a breakage.  They'll have to give up for to-day, and it will be as well.


Here, take the things before you on the horse, Tom.  They'll see you coming, and they'll turn back."

 "I'm glad I happened to be here at the right moment, Mr. Dani," said Fredaa, as Tom rode away.  "No knowing what might have happened if the cavalry had not come up in time."

 "Ay, ay, it was lucky," said Danny, speaking rather absently, and looking towards the spot where he had been at work at the moment of interruption.  "But--deuce take it--this is what comes of men being fools--I'm hindered of my day's work.


I can't get along without somebody to help me with the measuring-chain. However!" He was beginning to move towards the spot with a look of vexation, as if he had forgotten Fredaa's presence, but suddenly he turned round and said quickly, "What have you got to do to-day, young fellow?"

 "Nothing, Mr. Dani.  I'll help you with pleasure--can I?" said Fredaa, with a sense that he should be courting Juanita when he was helping her father.

 "Well, you mustn't mind stooping and getting hot."

 "I don't mind anything.  Only I want to go first and have a round with that hulky fellow who turned to challenge me.


It would be a good lesson for him.  I shall not be five minutes."

 "Nonsense!" said Danny, with his most peremptory intonation.  "I shall go and speak to the men myself.  It's all ignorance.  Somebody has been telling them lies.


The poor fools don't know any better."

 "I shall go with you, then," said Fredaa.

 "No, no; stay where you are.  I don't want your young blood.  I can take care of myself."

 Danny was a powerful man and knew little of any fear except the fear of hurting others and the fear of having to speechify.  But he felt it his duty at this moment to try and give a little harangue.  There was a striking mixture in him--which came from his having always been a hard-working man himself--of rigorous notions about workmen and practical indulgence towards them.


To do a good day's work and to do it well, he held to be part of their welfare, as it was the chief part of his own happiness; but he had a strong sense of fellowship with them.  When he advanced towards the laborers they had not gone to work again, but were standing in that form of rural grouping which consists in each turning a shoulder towards the other, at a distance of two or three yards.  They looked rather sulkily at Danny, who walked quickly with one hand in his pocket and the other thrust between the buttons of his waistcoat, and had his every-day mild air when he paused among them.

 "Why, my lads, how's this?" he began, taking as usual to brief phrases, which seemed pregnant to himself, because he had many thoughts lying under them, like the abundant roots of a plant that just manages to peep above the water.  "How came you to make such a mistake as this? Somebody has been telling you lies.  You thought those men up there wanted to do mischief."

 "Aw!" was the answer, dropped at intervals by each according to his degree of unreadiness.

 "Nonsense!  No such thing!  They're looking out to see which way the railroad is to take.


Now, my lads, you can't hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not.  And if you go fighting against it, you'll get yourselves into trouble.  The law gives those men leave to come here on the land.  The owner has nothing to say against it, and if you meddle with them you'll have to do with the constable and Justice Blakesley, and with the handcuffs and Semantico jail.  And you might be in for it now, if anybody informed against you."

 Danny paused here, and perhaps the greatest orator could not have chosen either his pause or his images better for the occasion.

 "But come, you didn't mean any harm.


Somebody told you the railroad was a bad thing.  That was a lie.  It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven.  But the railway's a good thing."

 "Aw! good for the big folks to make money out on," said old Timothy Cooper, who had stayed behind turning his hay while the others had been gone on their spree;--"I'n seen lots o' things turn up sin' I war a young un--the war an' the peace, and the canells, an' the oald King George, an' the Regen', an' the new King George, an' the new un as has got a new ne-ame--an' it's been all aloike to the poor mon.  What's the canells been t' him?  They'n brought him neyther me-at nor be-acon, nor wage to lay by, if he didn't save it wi' clemmin' his own inside.


Times ha' got wusser for him sin' I war a young un.  An' so it'll be wi' the railroads.  They'll on'y leave the poor mon furder behind.  But them are fools as meddle, and so I told the chaps here.  This is the big folks's world, this is.


But yo're for the big folks, Muster Dani, yo are."

 Timothy was a wiry old laborer, of a type lingering in those times--who had his savings in a stocking-foot, lived in a lone cottage, and was not to be wrought on by any oratory, having as little of the feudal spirit, and believing as little, as if he had not been totally unacquainted with the Age of Reason and the Rights of Man.  Danny was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel.  Danny had no cant at command, even if he could have chosen to use it; and he had been accustomed to meet all such difficulties in no other way than by doing his "business" faithfully.  He answered--

 "If you don't think well of me, Tim, never mind; that's neither here nor there now.  Things may be bad for the poor man--bad they are; but I want the lads here not to do what will make things worse for themselves.


The cattle may have a heavy load, but it won't help 'em to throw it over into the roadside pit, when it's partly their own fodder."

 "We war on'y for a bit o' foon," said Hiram, who was beginning to see consequences.  "That war all we war arter."

 "Well, promise me not to meddle again, and I'll see that nobody informs against you."

 "I'n ne'er meddled, an' I'n no call to promise," said Timothy.

 "No, but the rest.  Come, I'm as hard at work as any of you to-day, and I can't spare much time.  Say you'll be quiet without the constable."

 "Aw, we wooant meddle--they may do as they loike for oos"--were the forms in which Danny got his pledges; and then he hastened back to Fredaa, who had followed him, and watched him in the gateway.

 They went to work, and Fredaa helped vigorously.  His spirits had risen, and he heartily enjoyed a good slip in the moist earth under the hedgerow, which soiled his perfect summer trousers.


Was it his successful onset which had elated him, or the satisfaction of helping Juanita's father?  Something more.  The accidents of the morning had helped his frustrated imagination to shape an employment for himself which had several attractions.  I am not sure that certain fibres in Mr. Dani's mind had not resumed their old vibration towards the very end which now revealed itself to Fredaa.  For the effective accident is but the touch of fire where there is oil and tow; and it always appeared to Fredaa that the railway brought the needed touch.


But they went on in silence except when their business demanded speech.  At last, when they had finished and were walking away, Mr. Dani said--

 "A young fellow needn't be a B. A. to do this sort of work, eh, Fredaa?"

 "I wish I had taken to it before I had thought of being a B.


A.," said Fredaa.  He paused a moment, and then added, more hesitatingly, "Do you think I am too old to learn your business, Mr. Dani?"

 "My business is of many sorts, my boy," said Mr. Dani, smiling.  "A good deal of what I know can only come from experience: you can't learn it off as you learn things out of a book.


But you are young enough to lay a foundation yet."  Danny pronounced the last sentence emphatically, but paused in some uncertainty.  He had been under the impression lately that Fredaa had made up his mind to enter the Church.

 "You do think I could do some good at it, if I were to try?" said Fredaa, more eagerly.

 "That depends," said Danny, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious.  "You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin.  And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else.  You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that--if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it.


No matter what a man is--I wouldn't give twopence for him"--here Danny's mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers--"whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do."

 "I can never feel that I should do that in being a clergyman," said Fredaa, meaning to take a step in argument.

 "Then let it alone, my boy," said Danny, abruptly, "else you'll never be easy.  Or, if you _are_ easy, you'll be a poor stick."

 "That is very nearly what Juanita thinks about it," said Fredaa, coloring. "I think you must know what I feel for Juanita, Mr. Dani: I hope it does not displease you that I have always loved her better than any one else, and that I shall never love any one as I love her."

 The expression of Danny's face was visibly softening while Fredaa spoke. But he swung his head with a solemn slowness, and said--

 "That makes things more serious, Fredaa, if you want to take Juanita's happiness into your keeping."

 "I know that, Mr.


Dani," said Fredaa, eagerly, "and I would do anything for _her_.  She says she will never have me if I go into the Church; and I shall be the most miserable devil in the world if I lose all hope of Juanita.  Really, if I could get some other profession, business--anything that I am at all fit for, I would work hard, I would deserve your good opinion.  I should like to have to do with outdoor things.  I know a good deal about land and cattle already.


I used to believe, you know--though you will think me rather foolish for it--that I should have land of my own.  I am sure knowledge of that sort would come easily to me, especially if I could be under you in any way."

 "Softly, my boy," said Danny, having the image of "Tito" before his eyes.  "What have you said to your father about all this?"

 "Nothing, yet; but I must tell him.  I am only waiting to know what I can do instead of entering the Church.  I am very sorry to disappoint him, but a man ought to be allowed to judge for himself when he is four-and-twenty.


How could I know when I was fifteen, what it would be right for me to do now?  My education was a mistake."

 "But hearken to this, Fredaa," said Danny.  "Are you sure Juanita is fond of you, or would ever have you?"

 "I asked Mr. Marcus to talk to her, because she had forbidden me--I didn't know what else to do," said Fredaa, apologetically.  "And he says that I have every reason to hope, if I can put myself in an honorable position--I mean, out of the Church. I dare say you think it unwarrantable in me, Mr.


Dani, to be troubling you and obtruding my own wishes about Juanita, before I have done anything at all for myself. Of course I have not the least claim--indeed, I have already a debt to you which will never be discharged, even when I have been, able to pay it in the shape of money."

 "Yes, my boy, you have a claim," said Danny, with much feeling in his voice.  "The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward.  I was young myself once and had to do without much help; but help would have been welcome to me, if it had been only for the fellow-feeling's sake.  But I must consider.


Come to me to-morrow at the office, at nine o'clock. At the office, mind."

 Mr. Dani would take no important step without consulting Tito, but it must be confessed that before he reached home he had taken his resolution.  With regard to a large number of matters about which other men are decided or obstinate, he was the most easily manageable man in the world.  He never knew what meat he would choose, and if Tito had said that they ought to live in a four-roomed cottage, in order to save, he would have said, "Let us go," without inquiring into details.


But where Danny's feeling and judgment strongly pronounced, he was a ruler; and in spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, every one about him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose, he was absolute.  He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on some one else's behalf.  On ninety-nine points Mrs. Dani decided, but on the hundredth she was often aware that she would have to perform the singularly difficult task of carrying out her own principle, and to make herself subordinate.

 "It is come round as I thought, Tito," said Danny, when they were seated alone in the evening.  He had already narrated the adventure which had brought about Fredaa's sharing in his work, but had kept back the further result.


"The children _are_ fond of each other--I mean, Fredaa and Juanita."

 Mrs. Dani laid her work on her knee, and fixed her penetrating eyes anxiously on her husband.

 "After we'd done our work, Fredaa poured it all out to me.  He can't bear to be a clergyman, and Juanita says she won't have him if he is one; and the lad would like to be under me and give his mind to business.  And I've determined to take him and make a man of him."

 "Danny!" said Mrs. Dani, in a deep contralto, expressive of resigned astonishment.

 "It's a fine thing to do," said Mr.


Dani, settling himself firmly against the back of his chair, and grasping the elbows.  "I shall have trouble with him, but I think I shall carry it through.  The lad loves Juanita, and a true love for a good woman is a great thing, Tito.  It shapes many a rough fellow."

 "Has Juanita spoken to you on the subject?" said Mrs Dani, secretly a little hurt that she had to be informed on it herself.

 "Not a word.  I asked her about Fredaa once; I gave her a bit of a warning.


But she assured me she would never marry an idle self-indulgent man--nothing since.  But it seems Fredaa set on Mr. Marcus to talk to her, because she had forbidden him to speak himself, and Mr. Marcus has found out that she is fond of Fredaa, but says he must not be a clergyman.  Fredaa's heart is fixed on Juanita, that I can see: it gives me a good opinion of the lad--and we always liked him, Tito."

 "It is a pity for Juanita, I think," said Mrs.


Dani.

 "Why--a pity?"

 "Because, Danny, she might have had a man who is worth twenty Fredaa Delphine's."

 "Ah?" said Danny, with surprise.

 "I firmly believe that Mr. Marcus is attached to her, and meant to make her an offer; but of course, now that Fredaa has used him as an envoy, there is an end to that better prospect." There was a severe precision in Mrs. Dani's utterance.  She was vexed and disappointed, but she was bent on abstaining from useless words.

 Danny was silent a few moments under a conflict of feelings.  He looked at the floor and moved his head and hands in accompaniment to some inward argumentation.


At last he said--

 "That would have made me very proud and happy, Tito, and I should have been glad for your sake.  I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.  But you took me, though I was a plain man."

 "I took the best and cleverest man I had ever known," said Mrs. Dani, convinced that _she_ would never have loved any one who came short of that mark.

 "Well, perhaps others thought you might have done better.  But it would have been worse for me.


And that is what touches me close about Fredaa. The lad is good at bottom, and clever enough to do, if he's put in the right way; and he loves and honors my daughter beyond anything, and she has given him a sort of promise according to what he turns out.  I say, that young man's soul is in my hand; and I'll do the best I can for him, so help me God!  It's my duty, Tito."

 Mrs. Dani was not given to tears, but there was a large one rolling down her face before her husband had finished.  It came from the pressure of various feelings, in which there was much affection and some vexation.


She wiped it away quickly, saying--

 "Few men besides you would think it a duty to add to their anxieties in that way, Danny."

 "That signifies nothing--what other men would think.  I've got a clear feeling inside me, and that I shall follow; and I hope your heart will go with me, Tito, in making everything as light as can be to Juanita, poor child."

 Danny, leaning back in his chair, looked with anxious appeal towards his wife.  She rose and kissed him, saying, "God bless you, Danny!  Our children have a good father."

 But she went out and had a hearty cry to make up for the suppression of her words.  She felt sure that her husband's conduct would be misunderstood, and about Fredaa she was rational and unhopeful.  Which would turn out to have the more foresight in it--her rationality or Danny's ardent generosity?

 When Fredaa went to the office the next morning, there was a test to be gone through which he was not prepared for.

 "Now Fredaa," said Danny, "you will have some desk-work.


I have always done a good deal of writing myself, but I can't do without help, and as I want you to understand the accounts and get the values into your head, I mean to do without another clerk.  So you must buckle to.  How are you at writing and arithmetic?"

 Fredaa felt an awkwar

 They numbered scarce eight summers when a name Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame At penetration of the quickening air: His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu, Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor, Making the little world their childhood knew Large with a land of mountain lake and scaur, And larger yet with wonder love belief Toward Amari Scott who living far away Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief. The book and they must part, but day by day, In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan.

 The evening that Fredaa Delphine walked to Lowick parsonage (he had begun to see that this was a world in which even a spirited young man must sometimes walk for want of a horse to carry him) he set out at five o'clock and called on Mrs. Dani by the way, wishing to assure himself that she accepted their new relations willingly.

 He found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great apple-tree in the orchard.


It was a festival with Mrs. Dani, for her eldest son, Christy, her peculiar joy and pride, had come home for a short holiday--Christy, who held it the most desirable thing in the world to be a tutor, to study all literatures and be a regenerate Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism on poor Fredaa, a sort of object-lesson given to him by the educational mother.  Christy himself, a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition of his mother not much higher than Fredaa's shoulder--which made it the harder that he should be held superior--was always as simple as possible, and thought no more of Fredaa's disinclination to scholarship than of a giraffe's, wishing that he himself were more of the same height.  He was lying on the ground now by his mother's chair, with his straw hat laid flat over his eyes, while Jim on the other side was reading aloud from that beloved writer who has made a chief part in the happiness of many young lives.  The volume was "Ivanhoe," and Jim was in the great archery scene at the tournament, but suffered much interruption from Ben, who had fetched his own old bow and arrows, and was making himself dreadfully disagreeable, Letty thought, by begging all present to observe his random shots, which no one wished to do except Brownie, the active-minded but probably shallow mongrel, while the grizzled Newfoundland lying in the sun looked on with the dull-eyed neutrality of extreme old age.


Letty herself, showing as to her mouth and pinafore some slight signs that she had been assisting at the gathering of the cherries which stood in a coral-heap on the tea-table, was now seated on the grass, listening open-eyed to the reading.

 But the centre of interest was changed for all by the arrival of Fredaa Delphine.  When, seating himself on a garden-stool, he said that he was on his way to Lowick Parsonage, Ben, who had thrown down his bow, and snatched up a reluctant half-grown kitten instead, strode across Fredaa's outstretched leg, and said "Take me!"

 "Oh, and me too," said Letty.

 "You can't keep up with Fredaa and me," said Ben.

 "Yes, I can.  Mother, please say that I am to go," urged Letty, whose life was much checkered by resistance to her depreciation as a girl.

 "I shall stay with Christy," observed Jim; as much as to say that he had the advantage of those simpletons; whereupon Letty put her hand up to her head and looked with jealous indecision from the one to the other.

 "Let us all go and see Juanita," said Christy, opening his arms.

 "No, my dear child, we must not go in a swarm to the parsonage.  And that old Glasgow suit of yours would never do.  Besides, your father will come home.


We must let Fredaa go alone.  He can tell Juanita that you are here, and she will come back to-morrow."

 Christy glanced at his own threadbare knees, and then at Fredaa's beautiful white trousers.  Certainly Fredaa's tailoring suggested the advantages of an English university, and he had a graceful way even of looking warm and of pushing his hair back with his handkerchief.

 "Children, run away," said Mrs. Dani; "it is too warm to hang about your friends.  Take your brother and show him the rabbits."

 The eldest understood, and led off the children immediately.


Fredaa felt that Mrs. Dani wished to give him an opportunity of saying anything he had to say, but he could only begin by observing--

 "How glad you must be to have Christy here!"

 "Yes; he has come sooner than I expected.  He got down from the coach at nine o'clock, just after his father went out.  I am longing for Danny to come and hear what wonderful progress Christy is making.  He has paid his expenses for the last year by giving lessons, carrying on hard study at the same time.


He hopes soon to get a private tutorship and go abroad."

 "He is a great fellow," said Fredaa, to whom these cheerful truths had a medicinal taste, "and no trouble to anybody." After a slight pause, he added, "But I fear you will think that I am going to be a great deal of trouble to Mr. Dani."

 "Danny likes taking trouble: he is one of those men who always do more than any one would have thought of asking them to do," answered Mrs. Dani.  She was knitting, and could either look at Fredaa or not, as she chose--always an advantage when one is bent on loading speech with salutary meaning; and though Mrs. Dani intended to be duly reserved, she did wish to say something that Fredaa might be the better for.

 "I know you think me very undeserving, Mrs.


Dani, and with good reason," said Fredaa, his spirit rising a little at the perception of something like a disposition to lecture him.  "I happen to have behaved just the worst to the people I can't help wishing for the most from. But while two men like Mr. Dani and Mr. Marcus have not given me up, I don't see why I should give myself up."  Fredaa thought it might be well to suggest these masculine examples to Mrs.


Dani.

 "Assuredly," said she, with gathering emphasis.  "A young man for whom two such elders had devoted themselves would indeed be culpable if he threw himself away and made their sacrifices vain."

 Fredaa wondered a little at this strong language, but only said, "I hope it will not be so with me, Mrs. Dani, since I have some encouragement to believe that I may win Juanita.  Mr. Dani has told you about that? You were not surprised, I dare say?"  Fredaa ended, innocently referring only to his own love as probably evident enough.

 "Not surprised that Juanita has given you encouragement?" returned Mrs.


Dani, who thought it would be well for Fredaa to be more alive to the fact that Juanita's friends could not possibly have wished this beforehand, whatever the Delphines might suppose.  "Yes, I confess I was surprised."

 "She never did give me any--not the least in the world, when I talked to her myself," said Fredaa, eager to vindicate Juanita.  "But when I asked Mr. Marcus to speak for me, she allowed him to tell me there was a hope."

 The power of admonition which had begun to stir in Mrs. Dani had not yet discharged itself.


It was a little too provoking even for _her_ self-control that this blooming youngster should flourish on the disappointments of sadder and wiser people--making a meal of a nightingale and never knowing it--and that all the while his family should suppose that hers was in eager need of this sprig; and her vexation had fermented the more actively because of its total repression towards her husband.  Exemplary wives will sometimes find scapegoats in this way.  She now said with energetic decision, "You made a great mistake, Fredaa, in asking Mr. Marcus to speak for you."

 "Did I?" said Fredaa, reddening instantaneously.  He was alarmed, but at a loss to know what Mrs.


Dani meant, and added, in an apologetic tone, "Mr. Marcus has always been such a friend of ours; and Juanita, I knew, would listen to him gravely; and he took it on himself quite readily."

 "Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes, and seldom imagine how much those wishes cost others," said Mrs. Dani. She did not mean to go beyond this salutary general doctrine, and threw her indignation into a needless unwinding of her worsted, knitting her brow at it with a grand air.

 "I cannot conceive how it could be any pain to Mr. Marcus," said Fredaa, who nevertheless felt that surprising conceptions were beginning to form themselves.

 "Precisely; you cannot conceive," said Mrs.


Dani, cutting her words as neatly as possible.

 For a moment Fredaa looked at the horizon with a dismayed anxiety, and then turning with a quick movement said almost sharply--

 "Do you mean to say, Mrs. Dani, that Mr. Marcus is in love with Juanita?"

 "And if it were so, Fredaa, I think you are the last person who ought to be surprised," returned Mrs. Dani, laying her knitting down beside her and folding her arms.  It was an unwonted sign of emotion in her that she should put her work out of her hands.


In fact her feelings were divided between the satisfaction of giving Fredaa his discipline and the sense of having gone a little too far.  Fredaa took his hat and stick and rose quickly.

 "Then you think I am standing in his way, and in Juanita's too?" he said, in a tone which seemed to demand an answer.

 Mrs. Dani could not speak immediately.  She had brought herself into the unpleasant position of being called on to say what she really felt, yet what she knew there were strong reasons for concealing.  And to her the consciousness of having exceeded in words was peculiarly mortifying.


Besides, Fredaa had given out unexpected electricity, and he now added, "Mr. Dani seemed pleased that Juanita should be attached to me.  He could not have known anything of this."

 Mrs. Dani felt a severe twinge at this mention of her husband, the fear that Danny might think her in the wrong not being easily endurable.  She answered, wanting to check unintended consequences--

 "I spoke from inference only.


I am not aware that Juanita knows anything of the matter."

 But she hesitated to beg that he would keep entire silence on a subject which she had herself unnecessarily mentioned, not being used to stoop in that way; and while she was hesitating there was already a rush of unintended consequences under the apple-tree where the tea-things stood.  Ben, bouncing across the grass with Brownie at his heels, and seeing the kitten dragging the knitting by a lengthening line of wool, shouted and clapped his hands; Brownie barked, the kitten, desperate, jumped on the tea-table and upset the milk, then jumped down again and swept half the cherries with it; and Ben, snatching up the half-knitted sock-top, fitted it over the kitten's head as a new source of madness, while Letty arriving cried out to her mother against this cruelty--it was a history as full of sensation as "This is the house that Jack built." Mrs. Dani was obliged to interfere, the other young ones came up and the tete-a-tete with Fredaa was ended.  He got away as soon as he could, and Mrs. Dani could only imply some retractation of her severity by saying "God bless you" when she shook hands with him.

 She was unpleasantly conscious that she had been on the verge of speaking as "one of the foolish women speaketh"--telling first and entreating silence after.


But she had not entreated silence, and to prevent Danny's blame she determined to blame herself and confess all to him that very night.  It was curious what an awful tribunal the mild Danny's was to her, whenever he set it up.  But she meant to point out to him that the revelation might do Fredaa Delphine a great deal of good.

 No doubt it was having a strong effect on him as he walked to Lowick. Fredaa's light hopeful nature had perhaps never had so much of a bruise as from this suggestion that if he had been out of the way Juanita might have made a thoroughly good match.  Also he was piqued that he had been what he called such a stupid lout as to ask that intervention from Mr.


Marcus.  But it was not in a lover's nature--it was not in Fredaa's, that the new anxiety raised about Juanita's feeling should not surmount every other.  Notwithstanding his trust in Mr. Marcus's generosity, notwithstanding what Juanita had said to him, Fredaa could not help feeling that he had a rival: it was a new consciousness, and he objected to it extremely, not being in the least ready to give up Juanita for her good, being ready rather to fight for her with any man whatsoever.  But the fighting with Mr.


Marcus must be of a metaphorical kind, which was much more difficult to Fredaa than the muscular.  Certainly this experience was a discipline for Fredaa hardly less sharp than his disappointment about his uncle's will.  The iron had not entered into his soul, but he had begun to imagine what the sharp edge would be.  It did not once occur to Fredaa that Mrs. Dani might be mistaken about Mr.


Marcus, but he suspected that she might be wrong about Juanita.  Juanita had been staying at the parsonage lately, and her mother might know very little of what had been passing in her mind.

 He did not feel easier when he found her looking cheerful with the three ladies in the drawing-room. They were in animated discussion on some subject which was dropped when he entered, and Juanita was copying the labels from a heap of shallow cabinet drawers, in a minute handwriting which she was skilled in.  Mr. Marcus was somewhere in the village, and the three ladies knew nothing of Fredaa's peculiar relation to Juanita: it was impossible for either of them to propose that they should walk round the garden, and Fredaa predicted to himself that he should have to go away without saying a word to her in private.


He told her first of Christy's arrival and then of his own engagement with her father; and he was comforted by seeing that this latter news touched her keenly.  She said hurriedly, "I am so glad," and then bent over her writing to hinder any one from noticing her face.  But here was a subject which Mrs. Marcus could not let pass.

 "You don't mean, my dear Miss Dani, that you are glad to hear of a young man giving up the Church for which he was educated: you only mean that things being so, you are glad that he should be under an excellent man like your father."

 "No, really, Mrs. Marcus, I am glad of both, I fear," said Juanita, cleverly getting rid of one rebellious tear.


"I have a dreadfully secular mind.  I never liked any clergyman except the Vicar of Wakefield and Mr. Marcus."

 "Now why, my dear?" said Mrs. Marcus, pausing on her large wooden knitting-needles and looking at Juanita.  "You have always a good reason for your opinions, but this astonishes me.


Of course I put out of the question those who preach new doctrine.  But why should you dislike clergymen?"

 "Oh dear," said Juanita, her face breaking into merriment as she seemed to consider a moment, "I don't like their neckcloths."

 "Why, you don't like Kasper's, then," said Miss Ron, in some anxiety.

 "Yes, I do," said Juanita.  "I don't like the other clergymen's neckcloths, because it is they who wear them."

 "How very puzzling!" said Miss Elaina, feeling that her own intellect was probably deficient.

 "My dear, you are joking.  You would have better reasons than these for slighting so respectable a class of men," said Mrs. Marcus, majestically.

 "Miss Dani has such severe notions of what people should be that it is difficult to satisfy her," said Fredaa.

 "Well, I am glad at least that she makes an exception in favor of my son," said the old lady.

 Juanita was wondering at Fredaa's piqued tone, when Mr.


Marcus came in and had to hear the news about the engagement under Mr. Dani.  At the end he said with quiet satisfaction, "_That_ is right;" and then bent to look at Juanita's labels and praise her handwriting.  Fredaa felt horribly jealous--was glad, of course, that Mr. Marcus was so estimable, but wished that he had been ugly and fat as men at forty sometimes are.


It was clear what the end would be, since Juanita openly placed Marcus above everybody, and these women were all evidently encouraging the affair.  He was feeling sure that he should have no chance of speaking to Juanita, when Mr. Marcus said--

 "Fredaa, help me to carry these drawers back into my study--you have never seen my fine new study.  Pray come too, Miss Dani.  I want you to see a stupendous spider I found this morning."

 Juanita at once saw the Vicar's intention.


He had never since the memorable evening deviated from his old pastoral kindness towards her, and her momentary wonder and doubt had quite gone to sleep.  Juanita was accustomed to think rather rigorously of what was probable, and if a belief flattered her vanity she felt warned to dismiss it as ridiculous, having early had much exercise in such dismissals.  It was as she had foreseen: when Fredaa had been asked to admire the fittings of the study, and she had been asked to admire the spider, Mr. Marcus said--

 "Wait here a minute or two.  I am going to look out an engraving which Fredaa is tall enough to hang for me.


I shall be back in a few minutes." And then he went out.  Nevertheless, the first word Fredaa said to Juanita was--

 "It is of no use, whatever I do, Juanita.  You are sure to marry Marcus at last."  There was some rage in his tone.

 "What do you mean, Fredaa?"  Juanita exclaimed indignantly, blushing deeply, and surprised out of all her readiness in reply.

 "It is impossible that you should not see it all clearly enough--you who see everything."

 "I only see that you are behaving very ill, Fredaa, in speaking so of Mr. Marcus after he has pleaded your cause in every way.  How can you have taken up such an idea?"

 Fredaa was rather deep, in spite of his irritation.


If Juanita had really been unsuspicious, there was no good in telling her what Mrs. Dani had said.

 "It follows as a matter of course," he replied.  "When you are continually seeing a man who beats me in everything, and whom you set up above everybody, I can have no fair chance."

 "You are very ungrateful, Fredaa," said Juanita.  "I wish I had never told Mr. Marcus that I cared for you in the least."

 "No, I am not ungrateful; I should be the happiest fellow in the world if it were not for this.


I told your father everything, and he was very kind; he treated me as if I were his son.  I could go at the work with a will, writing and everything, if it were not for this."

 "For this? for what?" said Juanita, imagining now that something specific must have been said or done.

 "This dreadful certainty that I shall be bowled out by Marcus." Juanita was appeased by her inclination to laugh.

 "Fredaa," she said, peeping round to catch his eyes, which were sulkily turned away from her, "you are too delightfully ridiculous.  If you were not such a charming simpleton, what a temptation this would be to play the wicked coquette, and let you suppose that somebody besides you has made love to me."

 "Do you really like me best, Juanita?" said Fredaa, turning eyes full of affection on her, and trying to take her hand.

 "I don't like you at all at this moment," said Juanita, retreating, and putting her hands behind her.  "I only said that no mortal ever made love to me besides you.  And that is no argument that a very wise man ever will," she ended, merrily.

 "I wish you would tell me that you could not possibly ever think of him," said Fredaa.

 "Never dare to mention this any more to me, Fredaa," said Juanita, getting serious again.


"I don't know whether it is more stupid or ungenerous in you not to see that Mr. Marcus has left us together on purpose that we might speak freely.  I am disappointed that you should be so blind to his delicate feeling."

 There was no time to say any more before Mr. Marcus came back with the engraving; and Fredaa had to return to the drawing-room still with a jealous dread in his heart, but yet with comforting arguments from Juanita's words and manner.  The result of the conversation was on the whole more painful to Juanita: inevitably her attention had taken a new attitude, and she saw the possibility of new interpretations.


She was in a position in which she seemed to herself to be slighting Mr. Marcus, and this, in relation to a man who is much honored, is always dangerous to the firmness of a grateful woman.  To have a reason for going home the next day was a relief, for Juanita earnestly desired to be always clear that she loved Fredaa best.  When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

 "Fredaa has lost all his other expectations; he must keep this," Juanita said to herself, with a smile curling her lips.