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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14575 ***
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 14575-h.htm or 14575-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/5/7/14575/14575-h/14575-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/5/7/14575/14575-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+BYLOW HILL
+
+by
+
+GEORGE W. CABLE
+
+With Illustrations by F. C. Yohn
+
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+New York
+
+MCMII
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "Father," laughed the daughter, "isn't this rather
+youngish?"]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+      I. RUTH AND GODFREY
+     II. ISABEL
+    III. ARTHUR AND LEONARD
+     IV. AND BRING DOWN THE REMAINDER
+      V. SKY AND POOL
+     VI. IN THE PUBLIC EYE
+    VII. THE HOUR STRIKES
+   VIII. GIVE YOU FIVE MINUTES
+     IX. THE YOUNG YEAR SMILES
+      X. THE STORM REGATHERS
+     XI. HAS IT COME TO THIS?
+    XII. THE LANTERN QUENCHED
+   XIII. BABY
+    XIV. THE TALKATIVE LEONARD
+     XV. THE THIN ICE BREAKS
+    XVI. MUST GIVE YOU UP
+   XVII. SLEEP, OF A SORT
+  XVIII. MISSING
+    XIX. A DOUBLE STILL HUNT
+     XX. A DOUBLE RETURN
+    XXI. EVENING RED
+   XXII. MORNING GRAY
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+"Father," laughed the daughter, "isn't this rather youngish?"
+(Frontispiece)
+
+Indeed it was clear that to go away would be unfair.
+
+"Arthur Winslow, I give you five minutes."
+
+"But to know every day and hour that I'm watched."
+
+"I am waiting busily for her slayer."
+
+"Arthur! Arthur! can't you speak?"
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+RUTH AND GODFREY
+
+
+The old street, keeping its New England Sabbath afternoon so decently
+under its majestic elms, was as goodly an example of its sort as the
+late seventies of the century just gone could show. It lay along a
+north-and-south ridge, between a number of aged and unsmiling cottages,
+fronting on cinder sidewalks, and alternating irregularly with about as
+many larger homesteads that sat back in their well-shaded gardens with
+kindlier dignity and not so grim a self-assertion. Behind, on the west,
+these gardens dropped swiftly out of sight to a hidden brook, from the
+farther shore of which rose the great wooded hill whose shelter from the
+bitter northwest had invited the old Puritan founders to choose the spot
+for their farming village of one street, with a Byington and a Winslow
+for their first town officers. In front, eastward, the land declined
+gently for a half mile or so, covered, by modern prosperity, with a
+small, stanch town, and bordered by a pretty river winding among meadows
+of hay and grain. At the northern end, instead of this gentle decline,
+was a precipitous cliff side, close to whose brow a wooden bench, that
+ran half-way round a vast sidewalk tree, commanded a view of the valley
+embracing nearly three-quarters of the compass.
+
+In civilian's dress, and with only his sea-bronzed face and the polished
+air of a pivot gun to tell that he was of the navy, Lieutenant Godfrey
+Winslow was slowly crossing the rural way with Ruth Byington at his
+side. He had the look of, say, twenty-eight, and she was some four years
+his junior. From her father's front gate they were passing toward the
+large grove garden of the young man's own home, on the side next the
+hill and the sunset. On the front porch, where the two had just left
+him, sat the war-crippled father of the girl, taking pride in the
+placidity of the face she once or twice turned to him in profile,
+and in the buoyancy of her movements and pose.
+
+His fond, unspoken thought went after her, that she was hiding some care
+again,--her old, sweet trick, and her mother's before her.
+
+He looked on to Godfrey. "There's endurance," he thought again. "You
+ought to have taken him long ago, my good girl, if you want him at all."
+And here his reflections faded into the unworded belief that she would
+have done so but for his, her own father's, being in the way.
+
+The pair stopped and turned half about to enjoy the green-arched vista
+of the street, and Godfrey said, in a tone that left his companion no
+room to overlook its personal intent, "How often, in my long absences,
+I see this spot!"
+
+"You wouldn't dare confess you didn't," was her blithe reply.
+
+"Oh yes, I should. I've tried not to see it, many a time."
+
+"Why, Godfrey Winslow!" she laughed. "That was very wrong!"
+
+"It was very useless," said the wanderer, "for there was always the same
+one girl in the midst of the picture; and that's the sort a man can
+never shut out, you know. I don't try to shut it out any more, Ruth."
+
+The girl spoke more softly. "I wish I could know where Leonard is," she
+mused aloud.
+
+"Did you hear me, Ruth? I say I don't try any more, now."
+
+"Well, that's right! I wonder where that brother of mine is?"
+
+The baffled lover had to call up his patience. "Well, that's right,
+too," he laughed; "and I wonder where that brother of mine is? I wonder
+if they're together?"
+
+They moved on, but at the stately entrance of the Winslow garden they
+paused again. The girl gave her companion a look of distress, and the
+young man's brow darkened. "Say it," he said. "I see what it is."
+
+"You speak of Arthur"--she began.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"What did you make out of his sermon this morning?"
+
+"Why, Ruth, I--What did you make out of it?"
+
+"I made out that the poor boy is very, very unhappy."
+
+"Did you? Well, he is; and in a certain way I'm to blame for it."
+
+The girl's smile was tender. "Was there ever anything the matter with
+Arthur, and you didn't think you were in some way to blame for it?"
+
+"Oh, now, don't confuse me with Leonard. Anyhow, I'm to blame this time!
+Has Isabel told you anything, Ruth?"
+
+"Yes, Isabel has told me!"
+
+"Told you they are engaged?"
+
+"Told me they are engaged!"
+
+"Well," said the young man, "Arthur told me last night; and I took an
+elder brother's liberty to tell him he had played Leonard a vile trick."
+
+"Godfrey!"
+
+"That would make a much happier nature than Arthur's unhappy, wouldn't
+it?"
+
+Ruth was too much pained to reply, but she turned and called cheerily,
+"Father, do you know where Leonard is?"
+
+The father gathered his voice and answered huskily, laying one hand upon
+his chest, and with the other gesturing up by the Winslow elm to the
+grove behind it.
+
+She nodded. "Yes!... With Arthur, you say?... Yes!... Thank you!...
+Yes!" She passed with Godfrey through the wide gate.
+
+"That's like Leonard," said the lover. "He'll tell Arthur he hasn't done
+a thing he hadn't a perfect right to do."
+
+"And Arthur has not, Godfrey. He has only been less chivalrous than we
+should have liked him to be. If he had been first in the field, and
+Leonard had come in and carried her off, you would have counted it a
+perfect mercy all round."
+
+"Ho-oh! it would have been! Leonard would have made her happy. Arthur
+never can, and she can never make him so. But what he has done is not
+all: look how he did it! Leonard was his beloved and best friend"--
+
+"Except his brother Godfrey"--
+
+"Except no one, Ruth, unless it's you. I'm neither persuasive nor kind,
+nor often with him. Proud of him I was, and never prouder than when I
+knew him to be furiously in love with her, while yet, for pure, sweet
+friendship's sake, he kept standing off, standing off."
+
+"I wish you might have seen it, Godfrey. It was so beautiful--and so
+pitiful!"
+
+"It was manly,--gentlemanly; and that was enough. Then all at once he's
+taken aback! All control of himself gone, all self-suppression, all
+conscience"--
+
+"The conscience has returned," said the girl.
+
+"Oh, not to guide him! Only to goad him! Fifty consciences can't
+honorably undo the mischief now!"
+
+"Did I not write you that there was already, then, a coolness between
+her and Leonard?"
+
+"Yes; but the whole bigness and littleness of Arthur's small, bad deed
+lies in the fact that, though he knew that coolness was but a momentary
+tiff, with Isabel in the wrong, he took advantage of it to push his suit
+in between and spoil as sweet a match as two hearts were ever making."
+
+"It was more than a tiff, Godfrey; it"--
+
+"Not a bit more! not--a--bit!"
+
+"Yes!--yes--it was a problem! a problem how to harmonize two fine
+natures keyed utterly unlike. Leonard saw that. That is why he moved so
+slowly."
+
+"Hmm!" The lover stared away grimly. "I know something about slowness.
+I suppose it's a virtue--sometimes."
+
+"I think so," said the girl, caressing a flower.
+
+"Ah, well!" responded the other. "She has chosen a nature now that--Oh
+me!... Ruth, I shall speak to her mother! I am the only one who can.
+I'll see Mrs. Morris some time this evening, and lay the whole thing out
+to her as we four see it who have known one another almost from the one
+cradle."
+
+Ruth smiled sadly. "You will fail. I think the matter will have to go on
+as it is going. And if it does, you must remember, Godfrey, we do not
+really know but they may work out the happiest union. At any rate, we
+must help them to try."
+
+"If they insist on trying, yes; and that will be the best for Leonard."
+
+"The very best. One thing we do know, Godfrey: Arthur will always be a
+passionate lover, and dear Isabel is as honest and loyal as the day is
+long."
+
+"The day is not long; this one is not--to me. It's most lamentably
+short, and to-morrow I must be gone again. I have something to say to
+you, Ruth, that"--
+
+The maiden gave him a look of sweet protest, which suddenly grew remote
+as she murmured, "Isabel and her mother are coming out of their front
+door."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ISABEL
+
+
+There were two dwellings in the Winslow garden,--one as far across at
+the right of the Byington house as the other was at the left. The one on
+the right may have contained six or eight bedchambers; the other had but
+three. The larger stood withdrawn from the public way, a well-preserved
+and very attractive example of colonial architecture, refined to the
+point of delicacy in the grace and harmony of its details. Here dwelt
+Arthur Winslow, barely six weeks a clergyman, alone but for two or three
+domestics and the rare visits of Godfrey, his only living relation. The
+other and older house, in the garden's southern front corner, was a gray
+gambrel-roofed cottage, with its threshold at the edge of the sidewalk;
+and it was from this cottage that Isabel and her mother stepped,
+gratefully answering the affectionate wave of Ruth's hand,--Mrs. Morris
+with the dignity of her forty-odd years, and Isabel with a sudden eager
+fondness. The next moment the two couples were hidden from each other by
+the umbrageous garden and by the tall white fence, in which was repeated
+the architectural grace of the larger house.
+
+Mother and daughter conversed quietly, but very busily, as they came
+along this enclosure; but presently they dropped their subject to bow
+cordially across to the father of Ruth, and when he endeavored to say
+something to them Mrs. Morris moved toward him. Isabel took a step or
+two more in the direction of the Winslow elm and its inviting bench, but
+then she also turned. She was of a moderate feminine stature and perfect
+outline, her step elastic, her mien self-contained, and her face so
+young that a certain mature tone in her mellow voice was often the cause
+of Ruth's fond laughter. As winsome, too, she was, as she was beautiful,
+and "as pink as a rose," said the old-time soldier to himself, as he
+came down his short front walk, throwing half his glances forward to
+her, quite unaware that he was equally the object of her admiration.
+
+Though white-haired and somewhat bent he was still slender and handsome,
+a most worthy figure against the background of the red brick house,
+whose weathered walls contrasted happily with the blossoming shrubs
+about their base, and with the green of lawn and trees.
+
+"Good-afternoon, Isabel. I was saying to your mother, I hope such days
+as this are some offset for the Southern weather and scenery you have
+had to give up."
+
+"You shouldn't tempt our Southern boastfulness, General," Isabel
+replied, with an air of meek chiding. She had a pretty way of
+skirmishing with men which always brought an apologetic laugh from her
+mother, but which the General had discovered she never used in a company
+of less than three.
+
+"Oh! ho, ho!" laughed Mrs. Morris, who was just short, plump, and pretty
+enough to laugh to advantage. "Why, General,"--she sobered abruptly, and
+she was just pretty and plump and short enough to do this well,
+also,--"my recovered health is offset enough for me."
+
+"For _us_, my dear," said the daughter. "My mother's restored
+health is offset enough for us, General. Indeed, for me"--addressing the
+distant view--"there is no call for off-set; any landscape or climate is
+perfect that has such friends in it as--as this one has."
+
+"Oh! ho, ho!" laughed the mother again. Nobody ever told the Morrises
+they had a delicious Southern accent, and their words are given here
+exactly as they thought they spoke them.
+
+"My dear," persisted Isabel, rebukingly, "I mean such friends as Ruth
+Byington."
+
+Mrs. Morris let go her little Southern laugh once more. "Don't you
+believe her, General--don't you believe her. She means you every bit as
+much as she means Ruth. She means everybody on Bylow Hill."
+
+"I'm at the mercy of my interpreter," said Isabel. "But I thought"--her
+eyes went out upon the skyline again--"I thought that men--that men--I
+thought that men--My dear, you've made me forget what I thought!"
+
+They laughed, all three. Isabel, with a playful sigh, clutched her
+mother's hand, and the pair drew off and moved away to the bench.
+
+"He puts you in good spirits," said the mother, breaking a silence.
+
+"Good spirits! He puts me in pure heartache. Oh, why did you tell him?"
+
+"Tell him? My child! I have not told him!"
+
+"Oh, mother, do you not see you've told him point-blank that it's all
+settled?"
+
+"No, dearie, no! I only see that your distress is making you fanciful.
+But why should he not be told, Isabel?"
+
+"I'm not ready! Oh, I'm not ready! It may suit him well enough to hear
+it, for he knows Leonard is too fine and great for me; but I'm not ready
+to tell him."
+
+"My darling, he knows you are good enough for any Leonard he can bring."
+
+"Oh yes, on the plane of the Ten Commandments." The girl smiled
+unhappily.
+
+"But precious, he loves Arthur deeply, and thinks the world of him."
+
+"Mother, what is it like, to love deeply?"
+
+The query was ignored. "And the old gentleman is fond of you,
+sweetheart."
+
+"Oh, he likes me. What a tame old invalid that word 'fond' has grown to
+be! You can be fond of two or three persons at once, nowadays. My soul!
+I wish I were fond of Arthur Winslow in the old mad way the word meant
+when it was young!"
+
+"Pshaw, dearie! you'll be fond enough of him, once you're his. He's
+brilliant, upright, loving and lovable. You see, and say, he is so, and
+I know your fondness will grow with every day and every experience,
+happy or bitter."
+
+"Yes.... Yes, I could not endure not to give my love bountifully
+wherever it rightly belongs. But oh, I wish I had it ready to-day,--a
+fondness to match his!"
+
+"Now, Isabel! Why, pet, thousands of happy and loving wives will tell
+you"--
+
+"Oh, I know what they will tell me."
+
+"They'll not tell you they get along without love, dearie. But ten years
+from now, my daughter, not how fond you were when you first joined
+hands, but what you have"--
+
+"Oh yes,--been to each other, done for each other, borne from each
+other, will be the true measure. Oh, of course it will; but there's so
+much in the right start!"
+
+"Beyond doubt! Understand me, precious: if you have the least ground to
+fear"--
+
+"Mother! mother! No! no! What! afraid I may love some one else? Never!
+never! Oh, without boasting, and knowing what I am as well as Leonard
+Byington knows"--
+
+"Oh, pshaw! Leonard Byington!"
+
+"He knows me, mother,--as if he lived at a higher window that looked
+down into my back yard." The speaker smiled.
+
+"Then he knows," exclaimed the mother, "you're true gold!"
+
+"Yes, but a light coin."
+
+"My pet! He knows you're the tenderest, gentlest dear he ever saw."
+
+"But neither brave nor strong."
+
+"Oh, you not brave! you not strong! You're the lovingest, truest"--
+
+"Only inclined to be a bit too hungry after sympathy, dear."
+
+"You never bid for it, love, never."
+
+"Well, no matter; I shall never love any one but myself too much. I
+think I shall some day love Arthur as I wish I could love him now. I
+never did really love Leonard,--I couldn't; I haven't the stature. That
+was my trouble, dearie: I hadn't the stature. I never shall have; and if
+it's he you are thinking of, you are wasting your dear, sweet care. But
+he's going to be our best and nearest friend, mother,--he and Ruth and
+Godfrey, together and alike. We've so agreed, Arthur and I. Oh, I'm not
+going to come in here and turn the sweet old nickname of this happy spot
+into a sneer."
+
+"Then why are you not happy, precious?"
+
+"Happy? Why, my dear, I am happy!"
+
+"With touches of heartache?"
+
+"Oh, with big wrenches of heartache! Why not? Were you never so?"
+
+"I'm so right now, dearie. For after all is said"--
+
+"And thought that can't be said"--murmured Isabel.
+
+"Yes," replied the mother, "after all is said and thought, I should
+rather give you to Arthur than to any other man I know. Leonard will
+have a shining career, but it will be in politics."
+
+"I tried to dissuade him," broke in the daughter, "till I was ashamed."
+
+"In politics," continued Mrs. Morris,--"and Northern politics, Isabel.
+Arthur's will be in the church!"
+
+"Yes," said the other, but her whole attention was within the fence at
+their side, where a rough stile, made in boyhood days by the two
+brothers and Leonard, led over into the garden. She sprang up. "Let's
+go, mother; he's coming!"
+
+"Who, my child?"
+
+"Both! Come, dear, come quickly! Oh, I don't know why we ever came out
+at all!"
+
+"My dear, it was you proposed it, lest some one should come in!"
+
+The daughter had moved some steps down the road, but now turned again;
+for Ruth and Godfrey, returning, came out through the garden's high
+gateway. However, they were giving all their smiles to the greetings
+which the General sent them from his piazza.
+
+"Come over, mother!" called Isabel, in a stifled voice. "Cross to the
+hill path!" But before they could reach it Arthur and Leonard came into
+full view on the stile. Isabel motioned her mother despairingly toward
+them, wheeled once more, and with a gay call for Ruth's notice hurried
+to meet her in the middle of the way.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+ARTHUR AND LEONARD
+
+
+Godfrey passed over to the General, who had walked down to his gate on
+his way to the great elm. Out from behind the elm came the other two
+men, Arthur leading and talking briskly:--
+
+"The sooner the better, Leonard. Now while my work is new and taking
+shape--Ah! here's Mrs. Morris."
+
+Both men were handsome. Arthur, not much older than Ruth, was of medium
+height, slender, restless, dark, and eager of glance and speech. Leonard
+was nearer the age of Godfrey; fairer than Arthur, of a quieter eye,
+tall, broad-shouldered, powerful, lithe, and almost tamely placid. Mrs.
+Morris met them with animation.
+
+"Have our churchwarden and our rector been having another of their long
+talks?"
+
+The joint reply was cut short by Godfrey's imperative hail: "Leonard!"
+
+As Byington turned that way, Arthur said quietly to Mrs. Morris, "He's
+promised to retain charge"--and nodded toward Isabel. The nod meant
+Isabel's financial investments.
+
+"And mine?" murmured the well-pleased lady.
+
+"Both."
+
+The two gave heed again to Godfrey, who was loudly asking Leonard, "Why
+didn't you tell us the news?"
+
+"Oh," drawled Leonard smilingly, "I knew father would."
+
+"I haven't talked with Godfrey since he came," said Mrs. Morris; and as
+she left Arthur she asked his brother: "What news? Has the governor
+truly made him"--
+
+"District attorney, yes," said Godfrey. "Ruth, I think you might have
+told me."
+
+"Godfrey, I think you might have asked me," laughed the girl, drawing
+Isabel toward Arthur and Leonard, in order to leave Mrs. Morris to
+Godfrey.
+
+Arthur moved to meet them, but Ruth engaged him with a question, and
+Isabel turned to Leonard, offering her felicitations with a sweetness
+that gave Arthur tearing pangs to overhear.
+
+"But when people speak to us of your high office," he could hear her
+saying, "we will speak to them of your high fitness for it. And still,
+Leonard, you must let us offer you our congratulations, for it is a high
+office."
+
+"Thank you," replied Leonard: "let me save the congratulations for the
+day I lay the office down. Do you, then, really think it high and
+honorable?"
+
+"Ah," she rejoined, in a tone of reproach and defense that tortured
+Arthur, "you know I honor the pursuit of the law."
+
+Leonard showed a glimmer of drollery. "Pursuit of the law, yes," he
+said; "but the pursuit of the lawbreaker"--
+
+"Even that," replied Isabel, "has its frowning honors."
+
+"But I'm much afraid it seems to you," he said, "a sort of blindman's
+buff played with a club. It often looks so to the pursued, they say."
+
+Isabel gave her chin a little lift, and raised her tone for those behind
+her: "We shall try not to be among the pursued, Ruth and Arthur and I."
+
+The young lawyer's smile broadened. "My mind is relieved," he said.
+
+"Relieved!" exclaimed Isabel, with a rosy toss. "Ruth, dear, here is
+your brother in distress lest Arthur or we should embarrass him in his
+new office by breaking the laws! Mr. Byington, you should not confess
+such anxieties, even if you are justified in them!"
+
+His response came with meditative slowness and with playful eyes:
+"Whenever I am justified in having such anxieties, they shall go
+unconfessed."
+
+"That relieves _my_ fears," laughed Isabel, and caught a quick hint
+of trouble on Arthur's brow, though he too managed to laugh. Whereupon,
+half sighing, half singing, she twined an arm in one of Ruth's, swung
+round her, waved to the General as he took a seat on the elm-tree bench,
+and so, passing to Arthur, changed partners.
+
+"Let us go in," whispered Leonard to his sister, with a sudden pained
+look, and instantly resumed his genial air.
+
+But the uneasy Arthur saw his moving lips and both changes of
+countenance. He saw also the look which Ruth threw toward Mrs. Morris,
+where that lady and Godfrey moved slowly in conversation,--he ever so
+sedate, she ever so sprightly. And he saw Isabel glance as anxiously in
+the same direction. But then her eyes came to his, and under her voice,
+though with a brow all sunshine, she said, "Don't look so perplexed."
+
+"Perplexed!" he gasped. "Isabel, you're giving me anguish!"
+
+She gleamed an injured amazement, but promptly threw it off, and when
+she turned to see if Leonard or Ruth had observed it they were moving to
+meet Godfrey. Mrs. Morris was joining the General under the elm.
+
+"How have I given you pain, dear heart?" asked Isabel, as she and Arthur
+took two or three slow steps apart from the rest, so turning her face
+that they should see its tender kindness.
+
+"Ah! don't ask me, my beloved!" he warily exclaimed. "It is all gone!
+Oh, the heavenly wonder to hear you, Isabel Morris, you--give me loving
+names! You might have answered me so differently; but your voice, your
+eyes, work miracles of healing, and I am whole again."
+
+Isabel gave again the laugh whose blithe, final sigh was always its most
+winning note. Then, with tremendous gravity, she said, "You are very
+indiscreet, dear, to let me know my power."
+
+His face clouded an instant, as if the thought startled him with its
+truth and value. But when she added, with yet deeper seriousness of
+brow, "That's no way to tame a shrew, my love," he laughed aloud, and
+peace came again with Isabel's smile.
+
+Then--because a woman must always insist on seeing the wrong side of the
+goods--she murmured, "Tell me, Arthur, what disturbed you."
+
+"Words, Isabel, mere words of yours, which I see now were meant in
+purest play. You told Leonard"--
+
+"Leonard! What did I tell Leonard, dear?"
+
+"You told him not to confess certain anxieties, even if they were
+justified."
+
+"Oh, Arthur!"
+
+"I see my folly, dearest. But Isabel, he ought not to have answered that
+the more they were justified, the more they should go unconfessed!"
+
+"Oh, Arthur! the merest, idlest prattle! What meaning could you"--
+
+"None, Isabel, none! Only, my good angel, I so ill deserve you that with
+every breath I draw I have a desperate fright of losing you, and a
+hideous resentment against whoever could so much as think to rob me of
+you."
+
+"Why, dear heart, don't you know that couldn't be done?"
+
+"Oh, I know it, you being what you are, even though I am only what I am.
+But, Isabel, you know he loves you. No human soul is strong enough to
+blow out the flame of the love you kindle, Isabel Morris, as one would
+blow out his bedroom candle and go to sleep at the stroke of a clock."
+
+"Arthur, I believe Leonard--and I do not say it in his praise--I believe
+Leonard can do that!"
+
+"No, not so, not so! Leonard is strong, but the fire of a strong man's
+love, however smothered, burns on without mercy, my beautiful, and you
+cannot go in and out of that burning house as though it were not on
+fire."
+
+"And shall Leonard, then, not be our nearest and best friend, as we had
+planned?"
+
+"He shall, Isabel. Ah yes; not one smallest part of your sweet
+friendship will I take from him, nor of his from you. For, Isabel,
+though he were as weak as I"--
+
+"As weak as _I_, you should say, dear. You are not weak, Arthur,
+are you?"
+
+"Weak as the bending grass, Isabel, under this load of love. But though
+he, I say, were as weak as I, you--ah, you!--are as wise as you are
+bewitching; and if I should speak to you from my most craven fear, I
+could find but one word of warning."
+
+"Oh, you dear, blind flatterer! And what word would that be?"
+
+"That you are most bewitching when you are wisest."
+
+As Isabel softly laughed she cast a dreaming glance behind, and noticed
+that she and Arthur were quite hidden in the flowery undergrowth of the
+hill path. They kissed.
+
+"Beloved," said her worshipper, with a clouded smile, as he let her down
+from her tiptoes, "do you know you took that as though you were thinking
+of something else?"
+
+"Did I? Oh, I didn't mean to."
+
+Such a reply only darkened the cloud. "Of whom were you thinking,
+Isabel?"
+
+She blushed. "I was think--thinking--why, I was--I--I was
+think--thinking"--she went redder and redder as he went pale--"thinking
+of everybody on Bylow Hill. Why--why, dear heart, don't you see? When
+you"--
+
+"Oh, enough, enough, my angel! I take the question back!"
+
+"You _made_ me think of everybody, Arthur, you were so sudden. Just
+suppose I had done so to you!" They both thought that worthy of a good
+laugh. "Next time, dear," added Isabel,--"no, no, no, but--next time,
+you mustn't be so sudden. There's no need, you know,"--she blushed
+again,--"and I promise you I'll give my whole mind to it! Get me some of
+that hawthorn bloom yonder, and let's go back."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+AND BRING DOWN THE REMAINDER
+
+
+This "hill path" was a narrowed continuance of the street, that led
+gradually down along the hill's steep face to reach the town and the
+river meadows. Godfrey, halting before Ruth and her brother, watched the
+blooming hawthorn, over there, bend and shake and straighten and bend
+again, above Arthur's unseen hands. Then, glancing furtively back toward
+Mrs. Morris, he muttered to Ruth, while Leonard gravely looked out
+across the landscape, "I live and learn."
+
+"So we learn to live," was Ruth's playful reply. To her it was painfully
+clear that Mrs. Morris, very sweetly no doubt, had eluded Godfrey's
+endeavors to inform her of anything not to his brother's unqualified
+praise. In the Bylow Hill group, Ruth had a way of smiling abstractedly,
+which was very dear to Godfrey even when it meant he had best say no
+more; and this smile had just said this to him when Isabel and Arthur
+came into view again. As the two and the three drifted toward each
+other, Ruth let Leonard outstep her, and joined Godfrey with a light in
+her face that quickened his pulse.
+
+After a word or two of slight import she said, as they slowly walked,
+"Godfrey."
+
+"Yes," eagerly responded the lover.
+
+"Down in the garden, awhile ago--did I--promise something?"
+
+"You most certainly did!" She had promised that if he would let a
+certain subject drop she would bring it up again, herself, before he
+must take his leave.
+
+"And must you go very soon, now?" she asked.
+
+"I've only a few minutes left," said the lover, with a lover's license.
+
+"Well, I'm ready to speak. Of course, Godfrey, I know my heart."
+
+The young man smiled ruefully. "I've known mine till I'm dead tired of
+the acquaintance."
+
+Other words passed, her eyes on the ground as they loitered, and after a
+pause she murmured:--"But I've known my heart as long as you've known
+yours."
+
+"You've known--What do you--Oh, Ruth, look at me!"
+
+She looked, very tenderly, although she said, "You forget we are
+observed."
+
+"Oh, observed! Do you mean hope--for me--after all?"
+
+"I mean that if you will only wait until we can get a clear light on
+this matter of Isabel's--which will most likely be by the next time you
+come"--
+
+"Oh, Ruth, Ruth, my own Ruth at last!"
+
+"Please don't speak so. I'm not engaging myself to you now."
+
+"Oh yes, you are! Yes, you are! Yes--you--are!"
+
+"No--no--no--listen! Listen to me, Godfrey. I think that now, among us
+all, we shall manage Isabel's affair well enough, and that the very next
+time--you--come"--She began absently to pick her steps.
+
+"What--what then?"
+
+"Then you may ask me."
+
+The response of the overjoyed lover was but one or two passionate words,
+and her sufficient reply, as they halted among their fellows, was to
+look across the valley with her meditative smile. Isabel took note, but
+kindly gave a long sigh of admiration, and with an exalted sweep of the
+hand drew the gaze of the five to the beauties of the scene below. The
+day was near its end. The long shadow of the great cliff behind Bylow
+Hill hung over the roofs of the town and over the hither meadows. The
+sun's rays were laying their last touches upon the winding river, and
+upon the grainfields that extended from its farther shore. In the upper
+blue rested a few peaceful clouds, changing from silver to pink, from
+pink to pearly gray, and on the skyline crouched in a purpling haze the
+round-backed mountains of another county.
+
+To Mrs. Morris and the General the sight, from the old elm-tree seat,
+was even fairer than to the youthful group whose forms stood out against
+the sky, the floral colors of the girls' draperies heightened by the
+western light. For a while the two sitters gave the perfect scene the
+tribute of a perfect silence, and then the General asked, as he
+cautiously straightened his impaired frame, "Has not Isabel been making
+some--eh--news for herself--and us?"
+
+The lady's lips parted for their peculiar laugh of embarrassment, but
+the questioner's smile was so serious that she forced her sweetest
+gravity. "Why, General, according to our Southern ways," she
+said,--every word mellowed by her Southern way of saying it,--"that's
+for Isabel to tell you."
+
+"Then why does she not do it, Mrs. Morris?" asked the veteran, who had
+been district attorney himself once upon a time, and was clever with
+witnesses.
+
+"Why, really, General, Isabel hasn't had a cha--Oh! ho, ho! I oughtn't
+to have said that!" Mrs. Morris had a killing dimple, but never used it.
+
+"I suppose--of course"--said the General, "she will say
+it's--eh--Arthur?"
+
+"Now you're making me tell," she laughed, "and I mustn't! General,
+Godfrey seems to be going."
+
+In fact, Godfrey was shaking hands with Ruth and Leonard. Now he took
+the hands of Arthur and Isabel together, and Mrs. Morris laughed more
+sweetly and with more oh's and ho's than ever; for Isabel sedately
+kissed Arthur's brother.
+
+Ruth made signs to her father, who answered them in kind. "What does she
+say, Mrs. Morris? Can you hear?"
+
+"She says they're singing 'your hymn' down in a church under the hill."
+
+"Ah yes." He beamed and nodded to Ruth; but when Mrs. Morris once more
+laughed, his brow clouded a trifle. "Your daughter, Mrs. Morris"--
+
+The lady broke in with a note of bright surprise, rose, and took an
+unconscious step forward. The five young friends were advancing in a
+compact cluster, with measured pace. Ruth and Isabel, in front abreast,
+and making happy show of the hawthorn sprays, were just enough apart to
+conceal, except for their superior height, the three lovers, and in
+lowered tones, but with kindling eyes, the five, incited by Ruth, were
+singing the song they had caught up from the valley,--the old man's
+favorite from the days of his own song-time. The General got himself
+hurriedly to his feet; the shade passed from his brow. The group came
+close; he stepped out, and Isabel, meeting him, laid her two hands in
+his, while the halting cluster ceased their song suspensively on a line
+that pledged loves and friendships too ethereal to clash.
+
+"Isabel,"--he turned up a broadened palm,--"here's my amen to that line;
+where's yours?"
+
+With blushing alacrity she laid her hand on his.
+
+"Arthur!" he called, and the lively lover added his to the two. "Now,
+Ruth!"
+
+"Father!" laughed the daughter, "isn't this rather youngish?" But she
+laid her hand promptly upon Arthur's, and the lines of the General's
+face deepened playfully, and Mrs. Morris's dimple did the same, as
+Godfrey thrust his hand in upon Ruth's, unasked. The matron laughed very
+tenderly on the key of O while she added her hand, and received
+Leonard's heavy palm above it. Then Arthur clapped a second hand upon
+Leonard's, and Leonard was about to lay a second quietly upon Arthur's,
+when Isabel, rose-red from brow to throat, gayly broke the heap and
+embraced Ruth.
+
+"Well, honey-girlie," said Mrs. Morris, as she and Isabel reentered
+their cottage, "wasn't it sweet of them all, that 'laying on of hands,'
+as Arthur called it?"
+
+"Yes," replied the Southern girl, starting up the cramped old New
+England stairway to her room. "It was child's play, but it was very
+sweet of them, and especially of the General."
+
+The mother detained her fondly. "And still, my child, you're not
+satisfied?"
+
+"Ah, mother, are you blind, stone blind, or do you only hope I am?"
+
+"My dearie!"
+
+"Why, mother, excepting Leonard, we haven't had one word of true consent
+from one of them."
+
+"Oh, now, Isabel! They'll all be glad enough by and by."
+
+"Yes," said the daughter, from the landing above, "I've no doubt of
+that."
+
+She passed into her room, closed the door, and standing in the middle of
+the floor, with her temples in her palms, said, "O merciful God! Oh,
+Leonard Byington, if only that second hand of yours had hung back!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+SKY AND POOL
+
+
+Arthur and Isabel were married in their own little church of All Angels,
+at the far end of the old street.
+
+"I cal'late," said a rustic member of his vestry, "th' never was as
+pretty a weddin' so simple, nor as simple a weddin' so pretty!"
+
+Because he said it to Leonard Byington he ended with a manly laugh, for
+by the anxious glance of his spectacled daughter he knew he had slipped
+somewhere in his English. But when he heard Leonard and Ruth, in
+greeting the bride's mother, jointly repeat the sentiment as their own,
+he was, for a moment, nearly as happy as Mrs. Morris.
+
+"Such a pity Godfrey had to be away!" said Mrs. Morris. It was the only
+pity she chose to emphasize.
+
+Godfrey was on distant seas. The north-bound mid-afternoon express bore
+away the bridal pair for a week's absence.
+
+"Too short," said a friend or so whom Leonard fell in with as he came
+from the railway station, and Leonard admitted that Arthur was badly in
+need of rest.
+
+At sunset Ruth came out of her gate and stood to welcome her brother's
+tardy return. Both brightly smiled; neither spoke.
+
+When he gave her a letter with a foreign stamp her face lighted
+gratefully, but still without words she put it under her belt. Then they
+joined hands, and he asked, "Where's father?"
+
+"Inside on the lounge," she replied. Her lips fell into their faraway
+smile, to which she added this time a murmur as of reverie, and Leonard
+said almost as musingly, "Come, take a short turn."
+
+They moved on to the Winslow gate, and entered the garden by a path
+which brought them to a point midway between the old cottage and the
+larger house. There it crossed under an arch transecting an arbor that
+extended from a side door of the one dwelling to a like one of the
+other, and the brother and sister had just passed this embowered spot
+and were stepping down a winding descent by which the path sought the
+old mill-pond, when behind them they observed two women pass athwart
+their track by way of the arbor, and Ruth smiled and murmured again.
+The crossing pair were Mrs. Morris and Sarah Stebbens, the Winslows'
+life-long housekeeper, deeply immersed in arranging for Isabel to
+become lady of the larger house, while her mother, with a single
+young maidservant, was to remain mistress of the cottage.
+
+The deep pond to whose edge Leonard and Ruth presently came was a narrow
+piece of clear water held in between Bylow Hill and the loftier cliff
+beyond by an old stone dam long unused. Rude ledges of sombre rock
+underlay its depths and lined and shelved its sides. Broad beeches and
+dark hemlocks overhung it. At every turn it mirrored back the slanting
+forms of the white and the yellow birch, or slept under green mantles
+of lily pads. It bore a haunted air even in the floweriest days of the
+year, when every bird of the wood thrilled it with his songs, and it
+gave to the entire region the gravest as well as richest note among all
+its harmonies. Down the whole way to it some one long gone had gardened
+with so wise a hand that later negligence had only made the wild
+loveliness of this inmost refuge more affluent and impassioned.
+
+At one point, where the hemlocks hung farthest and lowest over the pool,
+and the foot sank deep in a velvet of green mosses, a solid ledge of
+dark rock shelved inward from the top of the bank and down through the
+flood to a depth cavernous and black. Here, brought from time to time by
+the Byington and Winslow playmates, lay a number of mossy stones rounded
+by primeval floods, some large enough for seats, some small; and here,
+where Ruth had last sat with Godfrey, she now came with her brother.
+
+The habitual fewness of Leonard's words was a thing she prized beyond
+count. It made Mrs. Morris nervous, drained her mind's treasury, and
+sent her conversational powers borrowing and begging; Isabel it awed;
+Arthur it tantalized; to Godfrey it was an appetizing drollery; but to
+Ruth it was dearer and clearer than all spoken eloquence.
+
+The same trait in her, only less marked, was as satisfying to him, and
+from one rare utterance to another their thoughts moved like consorted
+ships from light to light along a home coast. A motion, a glance, a
+gleam, a shade, told its tale, as across leagues of silence a shred of
+smoke may tell one dweller in the wilderness the way or want of another.
+Such converse may have been a mere phase of the New Englander's passion
+for economy, or only the survival of a primitive spiritual commerce
+which most of us have lost through the easier use of speech and print;
+but the sister took calm delight in it, and it bound the two to each
+other as though it were itself a sort of goodness or greatness.
+
+"They have it of their mother," the old General sometimes said to
+himself.
+
+There were moments, too, when their intercourse was still more subtle,
+and now they sat without exchange of glance or gesture, silent as chess
+players, looking up the narrow water into a sunset exquisite in the
+delicacy of its silvery plumes, fleeces pink and dusk, and illimitable
+distances of palest green seen through fan-rays of white light shot down
+from one dark, unthreatening cloud.
+
+"Leonard," at length said the sister, as if she had studied every
+possibility on the board before touching the chosen piece, "couldn't you
+go away for a time?"
+
+And with deliberate readiness the other gentle voice replied, "I don't
+think I'd better."
+
+While they spoke their gaze rested on the changing beauties of pool and
+sky, and after the brief inquiry and response it still remained, though
+the inner glow of their mutual love and worship deepened and warmed as
+did the colors of the heavens and of the glassing waters. The brother
+knew full well Ruth's poignant sense of his distresses; and to her his
+mute tongue and unbent head were a sister's convincement that he would
+endure them in a manner wholly faithful to every one of the loved hands
+that had lain under his the evening Godfrey had said good-by.
+
+[Illustration: Indeed it was clear that to go away would be unfair.]
+
+Indeed, it was clear that to go away--unless he honestly felt too weak
+to remain--would be unfair to almost every person, every interest,
+concerned; and such a step was but second choice in Ruth's mind,
+conditioned solely on any unreadiness he might have uprightly to bear
+the burden brought upon him by--well, after all, by his own too
+confident miscalculations in the game of hearts.
+
+To him such flight signified the indeterminate continuance of his
+sister's maiden singleness and a like prolongation of her lover's
+galling suspense. To Ruth it stood not only for the loss of her brother,
+but for the narrowing of their father's already narrowed life,--a
+narrowing which might come to mean a shortening as well; and it meant
+also the leaving of Isabel and Arthur to their mistake and to their
+unskilfulness slowly and patiently to work out its cure. To go away
+were, for him, to consent to be the one unbroken string on a noble but
+difficult instrument. These thoughts and many more like them passed to
+and fro, out through the abstracted eyes of the one, across to the
+fading clouds, and back through the abstracted eyes and into the
+responding heart of the other.
+
+At length the sister rose. "I must go to father," she said.
+
+The brother stood up. Their eyes exchanged a gentle gaze and tenderly
+contracted.
+
+"I will come presently," he replied, and was turning toward the water,
+when he paused, threw a hand toward the steep wood across the pool, and
+silently bade her listen.
+
+The note he had remotely heard was rare on Bylow Hill since the town had
+come in below, and one of the errands which oftenest brought the hill's
+dwellers to this nook in solitary pairs was to hearken for that voice of
+unearthly rapture,--a rapture above all melancholy and beyond all
+mirth,--the call of the hermit thrush.
+
+Now the waiting seemed in vain. The brother's hand sank, the sister
+turned, and soon he saw her pass from view among the boughs as she wound
+up the rambling path toward the three homes.
+
+At the top she halted, still longing to hear at his side that marvellous
+wood-note, and was just starting on once more, when from the same
+quarter as before it came again, with new and fervent clearness. With
+noiseless foot she sprang back down the bendings of the path, having no
+other thought but to find her brother standing as she had left him, a
+rapt hearer of the heavenly strain.
+
+She reached the spot, but found no hearkening or standing form. The
+young man's stalwart frame lay prone on the green bank, where he had
+thrown himself the moment she had left his sight, and his face was
+buried in the deep moss.
+
+The stir of her swift coming reached his ear barely in time for him,
+as she choked down a cry that had all but escaped her, to turn upon
+his back, meet her glance, and drive the agony from his face with a
+languorous smile. The melting song pervaded the air, but neither of
+them lifted a noting finger.
+
+Leonard rose to his feet. Ruth gave him a hand and then its fellow, and
+as he pressed them together she said, "I wish you _would_ go away
+for a time."
+
+He dropped one of her hands, and keeping the other, started slowly
+homeward; and it was not until they had climbed half the ascent that,
+with his most remote yet boyish smile, he replied, "I don't think I'd
+better."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+IN THE PUBLIC EYE
+
+
+August, September, October, November,--so passed the year in gorgeous
+recession over Bylow Hill. Among their dismantled trees the three homes
+stood unveiled to the town on the meadows and to travellers who looked
+from train windows while crossing the river bridge. To those who
+inquired whose they were there was always some one more than ready to
+give names and details, and to tell how perfect a bond ever had
+been--how beautiful a fellowship was yet, now--up there.
+
+Sevenfold they called it, although one of the seven was away; namely,
+Lieutenant Godfrey Winslow, of the navy, famed for his splendid behavior
+in the late so-and-so affair. That stately house at the right, they
+said, was his home what brief times the sea was not.
+
+There lived, it would be added, his younger brother, so rapidly coming
+into note,--the eccentric but gifted rector of All Angels; whose great
+success in the heart of a Congregational community was due hardly more
+to his high talents than to the combined winsomeness and practical
+sympathies of his beautiful bride, or to the resourceful wisdom and zeal
+of his churchwarden, Leonard Byington.
+
+"Any relation to Byington, your new political leader in these parts?"
+
+"Same man," the answer would be, and there the narrator was sure to fall
+into a glowing tribute to the ideal companionship existing between the
+rector, his bride, the young district attorney, and Ruth Byington.
+
+What made this intimacy the more interesting was, in the eyes of a
+growing number of observers, that, as they said, "Arthur Winslow was not
+always an affable man, and was much more rarely a happy one."
+
+Behind and above this popular verdict was that of the old street behind
+and above the town,--a sort of revised version, a higher criticism. If
+the young rector, this old street explained, oftener looked anxious than
+complacent, so in their time, most likely, did St. Paul and St. Peter.
+If he was not always affable, why, neither are volcanoes; the man was
+all molten metal within. Anyhow, he filled his church to the doors.
+
+Coaching parties of the vastly rich made the town their Sunday stopping
+place purely to hear him; not so much because the boldness of his
+speculations kept his bishop frightened as because he always fused those
+speculations on, white-hot, to the daily issues of private and public
+life, in a way to make pampered ladies hold their breath, and men of the
+world their brows. Such a man, to whom the least sin seemed black and
+bottomless, yet who appeared to know by experience the soul's every
+throe in the foulest crimes, was not going to show his joys on the
+surface in quips and smiles.
+
+"You should have heard," said the old street, "his sermon to husbands
+and wives! His own bride turned pale. He turned pale himself."
+
+It was wonder enough that even the bride could be happy, at such an
+altitude, so to speak; immersing herself utterly, as she did, in the
+interests that devoured him. All Angels forgot his gloom in the radiance
+of her charms,--the sweet genuineness of her formal pieties, the tender
+glow and universality of her sympathies, the witchery of her ever ready,
+never too ready playfulness. It was captivating to see how instantly and
+entirely she had fitted herself into a partnership so exacting; though
+it was pitiful to note, on second glance, how the tint and contour of
+her cheek were losing their perfection, and her eyes were showing those
+rapid alternations of languor and vivacity which story-tellers call a
+"hunted look." Yet, oh, yes, she was happy; the pair were happy. It was
+as a pair that they were happiest. Else, said the old street, they could
+not keep up the old Winslow-Byington alliance so beautifully.
+
+To the truth of this general outline the three homes' domestics,
+dominated by Sarah Stebbens, certified with cordial and loyal brevity.
+Yet when Ruth wrote Godfrey how well things were going, there lurked
+between her bright lines one or two irrepressible meanings that locked
+his jaws till they creaked.
+
+In fact, both his brother and hers were "ailing." Both carried a jaded,
+almost a broken look, and Arthur was taking things to make him eat and
+sleep; while Leonard had daily accepted more and more of the young
+rector's complicating cares, until he was really the parish's chief
+burden-bearer.
+
+"No," he said to his father, "Arthur carries his whole work manfully on
+his own shoulders."
+
+"But, my son," replied the old General, "don't you see you're carrying
+Arthur?"
+
+"No, I sha'n't do that," dryly responded the son; but Ruth saw a change
+on his brow as on that of a guide who fears he has missed the path.
+
+The four young friends spent many delightful evenings together in the
+Winslow house, with Mrs. Morris and the General on one side at cribbage.
+Ruth had frequent happy laughs, observing Isabel's gift for making
+Leonard talk. It gave her a new joy in both of them to have the lovely
+hostess draw him out, out, out, on every matter in the wide arena to
+which he so vitally belonged; eliciting a flow of speech so animated
+that only afterward did one notice how dumb as any tree on Bylow Hill
+he had been in regard to himself.
+
+"They are bow and violin," said Arthur to Ruth, with his dark, unsmiling
+face so free from resentment that she gratefully wondered at him, and
+was presently ashamed to find herself asking her own mind if he was
+growing too subtle for her.
+
+On these occasions Isabel was wont to court Ruth's counsel concerning
+her wifely part in Arthur's work, thus often getting Leonard's as well.
+Sometimes she impeached his masculine view of things, in her old
+skirmishing way. Then she would turn rose-color once more and mirthfully
+sigh, while Ruth laughed and wished for Godfrey, and Mrs. Morris
+breathed soft ho-ho's from the cribbage board.
+
+So came the Thanksgiving season, with strong, black ice on the mill
+pond, where the four skated hand in hand. Then the piling snows stopped
+the skating with a white Christmas, the old year sank to rest, the new
+rose up, and Bylow Hill, under its bare elms and with the pine-crested
+ridge at its back, sat in the cold sunshine like a white sea bird with
+its head in its down. And when the nights were frigid and clear its
+ruddy lights of lamp and hearth seemed to answer the downward gaze of
+the stars in silent gratitude for conditions of happiness strangely
+perfect for this imperfect world, and the town marvelled at the young
+rector's grasp of his subject when his text was, "The heart knoweth his
+own bitterness."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE HOUR STRIKES
+
+
+But on a day in the very last of winter, when every one was in the thick
+of all the year's tasks and cares, there came to Leonard this letter:--
+
+
+  LEONARD BYINGTON, ESQUIRE:
+
+  SIR,--I find myself compelled to ask that you consider your
+  acquaintanceship with my wife at an end. Doubtless this request will
+  give you more relief than surprise. The visible waste of your frame
+  and the loss of her exquisite bloom are proof enough that both you
+  and she have long been in daily dread of a far worse visitation.
+  It is not worse, because I know how sentimental your impotent and
+  conscience-plagued interchanges of affection have been. I shall permit
+  and assist you to keep this matter a secret. To let it be known would
+  instantly wreck your own career, and would blast at a breath the
+  fortunes of our church and of every one of both our kindreds. I will
+  therefore not at this time require you to resign your church office or
+  to break off those business intimacies with me which, though no longer
+  founded in personal esteem, are vital to interests that common decency
+  must move you to shield from new peril.
+
+  I ask for no repair of the inextinguishable wrong you have done me.
+  I only ask you not to fancy that I am to be beguiled by arguments or
+  denials or moved by threats, or that one word I here write is founded
+  on conjecture or inference. Grovelling at my feet, in sobs of shame
+  and with prayers for pardon, Isabel has told me all. Has told me all,
+  Leonard Byington, my once trusted friend. Now, though prostrated on
+  her bed, she rejoices in the double forgiveness of her husband and
+  her priest, blessing him for deliverance from the misleadings of one
+  who--great God! must I write it?--might at last have dragged her into
+  crime. It is her request, as it is my command, that you darken our
+  threshold no more, and that as far as practicable you keep yourself
+  from her sight.
+
+  Faithfully,
+
+  ARTHUR WINSLOW.
+
+
+With his swivel-chair overturned behind him the young lawyer stood at
+the desk of his inner office, read this letter through at headlong
+speed, turned it again, and re-read it slowly, searchingly, from his own
+name to its writer's.
+
+Then readjusting his chair he stepped to a door, asked a clerk in the
+outer office to order his cutter, turned back, and was closing his desk,
+when his partner came to him.
+
+"Byington, are you ill?" asked the fatherly man.
+
+"No; I'm only going out on some business. I'll be back about--" He
+looked at his watch.
+
+"Byington, don't go. You're ill. You don't realize how ill you are. If
+you go at all, go home, and let me send some one with you. Why, your
+hand is as cold"--
+
+"I'm all right," said the young man, freeing his hand and smiling with
+white lips. He took his hat and passed out.
+
+Meanwhile Isabel lay on her bed too overwhelmed to rise. In his room
+adjoining, with doors locked, Arthur paced the floor. He had spent the
+first half of the night in an agonizing interview with his wife, and the
+second half in writing and rewriting the letter to Leonard.
+
+Now Isabel noticed the cessation of his steps. In the door between
+them the key turned; then the door opened, and he stood, haggard and
+dishevelled, gazing on her. She sat up in the bed, wan, tear-spent,
+her glorious hair falling over the embroideries of her nightdress.
+
+"Arthur, dear, I am sorry for every angry word I have spoken. But the
+things I have denied I must deny forever.
+
+"If you should wait till doomsday, I could confess no more.
+
+"I have never harbored one throb of unworthy or unsafe regard toward any
+man in this wide world.
+
+"For me to say differently would be to lie in God's own face.
+
+"I have had great happiness of Leonard's companionship, and I have been
+proud to be myself a proof that a man and a woman can be close, dear,
+daily friends without being lovers or kin, and earth be only more like
+heaven for it, to them and all theirs. If Leonard has confessed one word
+more than that for me,--or even for himself, Arthur, dearest,--he has
+lost his reason. It's a frightful explanation, but I find no other.
+
+"Leonard Byington is not wicked, and if he were he wouldn't be so in a
+dastard's way.
+
+"Never since the day I first plighted my faith to you, dear heart, has
+he given me one sign of a lover's love.
+
+"Oh, Arthur, I do love my husband! This night has proved it to me as
+I never knew it before; and if you will only believe me and go back to
+Leonard, I believe he can tear the mask off this horrible mystery."
+
+Arthur turned and once more locked the door. His wife flamed red and
+hearkened, and the light footfall which had tortured her for hours began
+again. Suddenly she left the bed and hurried to dress.
+
+At the mirror, with her hair lifted on her hands, she paused and again
+hearkened. Sleighbells stopped at the front door.
+
+Now some one was let in down there, and now, at her husband's room,
+Giles, his English man of all work, announced Mr. Byington:--
+
+"Yes, sir, but he says if you can't come down 'e will 'ave to come up,
+sir."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+GIVE YOU FIVE MINUTES
+
+
+As Arthur entered the library Leonard came from its farther end, and
+they halted on opposite sides of a large table. Arthur was flushed and
+looked fearfully spent. Leonard was pale.
+
+"I have your letter, Arthur."
+
+The rector bowed. He gave a start, but tried to conceal a gleam of
+triumph.
+
+Leonard ignored it and spoke on:--
+
+"A gentleman, Arthur,--I mean any one trying to be a whole
+gentleman,--is a very helpless creature, nowadays, in matters of this
+sort."
+
+He looked formidable, and as he lightly grasped a chair at his side it
+seemed about to be turned into a weapon.
+
+"The old thing once called satisfaction," he continued, "is something
+one can no longer either ask or offer, in any form. He can neither rail,
+nor strike, nor spellbind, nor challenge, nor lampoon, nor prosecute."
+
+"Nearly as helpless as a clergyman," said Arthur.
+
+"Almost," replied the visitor. "No, there is no more satisfaction in any
+of those things, for him, than if he were all a clergyman is supposed to
+be. There is none even in saying this, to you, here, now, and I'm not
+here to say it. Neither am I here to vindicate myself--no, nor yet
+Isabel--with professions or arguments to you; I might as well argue with
+a forest fire."
+
+"Quite as well. What are you here for?"
+
+"Be patient and I'll tell you; I'm trying to be so with you."
+
+"You--trying"--
+
+"Stop that nonsense, Arthur. Ah me, Arthur Winslow, I have no wish to
+humiliate you. Through the loyalty of your wife's pure heart, whatever
+humiliates you must humiliate her. Oh, I could wish her in her shroud
+and coffin rather than have her suffer the humiliation you have prepared
+for yourself and for her through you."
+
+Arthur showed a thrill of alarm. "Do you propose to go down to public
+shame and drag us all with you?"
+
+"No, nor to let you, if I can prevent you. Arthur, you have allowed a
+base jealousy to persuade you, in the face of every contrary evidence,
+that your fair young wife has lost her loyalty--and your nearest friend
+the commonest honesty--in a clandestine love. Under the goadings of that
+passion you have foully guessed, have heartlessly accused, have brazenly
+lied. Isabel has confessed nothing to you, and I know by your lies to
+me how pusillanimously you must have been lying to her. Had your guess
+been right, I should not have known you were only guessing, and your
+successful iniquity would have remained hidden from everybody but
+yourself--I still do you the honor to believe you would have realized
+it. Now the vital question is, do you realize it, and will you undo it?"
+
+Arthur was deadly pale; his pointing finger trembled. "Leave"--he
+choked--"leave this house."
+
+Leonard turned scarlet, but his tone sank low. "Arthur, I don't believe
+your soul is rotten. If I did, I should not be such a knave or such a
+fool as to make any treaty with you that would leave you in your pulpit
+one Sabbath Day."
+
+"What do you--what do you mean by that?"
+
+"I mean that such a treaty would be foul faith to everybody."
+
+"So, then, you do propose one common shipwreck for us all."
+
+"Quite the contrary. To trust the fortunes of our loved ones to any
+treaty with a rotten soul would indeed be to launch them upon a stormy
+sea in a rotten boat. But I do not believe your soul is so. I believe it
+is sound,--still sound, though on fire; and so, to help you quench its
+burning, I give you my pledge to be from this day a stranger to your
+sweet wife. And now will you do something for me, to prove that your
+soul is sound and is going to stay sound? It shall be the least I can
+ask in good faith to the world we live in."
+
+"What is it?" asked Arthur. There was no capitulation in his face or his
+voice.
+
+"I want you to make to Isabel a full retraction and explanation of every
+falsehood you have uttered to her or to me in this matter." Leonard was
+pale again; Arthur burned red a moment, and then turned paler than
+Leonard.
+
+"You fiend!" gasped the husband. "I am to exalt you, and abase myself,
+to her?"
+
+"No. No, Arthur. Women are strange; every chance is that in her eyes I
+shall be abased." The speaker went whiter than ever.
+
+"But be that as it may, you shall have lifted your soul out of the mire.
+You must do it, Arthur; don't you see you must?"
+
+Arthur sank into the chair at his side. He seemed to have guessed what
+Leonard was keeping unsaid. A moisture of anguish stood on his brow.
+Yet--
+
+[Illustration: "Arthur Winslow, I give you five minutes."]
+
+"I will die before I will do it," he said.
+
+Leonard drew forth the letter, and then his watch. "Arthur Winslow, I
+give you five minutes. If you don't make me that promise in that time, I
+shall this day show this letter to your bishop."
+
+The rector sat clenching his fingers and spreading them again, and
+staring at the table.
+
+A bead of sweat, then a second, and then a third started down his
+forehead.
+
+Presently he clutched the board, drew himself to his feet, and turned to
+leave the chair, but fell across its arms, slid heavily from them, and
+with one rude thump and then another lay unconscious on the floor.
+
+Leonard sprang round the table, but when he would have lifted the fallen
+head it was in the arms of Isabel, and her dilated eyes were on him in a
+look of passionate aversion.
+
+"Ring!" she cried. "Ring for Sarah--and go!
+
+"No! stop! don't ring! he's coming to! Only go! go quickly and forever!
+Say not a word,--oh, not a word! I heard it all! Despise me too, for I
+listened at the door!
+
+"Oh, my husband! Arthur, look at me, Arthur. Look, Arthur; it's your
+Isabel. Oh, Arthur, my husband, my husband!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE YOUNG YEAR SMILES
+
+
+Martin Kelly, pious Irishman and out-door factotum of the Byington
+place, paused from the last snow-shovelling of the season to reply to a
+wandering salesman of fruit trees.
+
+"Mr. Airthur Winslow or Mr. Linnard Boyington,--naw, sor! ye can see
+nayther the wan nor th' other, whatsomiver! How can ye see thim, moy
+graciouz! whin 'tis two weeks since the two o' thim was tuck the same
+noight wid the pneumonias, boy gorra! and the both of thim has thim on
+the loongs!"
+
+The nursery agent asked how it had happened so.
+
+"Hawh! ask yer grandmother! All ye can say is they was roipe to catch
+the maladee, whatsomiver! Ye cannot always tell how 'tis catched, and
+whin ye cannot tell, moy graciouz! ye have got the wurrst koind!"
+
+The two sick men recovered very nearly at the same time.
+
+One day when Leonard had read all his accumulated mail and had seen
+three or four men officially in his bedchamber, he told Ruth that a
+certain criminal case, the trial of which had been waiting for his
+recovery, would take him to the county-seat, and would keep him there
+many days, probably weeks, except for brief visits to his office and yet
+briefer moments at home.
+
+Ruth gave him a look of tender approval, laid a hand in his, and bent
+into the evening fire her far-off smile. Thus, and only thus, he knew
+she had divined what had befallen.
+
+A day or two afterward Mrs. Morris brought him a note from Arthur. He
+wrote an answer while she stayed, and while Ruth listened elatedly to
+her sprightly account of how well Isabel still bore the burden of
+nursing a most loving but most nervous husband.
+
+The missive from Arthur was a short but complete and propitiative
+acknowledgment of his error and fraility. It offered no change in the
+agreement as to Isabel, but it professed a high yet humble resolve to
+fall no more, and it ended with a manly offer to resign his pulpit, and
+even to lay aside his sacred calling, if Leonard retained any belief in
+the moral necessity of his so doing.
+
+Leonard's reply was a very brief exhortation to his friend to put away
+all thought of resigning, and to take up his work again with the zeal
+with which he had first entered upon it.
+
+Mrs. Morris went away refreshed, and left the Byingtons equally so. Her
+buoyancy had been as prettily restrained, her sympathies as sweet, her
+dimple as unconscious, her belief in everybody's wit and wisdom except
+her own as genuine, and her timid dissimulations as kindly meant and as
+transparent, as ever. Yet there was an unspoken compassion for her when
+she was gone, for in the parting words with which she playfully vaunted
+her ignorance of the correspondence she was bearing, it was clear, even
+to the General, that behind that small ignorance she had a larger
+knowledge,--a fact that made her dainty cheerfulness seem very brave.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The freshets swept down the valleys, the myriad yellow twigs of the
+brookside willows turned green, a cheery piping rose from the ponds, the
+last gleam of snow passed from the farthest hills, the bluebird sang,
+the harrow followed the plough, Ruth's crocuses shone above the greening
+sod, and down by the old mill-pool and on the steep hillside beyond it
+she and Isabel gathered arbutus, anemones, and the yellow violet. Spring
+had come.
+
+Then through the thickening greenery the dogwood shone like belated
+drifts, the flashing warblers passed on into the north, the bobolink had
+arrived, the robin was already overeating, the whole chorus of birds
+that had come to nest and stay broke forth, and it was summer.
+
+Leonard was back in his own town, enriched with new esteem from the
+public and from the men of his profession. The noted case was won, a
+victory for the peace and dignity of the state, due wholly, it was said,
+to the energy and sagacity of the young district attorney. A murder had
+been so cunningly done that suspicion could fasten nowhere, until
+Byington laid his finger upon a man of so unspotted a name that no one
+else had had the mental courage to point to him. Through a long and
+masterly untangling of contradictions the state's counsel had so
+overwhelmingly proved him guilty that he had confessed without waiting
+for the jury's verdict.
+
+"Yes," said many, "it was a great stroke, Leonard's management of that
+thing." And not a few added that it had made him an older man--"that or
+something." Those who were of his politics, and even some who were not,
+stopped him in Main Street and State Street to "shake" and to say,
+without too much care for logical sequence, how soon, in their opinion,
+he would be the commonwealth's "favorite son."
+
+"My dear Mrs. Morris," said the General, "every town has at least one."
+But even Mrs. Morris could see the father's faith and pride through the
+old soldier's satire.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE STORM REGATHERS
+
+
+On the other hand, things were going ill with the little church of All
+Angels. Arthur kept his people as tensely strung as ever, but he no
+longer drew from them the chords of aspiration and enterprise. It was a
+sad disenchantment, and none the less so because no one seemed to know
+what the matter was. One darkly guessed he was writing a book, and the
+vestryman who had praised the lovely simplicity of the wedding lucidly
+explained that the young rector had "lost his grip."
+
+At times there were flashes of recovery. One Sabbath the whole
+congregation came out under his benediction uplifted by his word that
+"loving is living."
+
+"The more we love," they quoted him on their various ways home, "the
+more we live. The deeper we love, the deeper we live. The more selfishly
+or unselfishly, the higher, the broader, the purer, the wiser, we love,
+the more selfishly or unselfishly, the higher, the broader, the purer,
+the wiser, we live!" The rector's gentle wife was visibly and ever so
+prettily rejoiced.
+
+True, but hardly the whole truth. In her mother's cottage her smiles
+were almost sad, and when she had crossed the garden and got into her
+own room she dropped upon her bed and wept. Yet she quickly ceased, and
+put on again a brave serenity, for a very tender reason which forbade
+such risks.
+
+A bunch of the church's best men got together and agreed that all Arthur
+needed was rest; that this bright moment was the right one in which to
+offer him a vacation; that his physician should flatly order him to take
+it; and that Byington should arrange the matter.
+
+Leonard accepted the task, the physician spoke with startling flatness,
+and the whole kind plot worked well. Arthur consented to go away up into
+the hills beyond all the jar of the busy world's unrest.
+
+Isabel was to go with him, and they were to sojourn at some point where
+she would still be within prompt reach of medical skill, yet from which
+he could make long jaunts into the absolute wilds.
+
+Mrs. Morris was far from well when they left, and the day afterward she
+was seriously ill. That night Ruth sat up with her, and the next day she
+was worse, yet begged that no telegram be sent to her daughter.
+
+At the close of the day there came a letter from Isabel. It said that
+Arthur, "already a new man," would start the next morning at dawn for a
+three days' trip into the wilderness. He went; and he had not been three
+hours gone when Isabel received a dispatch calling her to her mother.
+The only day train would leave in a few minutes, and she had the fortune
+to catch it.
+
+Ruth met her at the station with the blessed word "better." They went up
+from the town in Ruth's carriage, Martin Kelly driving, who let it be
+known that though the doctor's name, "moy graciouz!" were signed to the
+telegram seven times over, the actual painstaker and sender was "Linnard
+Boyington, whatsomiver!"
+
+Still Ruth called it the doctor's telegram, and said it made no
+difference who sent it; but she saw Isabel was disturbed. "Well, Martin,
+Doctor will have to wait on himself to-morrow; Leonard will be out of
+town."
+
+That evening, alone with her brother, she said, "But I thought you were
+to be out of town to-morrow."
+
+"No," he replied, "I don't think I'd better."
+
+Another day passed, another came, and Mrs. Morris was still in danger.
+Isabel wrote Arthur that she would be with him the moment the peril was
+over, if he needed her; but if he did not, she would stay on for her
+mother's fuller recovery. Her letter had barely gone when she received a
+pencilled line brought in to the mountain hotel by a chance messenger
+and sent on to her, saying he would be out on his tramp five days
+instead of three. On the fifth day she telegraphed that her mother was
+getting well so fast that she would come, now, at his word.
+
+The next morning she betrayed to Ruth a glad sense of relief as she
+showed her a dispatch from Arthur, which read: "Going on another trip
+to-morrow. Stay till I write."
+
+Ruth repeated it to her father and brother at their noonday meal.
+Leonard made no comment, but the General asked pleasantly--
+
+"Is she certain he won't come in on this evening's express?" He was
+discerning more than any one wanted him to.
+
+However, at dusk came the train, took water at the tank, stopped at the
+station, and passed on, and Arthur did not appear.
+
+"Well, I'll go to bed," blithely spoke the General. "I'm not so old as I
+used to be, but I'm tired, after writing that letter this afternoon--to
+Godfrey. Good-night." So he gave fair notice that he had moved in this
+matter, himself.
+
+"I didn't know father had received a letter from Godfrey," said Ruth,
+shading her face from the lamp, and lifting to Leonard a smile which
+implied that it would have been but fair for him to have told her.
+
+"It came the day before Arthur went away," replied Leonard, and Ruth
+reluctantly chose a new topic.
+
+They rarely had an evening together thus, and with a soft rain falling
+at the open windows they sat and talked on many themes in what was to
+them a very talkative way. When something brought up the subject of the
+late noted trial, Ruth asked her brother how it had first come to him to
+suspect so unsuspected a man.
+
+His reply was tardy. "Partly," he said, and mused while he spoke,
+"because I am so unsuspected a man myself."
+
+He looked up with a smile, half play, half pain. "I know what the mind
+of an unsuspected man is capable of--under pressure."
+
+The questioner looked on him with fond faith, and then, dropping her
+eyes to her needlework, said, "That wasn't all that prompted you, was
+it?"
+
+"No," replied the brother, again musing. "I had noticed the singular
+value of wanton guesswork."
+
+"I thought so," said the sister. Her needle flagged and stopped, and
+each knew the other's mind was on the implacable divinations of one
+morbid soul.
+
+Leonard leaned and fingered the needlework,--a worsted slipper, too
+small for most men, too large for most women. "Is that for him?"
+
+"Yes," apologized Ruth; "it's the thing every clergyman has to incur.
+But I'm only doing it to help Isabel out; she has the other."
+
+The evening went quickly. When Leonard let down the window sashes and
+lowered the shades, Ruth, standing by the lamp as if to put out its
+light, said, "I'll not go up for a moment or two yet."
+
+She sent him an ardent smile across the room and turned to a desk.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+HAS IT COME TO THIS?
+
+
+Ruth wrote to her lover. Her father's keeping secret his receipt of
+Godfrey's letter until he had mailed its answer, could mean only that
+the answer was for Godfrey to come home. The General's talk of being
+tired by the writing of it was a purely expletive irony, for he had
+written with the brevity of an old soldier to a young sailor; but he had
+written that trouble was impending, that its source was Arthur, and that
+the last hope of removing it lay with him, Godfrey.
+
+A line from Ruth, pursuing after this message, would be one steamer
+behind it all the way, but it would reach the far wanderer before any
+leave would permit him to start homeward.
+
+So, now, what should she write? If her father had discerned so much more
+than he had let any one know he had discerned, how about others? How
+about the kind whose chief joy is ruthless guesswork? _That_ need
+of haste was one she had overlooked. Wise father!
+
+And yet--haste itself is such a hazardous thing! Ah, if Arthur had come
+in on that evening express, what to write were an easier question. The
+minutes sped by; her pen overhung the paper with the opening sentence
+unfinished, and every moment the thought she kept putting away came
+back: "Leonard!--Leonard!--Godfrey's summons should go to him from
+Leonard; and it should flash under the seas, not crawl across
+them!"--Hark!
+
+She rose and glided to the door through which her brother had gone.
+There she was startled by the sight of him speeding cautiously down
+the stair.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On entering his unlighted room Leonard had moved across it to a front
+window, where, veiled by the chamber's dusk, he stood looking out into a
+night dimly illumined by the overclouded moon. The Winslow house widened
+palely among its surrounding trees. The servants' rooms were remote as
+well as on the farther side, and on the nearer side no lamplight shone.
+A short way down the street a glow came from the Morris cottage.
+Evidently Isabel was with her mother.
+
+He stood and mused, unconsciously lulled by the cool drip of myriad
+leaves, and with his mind poised midway between emotion and thought. To
+yield to emotion would have been to chafe against the bands that knitted
+his life and hers to every life about them. To yield to thought would
+have been to think of her as no more to be drawn from these surrounding
+ties than some animate rainbow-fringed flower of the sea can be torn
+from its shell without laceration and death. To give thought word would
+have been to cry, "Oh, truest of womankind, where would this unsuspected
+man, this Leonard Byington, be if you were other than you are?" Yet the
+suspense between avoided feeling and avoided thought held him where he
+stood.
+
+So standing, it drifted idly into his mind that yonder arbor must be
+very wet to-night, and the cinder sidewalk out here much drier. As the
+thought moved him to draw one step back, the glow from the cottage
+broadened. Its front door had opened, and Mrs. Morris's young maid came
+out with a lantern, followed by Isabel saying last fond words to her
+mother as the convalescent closed the door.
+
+"Good-night!" she called back.
+
+In one great wave the young man's passion rolled over its bounds and
+brought him to his knees with arms outstretched. "Oh, Isabel!" he
+murmured. "Oh, my God! Oh, Isabel! Isabel! if I had but lost you
+fairly!"
+
+The two slight figures came daintily along the wet path in single file,
+the maid throwing the lantern's beams hither and yon as she looked back
+to answer Isabel's kindly questions; Isabel one moment half lost in the
+gloom of the trees, and then so lighted up again from foot to brow that
+it was easy to see the very lines of her winsome mouth, ripe for
+compassion or fortitude, yet wishful as a little child's.
+
+Her secret observer moaned as he stood erect. The fury of his soul
+seemed to enhance his stature. He did not speak again, but, "Oh, Isabel!
+harder to strive against than all the world beside!" was the unuttered
+cry that wrote itself upon his tortured brow. "If your unfair winner
+would only hold you by fair means! Yet I too was to blame! I too was to
+blame, and you alone were blameless!"
+
+Opposite his window Isabel ceased her light talk with the maid, halted,
+bent, and scanned something just off the firm path, in the clean wet
+sand.
+
+The maid turned and flooded her with the light of the lantern just as
+she impulsively lifted an alarmed glance to Leonard's window and as
+quickly averted it. "Go on," said the mistress. "I can walk faster if
+you can."
+
+The girl quickened her steps, but had not taken a dozen when Isabel
+stopped again. "Wait, Minnie. Now you can run back, thank you." She
+reached for the lantern.
+
+"I--I thought I was to go all the way, and--and bring the lantern back."
+
+"No, I'll keep the lantern; but I'll stay here and throw the light after
+you till you get in. Run along."
+
+Minnie tripped away. As she came where they had first halted, a
+purposely belated good-night softly overtook her; and when she looked
+back, Isabel, as if by inadvertency, sent the lantern's beam into her
+eyes. So too much light sent the maid by the spot unenlightened.
+
+Leonard drew aside lest the beam swing next into his window. But the
+precaution was wasted; the glare followed Minnie.
+
+Isabel also followed, slowly, a few paces, and then moved obliquely into
+the roadway and toward the window. Only for a moment the ray swept near
+her unseen observer, and, lighting up the rain-packed sand close before
+herself, revealed a line of footprints slanting toward her from
+Leonard's own gate.
+
+As the cottage door shut Minnie in, Isabel, reassured by the brightness
+of the Byingtons' lower windows, stopped for a furtive instant, and
+holding in her hand the fellow of the slipper so lately in Ruth's
+fingers, exactly fitted it to one of these footprints. Then, with the
+lantern on her farther side, and every vein surging with fright and
+shame, she made haste toward the open gateway of the Winslow house.
+
+A short space from it she recoiled with a gesture of dismay and
+self-repression, and her light shone full upon a man. He stepped from
+the garden, his form tensely lifted, his face aflame with anger.
+
+But her small figure straightened also, and swiftly muffling the lantern
+in a fold of her skirt, she exclaimed, audibly only to him, though in
+words clear-cut as musical notes, "Oh, Arthur Winslow, has it come to
+this?"
+
+She arrested his resentful answer by the uplift of a hand, which left
+the lantern again uncovered. "Inside! In the house!" she softly cried,
+starting on. "Not here! Look!--those upper windows!--we're in full view
+of them!"
+
+Quickly she remuffled the lantern, but not in time to hide his motion as
+he threw out an arm and pushed her rudely back, while he exclaimed, "In
+full view of them answer me one question!"
+
+It was then that Leonard went hurriedly downstairs.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE LANTERN QUENCHED
+
+
+"I will answer you nothing!" murmured Isabel, still facing her husband
+as she moved round into the garden driveway. "Arthur Winslow, it is you
+who are on trial, not I!"
+
+"I on trial! God, listen to that!"
+
+He sprang after her, gripped her shoulders, and hung over her, snarling,
+"You two-faced runaway! what have I done but suffer?"
+
+She kept the lantern hid. "What have you done? Oh, my husband, will you
+hear if I tell you? You have hung the fates of all of us, living or yet
+to live, on one thread,--please, dear, don't bear so heavily on me,--on
+one poor thread which the jar of another misstep will surely break. Oh,
+let us not make it! Come, Arthur,--my husband,--into the house; maybe
+we can yet save ourselves and our dear ones! Arthur, you're hurting me
+dreadfully. If you press me down that way, you'll force me to my knees."
+
+Still she spoke in undertone, and still she muffled the light, while
+steadily the weight of his arms increased. Suddenly he crowded her to
+the earth. "Arthur," she murmured, "Arthur, what are you going to do?
+Don't kill me here and now, Arthur; wait till to-morrow. I have that to
+pass through to-night which may end my life peaceably in bed; and if it
+should, then there will be no infamy on any of us,--on you or our child,
+living, or on me, dead; and Godfrey, and Ruth, and mother, and all can
+be"--
+
+"Give me that lantern!" He held her with one hand, snatched the light
+from cover, and thrust it into her face. "So this is what you signal him
+with, is it?"
+
+"Oh no, no! Arthur, dear, no! Before God's throne, no!"
+
+He lifted it as high as his arm would go, and with all his force swung
+it down, crashing and quenched, upon her head.
+
+She gave a gentle sigh and rolled at his feet. Groaning with horror and
+fright, he lifted her in his arms and bore her to her room and bed.
+
+There she presently opened her eyes to find him laving her face and
+head, moaning, covering them with kisses, and imploring her forgiveness
+in a thousand hysterical repetitions.
+
+"Hush, dear," she whispered. "I see how it all happened. Does anybody
+know? Oh, God be thanked! don't let any one find out! It was all a
+misunderstanding. So many things crowded together to mislead you!"
+
+"Oh yes, so many, many things at once, my treasure! Oh yes, yes!"
+
+"Call Sarah, will you, dear?"
+
+"Oh, beloved, why should I? You don't need Sarah for anything."
+
+"Yes, I need her. I must send her for mother--and Ruth--I promised Ruth;
+and you must send Giles for the doctor; my hour is come."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the Byington house Ruth and her brother met at the foot of the
+stairs.
+
+"Leonard," she whispered, "what is it? Is father ill? Leonard! Oh, what
+have you seen?"
+
+"Let me pass! quick!" He would have pressed her aside, but she laid
+hands on him.
+
+"What has Arthur done?" she asked. "What is he doing?"
+
+"Ruth! Ruth! he is putting her out of his own gate!" The brother
+extended both hands to turn the sister from his path, but she twined her
+arms on his.
+
+"Leonard! Leonard! for the love of heaven, let him do it! She has only
+to go to her mother; let her go! It's the last hope. But she'd better be
+dead, and she'd a hundred times rather be dead, than that Leonard
+Byington should be her rescuer! Come in here a minute."
+
+Slipping both hands into his she drew him into the lighted room, adding
+as they went, "In a few minutes I can make some errand to her and find
+how matters stand"--
+
+They stumbled over a disordered rug. She fell into a chair; he sank to
+his knees, and with his face in her hands he moaned, "Oh, Ruth! Oh,
+Ruth! it's my fault after all! I should have gone away at the
+beginning!"
+
+Ruth and Arthur met face to face in the Winslow garden. "I was just
+coming for you," he said, excitedly.
+
+"For Isabel?"
+
+"Yes, her mother is with her, and"--a sound of wheels--"here's Giles,
+now, off for the doctor."
+
+The servant passed. "Yes, I got here by the sunset express. I couldn't
+stay away--with this impending."
+
+"I didn't see you come."
+
+"No, of course you didn't see me, for I didn't go to the station, and so
+I didn't pass anywhere near your house. I got off at the tank and came
+up the hill path."
+
+"You must have got drenched; you _are_ drenched."
+
+"Oh no! I got in before the rain began. Let myself in without seeing any
+one, and found Isabel was over at her mother's. So I waited here."
+
+"Didn't let her know you were home?" asked Ruth, with a penetrating
+gaze.
+
+"No, I haven't been off the place since I came, but I stepped out so
+many times into the garden to see if she was coming that I'm soaking
+wet."
+
+They entered the lighted house, and he turned upon her a glance heavy
+and wavering with falsehood. His tongue ran like a terrified horse.
+"Oh--eh--before you go upstairs--Ruth--there's one thing I'm distressed
+about. I've told Mrs. Morris, and she's promised to see that the doctor
+understands it perfectly,--though I shall explain it to him myself the
+moment he comes. And still I wish you'd see that he understands, will
+you?"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Why, at last, as I was waiting for Isabel, and saw her coming, I went
+to meet her. Unfortunately she took me for a stranger, turned to run,
+and tripped and fell headlong! She somehow got her lantern between the
+base of a tree and the crown of her head, smashed the lantern, and cut
+and bruised her head pitifully!"
+
+To hide her start of distress Ruth moved up the stair; but after a step
+or two she turned. "Arthur, why say anything about it, if nothing is
+asked?"
+
+The husband stared at her and turned deadly pale.
+
+"Th--that's tr--true!" he said, with an eager gesture. "I'll not mention
+it. And--Ruth!"--she was leaving him--"you might s--say the same to Mrs.
+Morris!"
+
+She nodded, but would not trust her eyes to meet his. He was right; she
+had divined his deed.
+
+He went loiteringly into the library and gently closed the door. Then he
+turned the light low, paced once up and down the room, and all at once
+slammed himself full length upon a lounge, and lay face up, face down,
+by turns, writhing and tearing his hair.
+
+Soon again he was pacing the floor, and presently was prone once more,
+and then once more up.
+
+Giles, his English man, brought the doctor, and Arthur heard him
+discoursing as the vehicle drew up.
+
+"Yes, sir, quite so; quite so, sir. And yet I believe, sir, if h-all
+money and lands was 'eld in common, the 'ole 'uman ryce would be as
+'appy as the gentlemen and lydies on Bylow 'Ill!"
+
+The young husband met the physician cheerily, sent him up, and went back
+to his solitude.
+
+An hour passed, and then Sarah Stebbens knocked and leaned in. "Mr.
+Arthur!"
+
+"What, Sarah?"
+
+"Oh! I didn't see you. All's well, and it's a daughter."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+BABY
+
+
+It was most pleasant, being asked by everyone, even by General Byington,
+how it felt to be a grandmother. "Oh! ho, ho!" Mrs. Morris's unutilized
+dimple kept itself busy to the point of positive fatigue.
+
+Even more delightful was it, when the time came round for the totality
+of her sex--the only sex worth considering--to call and see the babe and
+mother, to hear them all proclaim it the prettiest infant ever seen, and
+covertly pronounce Isabel more beautiful than on her wedding day.
+
+In a way she was; and particularly when they fondly rallied her upon her
+new accession of motherly practical manner, and she laughed with them,
+and ended with that merry, mellow sigh which still gave Ruth new pride
+in her and new hope. But another source of Ruth's new hope was that
+Arthur, who had written to the bishop and resigned his calling the day
+after Mrs. Morris's little namesake was born, had at length withdrawn
+his letter.
+
+"It is to your brother we owe its withdrawal," said the bishop,
+privately, to Ruth.
+
+She beamed gratefully, but did not tell him that, after the long, secret
+conference between her brother and the rector, Leonard had come to her
+and wept for Arthur the only tears he had ever shed in her presence.
+Now Leonard had found occasion to go West for a time, though he still
+held his office; and Arthur was filling the rectorate almost in the old
+first way. On some small parish matter the rustic vestryman with the
+spectacled daughter came to Arthur's library in better spirits than he
+had shown for months, and by and by asked conjecturally, "I--eh--guess
+you don't keep any babies here you're ashamed to show, do ye?" and held
+his mouth very wide open.
+
+The infinitesimal was brought.
+
+"Well, I vum! Why, Miz. Winslow, I don't believe th' ever was a pretty
+baby so puny, nor a puny baby so pretty! Now, if it's a fair question, I
+hope y' ain't tryin' to push in between this baby and the keaow, be ye?"
+
+"No," laughed Isabel. "I'm not that conceited. I should only be in the
+way."
+
+"Well," he said as they parted, shaking Arthur's hand to the end of his
+speech, "I like to see a baby resemble its father, and that's what this
+'n 's a-tryin' to do, jest 's hard 's she can."
+
+So went matters for a time, and then, while the babe began to fill out
+and lengthen out, Isabel showed herself daily more and more overspent.
+The physician reappeared, and spoke plainly:--
+
+"And if your cousin down South is so determined to have you at her
+wedding, why, go! Leave your baby with your mother; she's older in the
+business than you are."
+
+But the cousin's wedding was weeks away yet, and Isabel clung to her wee
+treasure, and temporized with the aunts and cousins in the South and
+with her mother and Ruth at home, until the doctor spoke again.
+
+"Let's see," he said to Arthur. "This is November, baby's five months
+old. Send your wife away. Put her out! Something's killing her by
+inches, and I believe it's just care o' the nest. We must drive her off
+it, as I drove Leonard Byington off,--which, you remember, you, quietly,
+were the first to suggest to me to do.... Coming back, you
+say,--Byington? Yes, but only for a day or two,--election time."
+
+It did not occur to the doctor that Arthur was secretly keeping his wife
+from going anywhere.
+
+The night Leonard came home the old pond, for the first time in the
+season, froze over, and through Giles's activities it was arranged next
+day that Martin Kelly, Sarah Stebbens, Minnie, and he should go down
+there after supper and skate by the light of fagot fires made out on the
+ice. Giles piled the fagots; but at a late moment, to the disgust of
+Giles and Minnie, the older pair pitilessly changed their minds, and
+decided they were too old to make such nincompoops of themselves. Minnie
+would not go without Sarah, for Minnie was up to her pretty eyebrows in
+love with Giles, as well as immensely correct; and so there, as it
+seemed, was the end of that.
+
+At tea Arthur told Isabel he was going for a long walk down through the
+town and across the meadows, and would not be home before bedtime.
+Isabel approved heartily, and said Sarah would stay near the sleeping
+babe, and she would spend the evening with her mother. She and Arthur
+went together as far as the cross-paths in the arbor, and there, in
+parting, he clasped and kissed her with a sudden frenzy that only added
+one more distressful misgiving to the many that now haunted her days.
+
+She found her mother alone. They sat down, hand in hand, before an open
+fire, and had talked in sweet quietness but a short while, when a chance
+word and the knowledge that this time they would not be interrupted made
+it easy for Isabel to say things she had for weeks been trying to say.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE TALKATIVE LEONARD
+
+
+Across the street the father of Leonard and Ruth, already abed, lay
+thinking of their tribulation and casting about in his mind for some new
+move that might help to end it happily. Godfrey had not come. He had not
+looked for him to appear with a hop, skip, and a jump, "a man under
+authority" as he was; but here were five months gone.
+
+"I can't clamor for him," thought he, and feared Ruth had written him
+that the emergency was past. And so she had, in those days of new hope
+and new suspense which had followed for a while Arthur's withdrawal of
+his resignation.
+
+At the fireside below sat Leonard and Ruth, not hand in hand, like
+Isabel and her mother, yet conversing on the same theme as they.
+
+Leonard had spent the day at the polls; his party had won an easy
+victory; and, though not on the ticket, he was now awaiting a
+telegraphic summons to the state capital. His fortunes were growing.
+Yet that was not a thing to be wordy about, and now, when the murmur of
+his voice continued so long and steadily that it found even the dulled
+ear of the aged father in the upper room, that father knew what the
+topic must be. On all other matters the son and brother had become more
+silent than ever,--was being nicknamed far and near, flatteringly and
+otherwise, for his reticence; but let Ruth sit down with him alone and
+barely draw near this theme,--this wound,--and his speech bled from him
+and would not be stanched.
+
+"I can admit I have made the mistake of my life," he said, "but I cannot
+and will not, even now, give up and say there is nothing to be saved out
+of it. It's a mistake that has bound me to her, to you, to Godfrey, to
+him, to all, and demands of me, pinioned and blindfolded as I am, every
+effort I can make, every device I can contrive, to compel him to free
+her and you and all of us from this torture.
+
+"He shall not go on eating out our lives. I have dawdled with him
+weakly, pitifully, but I did it in my hope to save him. I tried to save
+him for his own sake, Ruth, truly,--as truly as for her sake and ours;
+and I wanted to save his work with him,--his church, his and hers; so
+much of it is hers. Oh, Ruth, I love that little bird-box, spite of all
+its spunky beliefs and twittering complacencies. I wanted to save it and
+him; and over and over there has seemed such good ground of hope in him.
+It's been always so unbelievable that he should utterly fail us.
+Ruth, if you could have seen his contrition the night I tore up that
+shameful, servile resignation! I don't need to see Isabel to know he
+is wearing the soul out of her. You needn't have answered one of my
+questions,--which I honor you for answering so unwillingly; Mrs. Morris
+gave me their answer in five minutes, though we talked only of
+investments. And Mrs. Morris needn't have given it; to see Arthur
+himself is enough. All the genuineness has gone out of the man,--out of
+his words, out of his face, out of his voice. I wonder it hasn't gone
+from all of us, driven out by this smirking masquerade into which he
+has trapped us."
+
+"Have you determined what to do?" asked the sister, gazing into the
+fire.
+
+"Not yet. But I sha'n't go back West. Flight doesn't avail. And, Ruth"--
+
+"Yes, brother; you've cabled?"
+
+"I have. He'll come at once, this time." A step on the porch drew the
+speaker to the door.
+
+The telegram from the capital had come. But until its bearer had gone
+again and was out of hearing down the street the young man lingered in
+the porch. His mind was wholly on that evening when Isabel had passed
+with the lantern. Would she pass now? From the idle query he turned to
+go in, when Ruth came out, and they stayed another moment together.
+Presently their ear caught a stir at the side of the Morris cottage.
+
+"Hmm," murmured Ruth half consciously, and, with a playful shudder at
+the cold, whispered, "Come in, come in!"
+
+But then quickly, lest this should carry a hint of distrust, she tripped
+in alone, closed the door, and glided to the bright hearth. There a
+moment of waiting changed her mind. She ran again to the door, and began
+to say as she threw it open, "My brother! you'll catch your"--
+
+But no brother was there.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE THIN ICE BREAKS
+
+
+Isabel, who had never confessed her trouble to her mother until now, had
+this evening told all there was to tell.
+
+"No, no, my dear," she said as she moved to go, "I have no dread of his
+blows. I don't suppose he will ever strike me again. Ah, there's the
+worst of it; he's got away, away beyond blows. I wish sometimes he'd
+brain me, if only that would stop his secretly watching me.
+
+"If he'd never gone beyond blows, I would have died before I would
+have told; not for meekness, dearie, nor even for love,--of you, or my
+child, or any one,--but just for pride and shame. But to know, every
+day and hour, that I'm watched, and that every path I tread is full of
+traps,--there's what's killing me. And I could let it kill me and never
+tell, if being killed were all. But I tell you because--Oh, my poor
+little mother dearie, do I wear you out, saying the same things over
+and over?
+
+"This is all I ask you to remember: that my reason for telling you is to
+save the honor of my husband himself, and of you, dear heart, and of--of
+my child, you know. For, mother, every innocent thing I do is being
+woven into a net of criminating evidence. Sooner or later it's certain
+to catch me fast and give me over, you and me and--and baby, to public
+shame."
+
+As they went toward the arbor door Isabel warily hushed, but her mother
+said: "There's no one to overhear, honey-blossom; Minnie's at your house
+with Sarah."
+
+But neither was there more to be said. The daughter shut herself out,
+and stood alone on the doorstep pondering what she had done. For she had
+acted as well as spoken, and, without knowledge of Leonard's move, was
+calling Godfrey home herself. Her mother was to send the dispatch in the
+morning.
+
+[Illustration: "But to know every day and hour that I'm watched."]
+
+So standing and distressfully musing, she heard the click of the
+Byingtons' door as Ruth left Leonard on the porch. But her thought went
+after Arthur. Where was he? That he had honestly gone where he had said
+he was going she painfully doubted. She stirred to move on, but had not
+taken a step when a feminine cry of terror set her blood leaping and
+sent her flying down the arbor, and where the two paths crossed she and
+Leonard met at such a speed that only by seizing her with both his hands
+did he avoid trampling her down. The scream was repeated again and
+again.
+
+"It's Minnie!" cried Isabel as they sprang down the path to the mill
+pond; and Leonard, outrunning her, called back,--
+
+"We'll get her out! She's not gone under!"
+
+The next moment he, and then she, were on the scene. Minnie stood on
+the firmer ice away from the bank, moaning in continued agitation, but
+already rescued. It was Arthur Winslow who had saved her.
+
+Now he gained the bank with the dripping girl, where he yielded her to
+his wife, and without a word from him, from Isabel, or from Leonard to
+any one but the incessantly talking maid, the four hurried up the path.
+When they reached the arbor Ruth had joined them, and there the three
+women turned to the cottage. Leonard passed on toward his home. Arthur
+went into his own house.
+
+In the cottage, while being hurried into dry clothes, Minnie more
+coherently explained her mishap. Wishing to play a joke on Giles, she
+had slipped away from the fireside company of him and Sarah to put a
+match to his fagots on the pond, run back with word that they were
+burning, and laugh with Sarah while Giles should plunge out to find the
+incendiaries. But she had forgotten how frail good ice may be against a
+warm bank, and leaping down, had promptly broken through. She had had
+the fortune to hold on by the ice's outer edge until Arthur, whom she
+felt sure only Providence could have sent there, drew her out. She was
+tearfully ashamed, yet not so broken in spirit but she fiercely vowed
+she would get even with Giles for this yet.
+
+Leonard went to his room, Arthur to his, and each in his way shut
+himself in to darkness, silence, and the fury of his own heart.
+
+One of the things most harrowing to Leonard was that, at every turn,
+the active part fell to Arthur, while him fate held mercilessly to the
+passive; and his soul writhed in unworded prayer for any conceivable
+turn of events that would give him leave to act, to do!
+
+But all he could do was done. Godfrey was sent for: everything must
+await his coming. Heaven hold Arthur's hand till Godfrey could come!
+
+Ruth returned home and began to lock up the house. When, presently, she
+tapped at her brother's door and looked in, he had lighted the room and
+was reading his telegram.
+
+"All right over the way," she said, and to hurry on over the grim
+untruth repeated briefly Minnie's story. "Good-night. You go--to-morrow?
+Well, you'll make haste back."
+
+She left him, but later returned.
+
+"Leonard." At the slightly opened door she thrust in her Bible, with a
+finger on the line, "My soul, wait thou only upon God."
+
+"Thank you," said the brother. "Good-night. I'm afraid we've kept Him
+waiting on us."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+MUST GIVE YOU UP
+
+
+Over on the Winslow side of the way, Isabel, having tarried in the
+cottage to explain to her frightened mother how perfectly natural it was
+that Arthur, after his tramp across the meadows, should have made a
+circuit to the upper side of the old mill pool, went pensively home.
+Presently, holding a lamp, she stood in the door between her room and
+Arthur's, lifted the light above her head, and, shading her brows,
+called his name. Hidden in the gloom, silent and motionless, he stared
+for a moment on the beautiful apparition, and then moved without a sound
+into the beams of the lamp, a picture of misery and desperation.
+
+"Why in the dark?" amiably inquired the wife.
+
+With widening eyes and spectral motions he drew near.
+
+"In the dark?" he asked. "Why in the dark? The darkness is in me, and
+all the lamps that light the world's ships into harbor could not dispel
+it."
+
+All at once he went to his knees. "Oh, my wife, my wife! save me, save
+me! Hell is in my soul!"
+
+She drew back, and with low vehemence urged him to his feet. "Up! up! My
+husband shall not kneel to me!"
+
+Laying her hand reverently upon his shoulder she pressed him into his
+room, set the lamp aside, and let him clasp her wildly in his arms.
+
+"Save me, Isabel," he moaned again. "Save me."
+
+"From what, dear heart,--from what can I save you?" She drew him to a
+seat and knelt beside him.
+
+"From the green-eyed demon that has gnawed, gnawed, gnawed at my heart
+till it is rent to shreds, and at my brain--my brain!--till it is almost
+gone." His brow drooped to hers. "Almost gone, beloved; my brain is
+almost gone."
+
+"No, Arthur, dearest, no, no, no; your heart is torn, but your mind,
+thank God, is whole. This is only a mood. Come, it will pass with one
+night's sleep."
+
+Still he held her brow beneath his. "Save me, Isabel; my soul is almost
+gone. Oh, save me from the fiends that come before me and behind me, by
+night and by day, eyes shut or eyes open."
+
+"My husband! my love! how can I save you? How can I help you? Tell me
+how."
+
+"Hear me! hear me confess! That will save me, oh, so sweetly, so
+sweetly! That will save me from the faces--the white, white faces that
+float on that black pool down yonder, and move their accusing lips at
+me: _his_ face--and mine--and thine. Oh, Isabel, until you stood
+before me in the golden light of your lamp, transfigured into a
+messenger from heaven, it was in my lost soul to do the deed this
+night."
+
+The wife laid her palms upon her husband's temples, and putting forth
+her strength lifted them and looked tenderly into his eyes.
+
+"Dear heart, you do not frighten me. You know how unaccountably fear
+deserts me in fearful moments. But I know there's nothing for either of
+us to fear now. This is all in your tortured imagination, and there,
+though you had not seen me, it would have stayed; you never would have
+come to the act. Arthur, your soul is not lost. You who have pointed the
+way of escape and deliverance so clearly and savingly to so many, you
+need not miss it now yourself."
+
+"Idle words, Isabel,--idle, idle words. The very words of Christ are
+idle to me until I give you up."
+
+"Give me up, my husband? Dear love, you cannot! You shall not! I will
+not be given up. You haven't the cause, and I haven't the cause."
+
+"Oh, Isabel, I stole you! And the curse of God has gone with the theft,
+and with every step of the thief, from the first day till now. From the
+first day until now God has lifted that other man up and brought me
+down. And yet, before God who said, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's
+wife, he loves you this moment--now!--with the love of a man for a
+woman."
+
+"Arthur, no! If he did"--
+
+"Isabel, if he did not--if he did not love you yet as before he lost
+you--oh! if he did not love you infinitely more now than then--he would
+not be Leonard Byington. That is all my evidence, all my argument, all
+the ground of my hate; and I hate him with a hatred that has
+finished--finished!--with my heart, and is devouring my brain."
+
+"Oh, my poor husband, listen to"--
+
+"Listen to me!" he broke in. "Listen before I lose the blessed impulse
+to say there is but one cure. I must give you up to Leonard Byington.
+Oh, let me speak! I took you from him by law; by law I will give you
+back."
+
+"Do you mean divorce, Arthur?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"On what ground?"
+
+"On the ground of ill treatment. You shall bring suit; I will plead
+guilty."
+
+She rose, with his temples still in her hands. "Ah! whose words are idle
+now?"
+
+She bent over him with eyes of passionate kindness. "You did not take me
+from him. You asked me to take you, and for better for worse, till death
+us do part, I took you, Arthur, knowing as much of any other man's love
+for me as I know at this hour. You could not steal me; the shame would
+be mine, to have let you. You are no thief! I am no stolen thing! You
+shall be happy with me; you shall not give me up!"
+
+He leaped to his feet and snatched her into his arms. The babe cried
+sleepily from its mother's room. She tenderly disengaged herself, left
+him in the door, moved on to the child's crib, and in the dim light of
+the bedside taper, facing him from beyond it, soothed the little one by
+her silent touch.
+
+To Arthur, wan and frail though she was, the sight was heavenly fair, a
+vision of ineffable peace to which it seemed a sacrilege to draw nearer;
+but she beckoned, and he stole to the spot. With the quieted babe in its
+crib between them, the pair knit arms about each other's neck and
+kissed.
+
+"My own! my own at last!" murmured the husband. "I never had you until
+now!"
+
+"The cure has worked, dear heart," breathed the wife,--"worked without
+surgery, has it not?"
+
+"The cure has worked," he replied,--"worked without the sacrifice. Oh,
+the sudden sweet ease of it!"
+
+Whispering a fervent good-night in response to hers, he covered her head
+and brows with caresses; then stole away with eyes still fastened on
+her, and at the dividing threshold waved a last parting and closed the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+SLEEP, OF A SORT
+
+
+Isabel went to her couch in great heaviness and agitation. Her sad
+confidings to her mother, Minnie's adventure, Arthur's pitiful if not
+alarming condition, she strove to reconsider duly and in their order;
+but perpetually there interfered, with its every smallest detail
+thrillingly clear and strong, that moment which had thrown her once more
+into the company, tossed her into the very clutch, of Leonard Byington.
+She turned her face into her pillow and prayed God for other thoughts
+and visions, and at length, while charging herself to see her mother in
+time to postpone the sending of her dispatch to Godfrey, she slept.
+
+Sleep, of a sort, came also to Arthur, though not before many an evil
+imagination had come back to tease and sting his galled mind.
+
+What chafed oftenest was the fact that Isabel, had he allowed it, would
+have sought to argue down his belief that Leonard loved her. Great
+heaven! what must be her feeling toward him, that she should offer to
+argue such a question? She might truly deny all knowledge of his
+passion, but oh, where were her quick outcries of womanly abhorrence?
+Where was the word that Leonard Byington was no more to her than any
+other man,--that word which would have been the first to flash from her
+if conscience had not stopped it? Twice he sprang up in his bed,
+whispering: "They love! They love! Each knows it of the other! They
+love!"
+
+The second time, as he stared, suddenly he saw them! They stood just
+beyond the foot of his couch, wrapped in each other's arms. Choking with
+wrath, freezing with horror, he slid to the floor; but at his first step
+they floated apart. Isabel glided toward her own door, fading as she
+went, and dissolved in a broad moonbeam. Leonard, as he receded, grew
+every instant more real, until, at his pursuer's second step, he melted
+through a window and was gone. Arthur sprang to the spot and stared out
+and down; but all he saw was the moon, the frosty night, and the silent,
+motionless garden.
+
+With a whisper of fierce purpose he turned and noiselessly threw on his
+clothes, then clutched his head in his hands in a wild effort to recall
+what the purpose was, and by and by lay quietly down again on his bed.
+He could not recollect; but the inner tumult quieted more and more, and
+after a time, without putting off any part of his dress, he drew the
+bedcovers over himself, and in a few moments was partially asleep. So
+for an hour or more he lay in half-waking dreams, ghastly with phantoms
+and breathless with dismay of his own ferocious strivings. Then he rose
+once more, and, with the noiselessness which habit had perfected, left
+his room, moved down the upper hall and the stair, and let himself out
+into the garden. Wadded in his arms he bore one or two of the coverings
+from his bed. He took his way to the pond.
+
+He was walking in his sleep.
+
+At an earlier day Isabel would have been awakened by her husband's
+softest movement; but now, used to his stirrings, weary in body and
+mind, and in some degree reassured, she slept on unstartled until
+Arthur's return.
+
+He came as silently as he had gone, and was empty-handed. He had tied a
+great stone in the two bed-coverings, and through the thin new ice of
+the hole where Minnie had broken in had sunk them in the black depth
+under the shelving rock. He was still asleep.
+
+The door between the two chambers gave a faint sound as he opened it,
+yet neither mother nor child moved. A moment passed, and he had reached
+the bed. Another went by, and Isabel was awake, wildly but vainly trying
+to scream, to rise. A knee was on her bosom, two hands grappled her
+throat, and two out-starting eyes were close to hers. Her husband was
+strangling her.
+
+Then he too awoke. With a horrified cry he recoiled, and she, for the
+first time in her life in a transport of terror, hurled him, in the
+strength of her frenzy, to the farther side of the bed, and writhing out
+on the opposite side, crept under it and lay still. In a torture of
+bewilderment and remorse Arthur buried his face in the bedside. Then,
+helpless to distinguish what he had done from what he had dreamed, he
+sprang back to the place where Isabel had lain sleeping, and lo, it was
+empty.
+
+"Oh, was it thou, was it thou?" he wailed, in a stifled voice. "Was it
+not he?"
+
+Whispering and moaning her name, hearkening and groping, he sought her
+from corner to corner, first of her room and then of his own, and then
+went to the hall and to other rooms in the same harrowing quest.
+
+Isabel crept forth and darted to her babe. Yet as she leaned to take it
+in her arms her better judgment told her the child was safe. The husband
+too, and every one beside, were safer from his jealous wrath while the
+babe remained. With one anguished knitting of her hands over it she left
+it, and fled in her night-dress. Arthur's course was made plain by his
+moanings, and easily avoiding him, she glided down a back stair, out
+into the arbor, and across to her mother's cottage and bed-chamber. As
+she did so he returned hurriedly to his room, with low cries of less
+wretched conviction, and looked eagerly under his bed and then under
+hers. Thereupon the last hope died, and he dropped to his face on the
+floor in abject agony.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+MISSING
+
+
+After a time a new conjecture brought him to his feet. To solve it he
+would go to the pond. If he had truly been there and done this appalling
+thing, he would know it by the empty imprint of the boulder he had taken
+from its resting place of years. If he had not, then Isabel had fled to
+her mother and would be found with her in the morning, and the blot of
+her murder, though it blackened his soul, was yet not on his hands.
+
+He went to the water, and soon he came again with the step and face of
+one called out of his grave. Slowly he counted the disordered coverings
+of his wife's couch, stood a moment in desolate perplexity, and then
+went quickly and counted those of his own. A sheet and a blanket were
+gone. He turned to a closet and supplied the lack, and then paced the
+floor until dawn.
+
+Before the servants were fairly astir he laid away the clothing Isabel
+had put off, and contrived to leave the house and pass through the arbor
+unseen until he reached its farther end; but there Mrs. Morris, in a
+dressing gown, opened to him before he could knock. She forced her usual
+laugh, but he saw the white preparedness of her face.
+
+"She knows my crime," he thought, and was in agony to guess how she had
+got the knowledge and what she would do with it.
+
+"Why, Arthur," she sweetly began, "what brings you"--But her throat
+closed.
+
+"Mother," he interrupted emotionally as they shut themselves in, "is
+Isabel here?"
+
+"Isabel?--No-o! Why--why, Arthur, she went home last night before ten
+o'clock!" The little lady knew her acting was not good, but it was
+better than she had hoped to make it. "Arthur Winslow! don't tell me my
+child is not at home! Oh, my heavens!"
+
+"Wait, mother; listen. I beseech you. Do you absolutely know she's not
+here?"
+
+"I know it! Oh, Arthur, are you only trying to break bad news to me by
+littles? Has Isabel destroyed herself? Has she fled?" The inquirer
+played well now; her pallor, that had seemed to accuse him, was gone,
+and her question offered a cue which he greedily took.
+
+"Fled? Isabel! Destroyed herself,--that spotless soul? Oh no, no, no!
+But Oh merciful God! I am afraid she has been stolen!" He sank into a
+seat and dropped his face into his hands.
+
+The maid's steps sounded overhead, and he started up. Mrs. Morris laid a
+hand on his arm. She was pale again, but her words were reassuring.
+
+"It's Minnie," she murmured: "let me go and see her. She'll not be
+surprised; I'm always the first one up." She went, and was soon back
+again.
+
+"There is no time to lose"--Arthur began.
+
+"No, you must go. Go search for every clue that will tell us a word of
+her; but, whatever you do, let no one, not even Sarah, know she is
+missing, until we know enough ourselves to protect her from every shadow
+of reproach!"
+
+"True! true! right! right!" said Arthur, while with secret terror he
+cried to himself: "This woman knows! She knows, she knows, and all this
+is make-believe, put on to gain time!"
+
+But he saw no safer course than to help on the sham. "Right," he said
+again; "only, mother, dear, how shall we hide her absence?"
+
+"We needn't hide it. You know she got another telegram last night,
+begging her to come at once to the wedding. We can say she went on this
+morning's train, before day; it makes such good Southern connections.
+And now go! make your search with all your might! and after a while I'll
+come over and pack a trunk full of her things, and express it South,
+just as if she were there, and had gone so hurriedly that--Don't you
+see?"
+
+Arthur said he saw it all, but he did not; he saw much that was not,
+and much that was he saw not. He did not see that the dust of the old
+street, and of the new town as well, was on Mrs. Morris's shoes; and
+that Isabel, in a gown which she had left at the cottage when she went
+to be mistress of his home, was really on the train, bound South.
+
+Dropping all pretence of having any search to make, he hurried back to
+his own room, and by and by told the pleasantly astonished Sarah and
+Giles the simple truth as Mrs. Morris had put it into his mouth, but
+told it in the firm belief that he was covering a hideous crime with an
+all but transparent lie.
+
+After a false show of breakfasting he went into his study,--"to work on
+his sermon," he said; but did nothing there but pace the floor, hold his
+head, and whisper, "It will not last an hour after _he_ has heard
+it," and, "O God, have mercy! Oh, my wife, my wife! Oh, my brain, my
+brain!"
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+A DOUBLE STILL HUNT
+
+
+Mrs. Morris's task was too large for her. She had always taken such
+care of her innocence that her cultivation of the virtues had been only
+incidental. Hence, morally, she had more fat than fibre; and hence
+again, though to her mind guilt was horrible, publicity was so much
+worse that her first and ruling impulse toward any evil doing not her
+own was to conceal it. That was her form of worldliness, the only fault
+she felt certain she was free from. And here she was, without a helping
+hand or a word of counsel, laboring to hide from the servants and from
+the dear Byingtons, from the church and from a scoffing world, the
+hideous fact that Isabel was a fugitive from the murderous wrath of a
+jealous husband, and that the rector of All Angels had crumbled into
+moral ruin.
+
+"And oh," she cried, "is it the worst of it, or is it the best of it,
+that in this awful extremity he keeps so sane, so marvellously sane?"
+She said this the oftener because every few hours some new sign to the
+contrary forced itself upon her notice. Oblivion was her cure-all.
+
+For a while after his conference with Mrs. Morris Arthur made some
+feeble show--for her eye alone--of looking after clews, and then, as
+much to her joy as to her amazement, told her it was a part of his
+detective strategy to return into his study, and seemingly to his
+ordinary work, until time would allow certain unfoldings for which he
+looked with confidence.
+
+"Have you found out anything?" she asked, with a glaringly false
+eagerness that gave him a new panic of suspicion and whetted his
+cunning.
+
+He said he had, but must beg her not to ask yet what it was. Then he
+inquired if any neighbor had left town that morning for Boston, and her
+heart rose into her throat as she marked the subtlety he could not keep
+out of his dark face.
+
+"Why, ye--yes--n--no, no one that I know of ex--except Leonard
+Byington," she replied, and thought, "If he should accuse Leonard, we
+are undone!"
+
+To avoid that risk she would have told him, then and there, all she
+knew, had she not feared she might draw his rage upon herself for aiding
+the wife's flight. She must, must, must keep on good terms with him till
+she and Isabel could somehow get the child. So passed the awful hours,
+mother and husband each marvelling in agony over the ghastly puzzle of
+the other's apathy.
+
+Later in the day she knocked timorously at his study door. She had come
+with a silly little proposition that he let her take the infant and go
+South as if to join Isabel. Thus the trunk would not lie in the express
+office down there, unclaimed and breeding awkward inquiries, and she
+from that point, with him at this, could keep up the illusion they had
+invented until Isabel herself should--eh--return!
+
+But when he let her in, he stood before her a silent embodiment of such
+remorse and foreboding that she could have burst into sobs and cries.
+
+Yet she broached her plan, trembling visibly, while he heard her through
+with melancholy deference.
+
+In reply he commended it, but called to her notice how much better it
+would be for her to go alone. Then the babe, left behind, would be an
+unspoken yet most eloquent guarantee that its mother would soon
+reappear.
+
+"Very true," responded the emboldened lady; "yet on the other hand"--
+
+He put out an interrupting touch. "The child is as safe with me as if it
+were in its mother's bosom."
+
+"Oh, it isn't so much a question of safety as"--
+
+The father interrupted again, with a gleam in his eyes like the
+outflashing of a knife. "I hold the child against all comers, and would
+if I had to slay its mother to do it."
+
+Mrs. Morris stifled an outcry and would have left him, but he would not
+let her.
+
+"Stay! Oh, listen to a soul in torment! The babe is already motherless.
+Isabel can never return, mother; she is with the dead. I am not waiting
+idly here for her; I am waiting busily--for her slayer. He has fled; but
+when he sees he is not pursued he will come back to the spot,--to the
+black, black hole. He cannot help it. I _know_ that. Oh, how well I
+know it! And the moment he comes he is caught,--caught in the web of
+proofs I am weaving!"
+
+He held her arm and gazed into her gazing eyes in ferocious fear of the
+web she might be weaving for him; while she, reeling sick with fear of
+him, tried with all her shaken wits to sham an impassioned accord.
+
+"And you _will_ wait?" she exclaimed approvingly. "You will not
+stir till the thing is sure?"
+
+He would not stir till the thing was sure.
+
+[Illustration: "I am waiting busily for her slayer."]
+
+As soon as it was dark enough to slip over to the Byingtons' unseen, she
+went, bearing to Ruth Isabel's apologetic good-bys, trying her small
+best to play at words with the General, and quickly getting away again,
+grateful for a breath of their atmosphere, though distressfully
+convinced that Ruth had divined the whole trouble, through the joy
+betrayed by herself on hearing that Leonard would be away for a week.
+
+She went home and slept like a weary child, and neither the next day nor
+the next, nor the next, was so awful as this first had been; they lacked
+the crackle and glare, and the crash, of the burning and falling temple.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+A DOUBLE RETURN
+
+
+Let us not attempt the picture of Isabel keeping the happy guise of a
+wedding guest among her kindred and childhood playmates while her heart
+burned with perpetual misery, yearning, and alarm. "My baby, my baby!"
+cried her breast, while the babe slept sweetly under faultless care.
+
+Nor need we draw a close portrait of her husband's mind, if mind it
+could longer be called. A horror of sleep, a horror of being awake and
+aware, remorse, phantoms, voices, sudden blazings of wrath as suddenly
+gone, sweating panics, that craven care of life which springs so rank as
+the soul decays, and a steady, cunning determination to keep whole the
+emptied shell of reputation and rank,--these were the things that filled
+his hours by day, by night; these, and a frightful expectance of one
+accusing, child-claiming ghost that never came. The air softened to
+Indian summer; the ice faded off the pool; a million leaves, crimson and
+bronze, scarlet and gold, dropped tenderly upon its silvering breadth
+and lay still; and both the joyless master of the larger house and the
+merry maid of the cottage asked Heaven impatiently if the pond would
+never freeze over again.
+
+It was Saturday afternoon when Giles, asked by Sarah Stebbens where Mr.
+Arthur was, told her he was again, as he had been so many times the last
+three days, down by the water, sitting at the edge of the overhanging
+bank; or, as the Englishman expressed it, "'dreamink the 'appy hours
+aw'y.'" So the week passed out; a second came in, and the rector of All
+Angels went to his sacred office.
+
+He knew, before he appeared in the chancel, that Mrs. Morris was in her
+accustomed place, and Ruth and her father in theirs, and that Leonard
+was not yet reported back nor looked for; but exactly as he began to
+read, "'Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us, in sundry
+places, to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness, and
+that we should not dissemble nor cloak them before the face of Almighty
+God our heavenly Father'"--a sickness filled Mrs. Morris's frame, a
+deathly hue overspread the minister's face, and Leonard came in and sat
+beside his father and sister.
+
+Yet the service went on. The people knelt.
+
+"'Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy
+ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires
+of our own hearts'"--
+
+Thus far the rector's voice had led, but here it sank, and the old
+General's, in a measure, took its place.
+
+Then it rose again, in the confession, "There is no health in us," and
+in the supplication, "Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders."
+
+There once more it failed, while the people, faltering with distress,
+repeated, "That we may hereafter lead a godly, righteous, and sober
+life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen."
+
+At this the farmer with the spectacled daughter stepped nimbly over the
+rail and caught Arthur as he rose and staggered. Leonard was hurrying
+forward, and half the people kneeling, half standing, when Mrs. Morris
+vacantly stopped his way with a face so aghast and words so confused
+that he had to give her over to Ruth. Then he hastened on to where
+Arthur was being led into the vestry by his physician and others.
+
+But now he was turned back by the doctor, requesting him to dismiss the
+congregation; which he did, with the physician's assurance that the
+trouble was no more than vertigo, and that Arthur was even now quite
+able to proceed home in the farmer vestryman's rockaway. The people
+noticed that the physician went with him.
+
+Mrs. Morris followed on foot with the farmer's daughter, and with Ruth
+and the General, and Leonard went into town to telegraph Isabel, in her
+mother's name, to come home. As he was starting, Mrs. Morris drew Ruth
+aside and whispered something about Godfrey. To which Ruth softly
+replied, with an affectionate twist in her smile, "It couldn't hurry
+him; he's already on the way."
+
+In the room next that in which her son-in-law lay asleep under anodynes
+the little mother's odd laugh was turned all to moan. "Oh!--ho--ho!" she
+sighed in solitude, "if Arthur could have learned from Godfrey how to
+wait, or even if Isabel could but have learned from Ruth how to keep one
+waiting!"
+
+She paused at a window that looked over the garden and into the street.
+Leonard passed. She turned quickly away, only sighing again,
+"Oh!--ho--ho!" Her thought might have been kinder had she known he was
+stabbing himself at every step with blame of all this woe.
+
+"I ought to have foreseen," was his constant silent cry. "I am the one
+who ought to have foreseen."
+
+Lack of Sunday trains and two failures to connect kept Isabel from
+arriving until nightfall of the third day, Wednesday. Arthur knew Mrs.
+Morris had telegraphed for her; but to him that was only part of the
+play under which he thought he and she were hiding the frightful truth.
+
+On this day he had so outwitted his village physician as to be given the
+freedom for which he ravened; liberty to take the air in his garden, as
+understood by the doctor, but by him liberty to stand guard down at the
+edge of that dark pool which would not freeze over,--liberty to take an
+air sweet with the odors of the parting year, but crowded also with
+distended eyes and strangling groans.
+
+He was down there in the early starlight when Ruth drove softly into the
+garden, bringing Isabel. Warily the mother came out into the pillared
+porch, and silently received the house's mistress into her arms.
+
+"He doesn't know," she said. "I couldn't tell him till you should come,
+for fear of disappointing him."
+
+The argument seemed strained, but no one said so, and with a whispered
+good-night Ruth drove away, and the two went in. As they stole upstairs
+they debated how Isabel had best reveal herself. "I'm terribly afraid
+that won't work, blessing," said Mrs. Morris; "you'd better let me break
+it to him, first."
+
+"No, dearie, I don't think so. I haven't the shadow of a fear"--
+
+"Oh, my darling child, you never have!"
+
+"But I know him so well, mother. We have only to come unexpectedly face
+to face and--Oh, I've seen the effect so often!" They entered her room
+whispering: "I'll change this dress for the one he last saw me in, and
+stand over here by the crib where I stood then, and--Oh, sweet Heaven!
+is this my little flower sleeping just as I left her?" With clasped
+hands and tearful eyes she bent over the child.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+EVENING RED
+
+
+Then she began to unrobe, but stopped to throw her arms about her
+mother's neck.
+
+"Now, dearly beloved, you hurry away down the path and persuade him up
+and send him in. I'm only afraid you'll find him chilled half to death,
+it's growing cold so fast. And you can follow in after him, dearie, if
+you wish,--only not too close."
+
+The mother went, and had got no farther than the cross-path when she
+came all at once upon the master of the house.
+
+"Oh! ho, ho! here you are! I was just--Arthur, dear, where is your
+overcoat? Do go right up to your room, my son, till I can get Sarah
+to have a fire started in the library." She multiplied words in pure
+affright, so drawn was his face with anguish, and so wild his eyes
+with aimless consternation.
+
+Without reply he passed in and went upstairs. Mrs. Morris remained
+below.
+
+Isabel's heart beat fast. She had made her change of dress, and in a far
+corner of her room, with her face toward the open door that let into
+his, was again leaning with a mother's ecstasy over the sleeping babe,
+when she heard his step.
+
+It came to his outer door, which from her place could not be seen.
+
+Did he stop, and stand there? No, he had not stopped; he was only moving
+softly, for the child's sake.
+
+She stood motionless, listening and looking with her whole soul, and
+wishing the light were less dim in this shadowy corner, but knowing
+there was enough to show her to him when he should reach the nearer
+door. The endless moment wore away, and there on the threshold he
+stood--if that--Oh merciful God!--if that was Arthur Winslow.
+
+His eyes fell instantly upon her, yet he made neither motion nor sound,
+only stayed and stared, while an unearthly terror came into his face.
+
+Care of the child kept her silent, but in solemn tenderness she lifted
+her arms toward him.
+
+
+
+He uttered a freezing shriek and fled. In an instant his tread was
+resounding in the hall, then on two or three steps of the stair as she
+hurried after, and then there came a long, tumbling fall, her mother's
+wail in the hail below, and a hoarse cry of dismay from Giles as he
+rushed out of the library.
+
+"He's only stunned, mum," Giles was saying as Isabel reached the spot.
+"He's no more nor just stunned, mum."
+
+He had lifted the fallen man's head and shoulders, and Mrs. Stebbens
+came, dropping to her knees and sprinkling water into the still, white
+face.
+
+Isabel threw herself between.
+
+[Illustration: "Arthur! Arthur! can't you speak?"]
+
+"Arthur! Arthur! can't you speak? Oh, let us move him into the library!"
+
+"Yes, um!" exclaimed Giles. "'E'll come to in there; you can see 'e's
+only stunned."
+
+He tried to raise him, and Isabel and Sarah moved to help; but the wife
+turned on hearing Ruth's voice at her side, and Leonard Byington lifted
+the limp man in his arms unaided, and bore him to the library lounge.
+
+"Arthur," he pleaded, with arms still under him, "can't you speak to us,
+dear boy? Say at least good-by, can't you, Arthur?" He parted the
+clothing from neck and breast, and laid an ear to his heart.
+
+"Do you hear it, Leonard?" cried the wife. "Oh, you do hear it, don't
+you, Leonard?"
+
+There was no answer. For a moment Leonard's own form relaxed, and he
+turned his face and buried it in the unresponsive breast. Then he lifted
+it again, and taking the other face between his hands he sank his brow
+to the brow upturned and cried: "God rest your soul, Arthur! Oh, Arthur,
+Arthur, God rest your soul!"
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+MORNING GRAY
+
+
+Mrs. Morris gave the physician her account of the accident, the
+physician gave the reporters his, and no other ever got into the old
+street or the town it looks down upon with such sweet superiority.
+
+Said the rustic vestryman to another pall-bearer, as they turned toward
+their homes, "Many's the time All Angels's been craowded, but I never
+see it craowded as 'twas this time."
+
+The new mound was white under January snows when Godfrey and Isabel
+first stood beside it together; and when summer had come and gone again,
+and at last the time drew near when, by the regular alternations of the
+service, the ocean wanderer's three years afloat were to be followed by
+three ashore, it was beside that mound that Ruth let him ask the
+long-withheld question.
+
+And once more the new year followed the old.
+
+On one of its earliest days, "I cal'late," a certain somebody began to
+say to General Byington, "th' never was a happier weddin' so quiet, nor
+a qui--" But he caught the sheen of his daughter's spectacles and
+forebore.
+
+And still moved on the heavenly procession of the seasons; and as each
+new one passed with smile and song, and strewed its flowers or fruits
+on Bylow Hill, the memory of one who after life's fitful fever slept
+soundly at last was ever a sweet forgetting of all that had once been
+bitter, and a sweeter and sweeter remembrance of whatsoever things had
+been pure, lovely, and of good report.
+
+One day the travelling salesman of fruit trees came again. This time he
+met Minnie, some of whose information puzzled him.
+
+"But I thought you said the young Mrs. Winslow lived in the large house
+on this side."
+
+"Yes, but that's the other one; that's Mrs. Isabel Winslow, the widow.
+Captain Winslow, he's so much o' the time to the navy yard that him and
+his wife they just keep their home along with her father and Mr.
+Leonard."
+
+"And who is it that, I understand, a Mr. Giles over here is about to
+marry?"
+
+For reply Minnie covered her mouth and nose with her hand, sputtered,
+and shut the door in his face.
+
+Another year went by, yet another followed, and still Ruth--daughter,
+sister, wife, and mother--remained the happy mistress of the house in
+which she was born, and Leonard remained one of her household. Mrs.
+Morris turned the cottage over to Mr. and Mrs. Giles--hem!--and dwelt in
+the Winslow house with Isabel; who, even the young said, grew more
+beautiful and lovable all the time.
+
+But there came a day, after all,--year uncertain,--when Leonard, with
+Mrs. Morris's little namesake on his knee, asked Isabel if she did not
+think it would be well for him to go away for a while; and Isabel
+murmured no.
+
+So by and by the Winslow pair went to live in the Winslow house, and the
+Byington pair in the Byington house; and if you listen well, you may
+hear an aged voice, a voice with a brogue, saying:--
+
+"Ay! there's a Linnard Winslow, now, and there's a Godfrey Boyington.
+And there's still an Isable Winslow and a Ruth Boyington. But the mother
+of Ruth Boyington is she that wor Isable Winslow, moy graciouz! and the
+mother of Isable Winslow is she that wor Ruth Boyington. And so there
+be's an Isable in the wan house and an Isable in th' other; and there
+be's a Ruth in the wan house and a Ruth in th' other, moy graciouz! and
+there's an Airthur in each, whatsomiver!"
+
+
+
+
+
+By GEORGE W. CABLE
+
+  Bylow Hill. Illustrated in color by F.C. Yohn. $1.25.
+
+  The Cavalier. Illustrated by H.C. Christy. $1.50.
+
+  John March, Southerner. $1.50.
+
+  Bonaventure. $1.50.
+
+  Dr. Sevier. $1.50.
+
+  The Grandissimes. $1.50.
+
+  Old Creole Days. $1.50.
+
+  Strong Hearts. $1.25.
+
+  Strange True Stories of Louisiana. Illustrated. $1.25.
+
+  The Creoles of Louisiana. Illustrated. $2.50.
+
+  The Silent South. With Portrait. $1.00.
+
+  The Negro Question. 75 cents.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14575 ***