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+A Project Gutenberg Etext of A Story of To-day, by Margret Howth
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+A Story of To-day
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+by Margret Howth
+
+May, 1996  [Etext #515]
+
+
+A Project Gutenberg Etext of A Story of To-day, by Margret Howth
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+
+MARGRET HOWTH.
+
+A STORY OF TO-DAY
+
+"My matter hath no voice to alien ears."
+
+
+TO MY MOTHER.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Let me tell you a story of To-Day,--very homely and narrow in its
+scope and aim.  Not of the To-Day whose significance in the
+history of humanity only those shall read who will live when you
+and I are dead.  We can bear the pain in silence, if our hearts
+are strong enough, while the nations of the earth stand afar off. 
+I have no word of this To-Day to speak.  I write from the border
+of the battlefield, and I find in it no theme for shallow
+argument or flimsy rhymes.  The shadow of death has fallen on us;
+it chills the very heaven.  No child laughs in my face as I pass
+down the street.  Men have forgotten to hope, forgotten to pray;
+only in the bitterness of endurance, they say "in the morning,
+`Would God it were even!' and in the evening, `Would God it were
+morning!'"  Neither I nor you have the prophet's vision to see
+the age as its meaning stands written before God.  Those who
+shall live when we are dead may tell their children, perhaps,
+how, out of anguish and darkness such as the world seldom has
+borne, the enduring morning evolved of the true world and the
+true man. It is not clear to us.  Hands wet with a brother's
+blood for the Right, a slavery of intolerance, the hackneyed cant
+of men, or the blood-thirstiness of women, utter no prophecy to
+us of the great To-Morrow of content and right that holds the
+world.  Yet the To-Morrow is there; if God lives, it is there. 
+The voice of the meek Nazarene, which we have deafened down as
+ill-timed, unfit to teach the watchword of the hour, renews the
+quiet promise of its coming in simple, humble things.  Let us go
+down and look for it.  There is no need that we should feebly
+vaunt and madden ourselves over our self-seen rights, whatever
+they may be, forgetting what broken shadows they are of eternal
+truths in that calm where He sits and with His quiet hand
+controls us.
+
+Patriotism and Chivalry are powers in the tranquil, unlimited
+lives to come, as well as here, I know; but there are less
+partial truths, higher hierarchies who serve the God-man, that do
+not speak to us in bayonets and victories,-- Mercy and Love.  Let
+us not quite neglect them, unpopular angels though they be.  Very
+humble their voices are, just now: yet not altogether dead, I
+think.  Why, the very low glow of the fire upon the hearth tells
+me something of recompense coming in the hereafter,--
+Christmas-days, and heartsome warmth; in these bare hills
+trampled down by armed men, the yellow clay is quick with pulsing
+fibres, hints of the great heart of life and love throbbing
+within; slanted sunlight would show me, in these sullen
+smoke-clouds from the camp, walls of amethyst and jasper, outer
+ramparts of the Promised Land.  Do not call us traitors, then,
+who choose to be cool and silent through the fever of the
+hour,--who choose to search in common things for auguries of the
+hopeful, helpful calm to come, finding even in these poor
+sweet-peas, thrusting their tendrils through the brown mould; a
+deeper, more healthful lesson for the eye and soul than warring
+truths.  Do not call me a traitor, if I dare weakly to hint that
+there are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a
+man may appear creditably in the great masquerade, and not blush
+when it is over; or if I tell you a story of To-Day, in which
+there shall be no bloody glare,--only those homelier, subtiler
+lights which we have overlooked.  If it prove to you that the sun
+of old times still shines, and the God of old times still lives,
+is not that enough?
+
+
+My story is very crude and homely, as I said,--only a rough
+sketch of one or two of those people whom you see every day, and
+call "dregs," sometimes,--a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you
+might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or
+back-streets.  I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I
+know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find; idyls
+delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious
+eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of
+pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened
+themselves in everybody's home. You want something, in fact, to
+lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to
+kindle and chafe and glow in you.  I want you to dig into this
+commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. 
+Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do
+not see.
+
+Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now.  Ha! that is
+spirit-stirring!--that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood! 
+Your manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor
+daily necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into
+this common, every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not
+be in it also a great warfare.  Not a serfish war; not altogether
+ignoble, though even its  only end may appear to be your daily
+food.  A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the
+world, and not without its pathos.  It has its slain.  Men and
+women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in
+your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep
+under every green hill-side.
+
+You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that
+war.  There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a
+judge's bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly
+honour, for purer triumph than his who falls foremost in the
+breach.  Your enemy, Self, goes with you from the cradle to the
+coffin; it is a hand-to-hand struggle all the sad, slow way,
+fought in solitude,--a battle that began with the first
+heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when the drops ooze
+out, and sudden halt in the veins,--a victory, if you can gain
+it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of the
+wider, stronger range of being, beyond death.
+
+Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have
+known, and how they conquered or were worsted in the fight.  Very
+common lives, I know,--such as are swarming in yonder
+market-place; yet I dare to call them voices of God,--all!
+
+My reason for choosing this story to tell you is simple enough.
+
+An old book, which I happened to find to-day, recalled it.  It
+was a ledger, iron-bound, with the name of the firm on the
+outside,--Knowles & Co.  You may have heard of the firm: they
+were large woollen manufacturers: supplied the home market in
+Indiana for several years.  This ledger, you see by the writing,
+has been kept by a woman.  That is not unusual in Western trading
+towns, especially in factories where the operatives are chiefly
+women.  In such establishments, they can fill every post
+successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with the
+hands for that.
+
+The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,--very
+legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose.  People who
+profess to read character in chirography would decipher but
+little from these cramped, quiet lines.  Only this, probably:
+that the woman, whoever she was, had not the usual fancy of her
+sex for dramatizing her soul in her writing, her dress, her
+face,--kept it locked up instead, intact; that her words and
+looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere absorbents
+by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her, not
+flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that
+lay within, before careless passers-by.  The first page has the
+date, in red letters, October 2, 1860, largely and  clearly
+written.  I am sure the woman's hand trembled a little when she
+took up the pen; but there is no sign of it here; for it was a
+new, desperate adventure to her, and she was young, with no faith
+in herself.  She did not look desperate, at all,--a quiet, dark
+girl, coarsely dressed in brown.
+
+There was not much light in the office where she sat; for the
+factory was in one of the close by-streets of the town, and the
+office they gave her was only a small square closet in the
+seventh story.  It had but one window, which overlooked a
+back-yard full of dyeing vats.  The sunlight that did contrive to
+struggle in obliquely through the dusty panes and cobwebs of the
+window, had a sleepy odour of copperas latent in it.  You smelt
+it when you stirred. The manager, Pike, who brought her up, had
+laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk for her.  As
+soon as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his heavy
+boots had thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to the
+frame-rooms.  Then she climbed up on the high office-stool
+(climbed, I said, for she was a little, lithe thing) and went to
+work, opening the books, and copying from one to the other as
+steadily, monotonously, as if she had been used to it all her
+life.  Here are the first pages: see how sharp the angles are of
+the  blue and black lines, how even the long columns: one would
+not think, that, as the steel pen traced them out, it seemed to
+be lining out her life, narrow and black.  If any such morbid
+fancy were in the girl's head, there was no tear to betray it. 
+The sordid, hard figures seemed to her types of the years coming,
+but she wrote them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had nothing
+better for her, so she did not care.  She finished soon: they had
+given her only an hour or two's work for the first day.  She
+closed the books, wiped the pens in a quaint, mechanical fashion,
+then got down and examined her new home.
+
+It was soon understood.  There were the walls with their broken
+plaster, showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over
+them, sketches with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had
+been an artist in his way,--his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on
+the ceiling with the smoke of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in
+the dusty corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the
+old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P.
+Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of
+cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple.  That was all,
+except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the
+whole.  One thing more, odd enough there: a  wire cage, hung on
+the wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken, peering
+dolefully with suspicious eyes out at her, and then down at the
+mouldy bit of bread on the floor of his cage,--left there, I
+suppose, by the departed Teagarden.  That was all, inside.  She
+looked out of the window.  In it, as if set in a square black
+frame, was the dead brick wall, and the opposite roof, with a cat
+sitting on the scuttle.  Going closer, two or three feet of sky
+appeared.  It looked as if it smelt of copperas, and she drew
+suddenly back.
+
+She sat down, waiting until it was time to go; quietly taking the
+dull picture into her slow, unrevealing eyes; a sluggish,
+hackneyed weariness creeping into her brain; a curious feeling,
+that all her life before had been a silly dream, and this dust,
+these desks and ledgers, were real,--all that was real.  It was
+her birthday; she was twenty.  As she happened to remember that,
+another fancy floated up before her, oddly life-like: of the old
+seat she made under the currant-bushes at home when she was a
+child, and the plans she laid for herself, when she should be a
+woman, sitting there,--how she would dig down into the middle of
+the world, and find the kingdom of the griffins, or would go
+after Mercy and Christiana in their pilgrimage.  It was only a
+little while ago  since these things were more alive to her than
+anything else in the world.  The seat was under the
+currant-bushes still.  Very little time ago; but she was a woman
+now,--and, look here!  A chance ray of sunlight slanted in,
+falling barely on the dust, the hot heaps of wool, waking a
+stronger smell of copperas; the chicken saw it, and began to
+chirp a weak, dismal joy, more sorrowful than tears.  She went to
+the cage, and put her finger in for it to peck at.  Standing
+there, if the vacant life coming rose up before her in that hard
+blare of sunlight, she looked at it with the same still, waiting
+eyes, that told nothing.
+
+The door opened at last, and a man came in,--Dr. Knowles, the
+principal owner of the factory.  He nodded shortly to her, and,
+going to the desk, turned over the books, peering suspiciously at
+her work.  An old man, overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen
+mass of flesh, as he stood erect, facing her.
+
+"You can go now," he said, gruffly.  "Tomorrow you must wait for
+the bell to ring, and go--with the rest of the hands."
+
+A curious smile flickered over her face like a shadow; but she
+said nothing.  He waited a moment.
+
+"So!" he growled, "the Howth blood does not blush to go down into
+the slime of the gutter? is sufficient to itself?"
+
+A cool, attentive motion,--that was all.  Then she stooped to tie
+her sandals.  The old man watched her, irritated.  She had been
+used to the keen scrutiny of his eyes since she was a baby, so
+was cool under it always.  The face watching her was one that
+repelled most men: dominant, restless, flushing into red gusts of
+passion, a small, intolerant eye, half hidden in folds of yellow
+fat,--the eye of a man who would give to his master (whether God
+or Satan) the last drop of his own blood, and exact the same of
+other men.
+
+She had tied her bonnet and fastened her shawl, and stood ready to go.
+
+"Is that all you want?" he demanded.  "Are you waiting to hear
+that your work is well done?  Women go through life as babies
+learn to walk,--a mouthful of pap every step, only they take it
+in praise or love.  Pap is better.  Which do you want?  Praise, I fancy."
+
+"Neither," she said, quietly brushing her shawl.  "The work is
+well done, I know."
+
+The old man's eye glittered for an instant, satisfied; then he
+turned to the books.  He thought she had gone, but, hearing a
+slight clicking sound, turned round.  She was taking the chicken
+out of the cage.
+
+"Let it alone!" he broke out, sharply.  "Where are you going with it?"
+
+"Home," she said, with a queer, quizzical face.  "Let it smell
+the green fields, Doctor.  Ledgers and copperas are not good food
+for a chicken's soul, or body either."
+
+"Let it alone!" he growled.  "You take it for a type of yourself, eh?
+It has another work to do than to grow fat and sleep about the barnyard."
+
+She opened the cage.
+
+"I think I will take it."
+
+"No," he said, quietly.  "It has a master here.  Not P. Teagarden.
+Why, Margret," pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars
+"do you think the God you believe in would have sent it here
+without a work to do?"
+
+She looked up; there was a curious tremour in his flabby face, a
+shadow in his rough voice.
+
+"If it dies here, its life won't have been lost.  Nothing is lost.
+Let it alone."
+
+"Not lost?" she said, slowly, refastening the cage.  "Only I think"----
+
+"What, child?"
+
+She glanced furtively at him.
+
+"It's a hard, scraping world where such a thing as that has work to do!"
+
+He vouchsafed no answer.  She waited to see his lip curl
+bitterly, and then, amused, went down the stairs.  She had paid
+him for his sneer.
+
+The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great
+staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the
+factory.  It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the
+suburbs of trading towns.  This one went round the four sides of
+a square, with the yard for the vats in the middle.  The ladders
+and passages she passed down were on the inside, narrow and dimly
+lighted: she had to grope her way sometimes.  The floors shook
+constantly with the incessant thud of the great looms that filled
+each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder.  It deafened her,
+made her dizzy, as she went down slowly.  It was no short walk to
+reach the lower hall, but she was down at last.  Doors opened
+from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw
+vast, dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings. 
+There was a crowd of porters and draymen cracking their whips,
+and lounging on the trucks by the door, waiting for loads,
+talking politics, and smoking.  The smell of tobacco, copperas,
+and burning logwood was heavy to clamminess here.  She stopped,
+uncertain.  One of the porters, a short, sickly man, who stood
+aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her with his staff. 
+Margret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she had seen
+this one before as she passed,--a dark face, sullen,
+heavy-lipped, the hair cut convict-fashion, close to the head. 
+She thought too, one of the men muttered "jail-bird," jeering him
+for his forwardness.  "Load for Clinton! Western Railroad!" sung
+out a sharp voice behind her, and, as she went into the street, a
+train of cars rushed into the hall to be loaded, and men swarmed
+out of every corner,--red-faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and
+heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, with souls half asleep
+somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp,--hands,
+like herself, going through the slow, heavy work, for, as Pike
+the manager would have told you, "three dollars a week,--good
+wages these tight times."  For nothing more?  Some other meaning
+may have fallen from their faces into this girl's subtile
+intuition in the instant's glance,--cheerfuller, remoter aims,
+hidden in the most sensual face,--homeliest home-scenes, low
+climbing ambitions, some delirium of pleasure to come,--whiskey,
+if nothing better: aims in life like yours differing in degree. 
+Needing only to make them the same----did you say what?
+
+She had reached the street now,--a back-street, a crooked sort of
+lane rather, running between endless piles of warehouses.  She
+hurried down it to gain the suburbs, for she lived out in the
+country.  It was a long, tiresome walk through the outskirts of
+the town, where the dwelling-houses were,--long rows of two-story
+bricks drabbled with soot-stains.  It was two years since she had
+been in the town.  Remembering this, and the reason why she had
+shunned it, she quickened her pace, her face growing stiller than
+before.  One might have fancied her a slave putting on a mask,
+fearing to meet her master.  The town, being unfamiliar to her,
+struck her newly.  She saw the expression on its face better.  It
+was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in by hills.  It
+had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a
+keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade, having
+shops in the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are
+cottages in other cities, there were mills here; the trees, which
+some deluded dreamer had planted on the flat pavements, had all
+grown up into abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy
+was to keep out of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them,
+played sharply "for keeps;" the bony old dray-horses, plodding
+through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes, that measured
+their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look.  Even the
+churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder
+in the hills, where the few field-people--Arians, Calvinists,
+Churchmen-- gathered every Sunday, and air and sunshine  and
+God's charity made the day holy.  These churches lifted their
+hard stone faces insolently, registering their yearly alms in the
+morning journals.  To be sure the back-seats were free for the
+poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the windows, the carving of
+the arches, the very purity of the preacher's style, said plainly
+that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
+than for a man in a red wamus to enter the kingdom of heaven
+through that gate.
+
+Nature itself had turned her back on the town: the river turned
+aside, and but half a river crept reluctantly by; the hills were
+but bare banks of yellow clay.  There was a cinder-road leading
+through these.  Margret climbed it slowly.  The low town-hills,
+as I said, were bare, covered at their bases with dingy stubble-
+fields.  In the sides bordering the road gaped the black mouths
+of the coal-pits that burrowed under the hills, under the town. 
+Trade everywhere,--on the earth and under it.  No wonder the girl
+called it a hard, scraping world.  But when the road had crept
+through these hills, it suddenly shook off the cinders, and
+turned into the brown mould of the meadows,--turned its back on
+trade and the smoky town, and speedily left it out of sight
+contemptuously, never looking back once.  This was the country
+now in earnest.
+
+Margret slackened her step, drawing long breaths of the fresh
+cold air.  Far behind her, panting and puffing along, came a
+black, burly figure, Dr. Knowles.  She had seen him behind her
+all the way, but they did not speak.  Between the two there lay
+that repellent resemblance which made them like close
+relations,--closer when they were silent.  You know such people? 
+When you speak to them, the little sharp points clash.  Yet they
+are the few whom you surely know you will meet in the life beyond
+death, "saved" or not.  The Doctor came slowly along the quiet
+country-road, watching the woman's figure going as slowly before
+him.  He had a curious interest in the girl,--a secret reason for
+the interest, which as yet he kept darkly to himself.  For this
+reason he tried to fancy how her new life would seem to her.  It
+should be hard enough, her work,--he was determined on that; her
+strength and endurance must be tested to the uttermost.  He must
+know what stuff was in the weapon before he used it.  He had been
+reading the slow, cold thing for years,--had not got into its
+secret yet.  But there was power there, and it was the power he
+wanted.  Her history was simple enough: she was going into the
+mill to support a helpless father and mother; it was a common
+story; she had given up much for them;--other women did the same. 
+He gave her scanty praise.  Two years ago (he had keen, watchful
+eyes, this man) he had fancied that the homely girl had a dream,
+as most women have, of love and marriage: she had put it aside,
+he thought, forever; it was too expensive a luxury; she had to
+begin the life-long battle for bread and butter.  Her dream had
+been real and pure, perhaps; for she accepted no sham love in its
+place: if it had left an empty hunger in her heart, she had not
+tried to fill it.  Well, well, it was the old story.  Yet he
+looked after her kindly as he thought of it; as some people look
+sorrowfully at children, going back to their own childhood.  For
+a moment he half relented in his purpose, thinking, perhaps, her
+work for life was hard enough.  But no: this woman had been
+planned and kept by God for higher uses than daughter or wife or
+mother.  It was his part to put her work into her hands.
+
+The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out
+through the hills.  A sleepy, quiet road.  The restless dust of
+the town never had been heard of out there.  It went wandering
+lazily through the corn-fields, down by the river, into the very
+depths of the woods,--the low October sunshine slanting warmly
+down it all the way, touching the grass-banks and the corn-fields
+with patches of russet gold.  Nobody in such a road could be in a
+hurry.  The quiet was so deep, the free air, the heavy trees, the
+sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one could be sure of
+finding them the same a hundred years from now.  Nobody ever was
+in a hurry.  The brown bees came along there, when their work was
+over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the road-side
+in a voluptuous stupor of delight.  The cows sauntered through
+the clover by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in it
+and sleeping outright.  The country-people, jogging along to the
+mill, walked their fat old nags through the stillness and warmth
+so slowly that even Margret left them far behind.  As the road
+went deeper into the hills, the quiet grew even more penetrating
+and certain,--so certain in these grand old mountains that one
+called it eternal, and, looking up to the peaks fixed in the
+clear blue, grew surer of a world beyond this where there is
+neither change nor death.
+
+It was growing late; the evening air more motionless and cool;
+the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now;
+in the valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. 
+Margret turned from the road, and went down the fields.  One did
+not wonder, feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps
+of meadow, that this woman, coming down from among them, should
+be strangely still, with dark questioning eyes dumb to their own
+secrets.
+
+Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that
+she had left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the
+thought of them off her brain.  No miles could measure the
+distance between her home and them.  At a stile across the field
+an old man sat waiting.  She hurried now, her cheek colouring. 
+Dr. Knowles could see them going to the house beyond, talking
+earnestly.  He sat down in the darkening twilight on the stile,
+and waited half an hour.  He did not care to hear the story of
+Margret's first day at the mill, knowing how her father and
+mother would writhe under it, soften it as she would.  It was
+nothing to her, he knew.  So he waited.  After a while he heard
+the old man's laugh, like that of a pleased child, and then went
+in and took her place beside him.  She went out, but came back
+presently, every grain of dust gone, in her clear dress of pearl
+gray.  The neutral tint suited her well.  As she stood by the
+window, listening gravely to them, the homely face and waiting
+figure came into full relief.  Nature had made the woman in a
+freak of rare sincerity.  There were no reflected lights about
+her; no gloss on her skin, no glitter in her eyes, no varnish on
+her soul.  Simple and dark and pure, there she was, for God and
+her master to conquer and understand.  Her flesh was cold and
+colourless,--there were no surface tints on it,--it warmed
+sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,--out of her
+heart; her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless
+brown, lay in unpolished folds of dark shadow.  I saw such hair
+once, only once.  It had been cut from the head of a man, who,
+unconscious, simple as a child, lived out the law of his nature,
+and set the world at defiance,--Bysshe Shelley.
+
+The Doctor, talking to her father, watched the girl furtively,
+took in every point, as one might critically survey a Damascus
+blade which he was going to carry into battle.  There was neither
+love nor scorn in his look,--a mere fixedness of purpose to make
+use of her some day.  He talked, meanwhile, glancing at her now
+and then, as if the subject they discussed were indirectly linked
+with his plan for her.  If it were, she was unconscious of it. 
+She sat on the wooden step of the porch, looking out on the
+melancholy sweep of meadow and hill range growing cool and dimmer
+in the dun twilight, not hearing what they said, until the
+sharpened, earnest tones roused her.
+
+"You will fail, Knowles."
+
+It was her father who spoke.
+
+"Nothing can save such a scheme from failure.  Neither the French
+nor German Socialists attempted to base their systems on the
+lowest class, as you design."
+
+"I know," said Knowles.  "That accounts for their partial
+success."
+
+"Let me understand your plan practically," eagerly demanded her
+father.
+
+She thought Knowles evaded the question,--wished to leave the
+subject.  Perhaps he did not regard the poor old school-master as
+a practical judge of practical matters.  All his life he had
+called him thriftless and unready.
+
+"It never will do, Knowles," he went on in his slow way.  "Any
+plan, Phalanstery or Community, call it what you please, founded
+on self government, is based on a sham, the tawdriest of shams."
+
+The old school-master shook his head as one who knows, and tried
+to push the thin gray hairs out of his eyes in a groping way. 
+Margret lifted them back, so quietly that he did not feel her.
+
+"You'll call the Republic a sham next!" said the Doctor, coolly
+aggravating.
+
+"The Republic!"  The old man quickened his tone, like a war-horse
+scenting the battle near at hand.  "There never was a thinner-
+crusted Devil's egg in the world than democracy.  I think I've
+told you that before?"
+
+"I think you have," said the other, dryly.
+
+"You always were a Tory, Mr. Howth," said his wife, in her
+placid, creamy way.  "It is in the blood, I think, Doctor.  The
+Howths fought under Cornwallis, you know."
+
+The school-master waited until his wife had ended.
+
+"Very true, Mrs. Howth," he said, with a grave smile.  Then his
+thin face grew hot again.
+
+"No, Dr. Knowles.  Your scheme is but a sign of the mad age we
+live in.  Since the thirteenth century, when the anarchic element
+sprang full-grown into the history of humanity, that history has
+been chaos.  And this republic is the culmination of chaos."
+
+"Out of chaos came the new-born earth," suggested the Doctor.
+
+"But its foundations were granite," rejoined the old man with
+nervous eagerness,--"granite, not the slime of yesterday.  When
+you found empires, go to work as God worked."
+
+The Doctor did not answer; sat looking, instead, out into the
+dark indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled
+at him were some old worn-out song.  Seeing, however, that the
+school-master's flush of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying
+out, he roused himself to gibe it into life.
+
+"Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have?  If the trodden rights of
+the human soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our
+empire to last?  On despotism?  Civil or theocratic?"
+
+"Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs,"
+replied the school-master.
+
+The Doctor laughed.
+
+"What a successful politician you would have made?  You would
+have had such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!"
+
+Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.
+
+"My dear," she said, timidly, "I think that is treason."
+
+The angry heat died out of his face instantly, as he turned to
+her, without the glimmer of a covert smile at her simplicity. 
+She was a woman; and when he spoke to the Doctor, it was in a
+tone less sharp.
+
+"What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts
+throbbing under their round-aborts?  `Happy, proud America!' 
+Somehow in that way.  `Cursed, abased America!' better if they
+had said.  Look at her, in the warm vigour of her youth, most
+vigorous in decay!  Look at the germs and dregs of nations,
+creeds, religions, fermenting together!  As for the theory of
+self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great
+archetypes of the experiment, into a paling, miserable failure!"
+
+The Doctor did not hear.  Some sharper shadow seemed to haunt him
+than the downfall of the Republic.  What help did he seek in this
+girl?  His keen, deep eyes never left her unconscious face.
+
+"No," Mr. Howth went on, having the field to himself,--"we left
+Order back there in the ages you call dark, and Progress will
+trumpet the world into the ditch."
+
+"Comte!" growled the Doctor.
+
+The school-master's cane beat an angry tattoo on the hearth.
+
+"You sneer at Comte?  Because, having the clearest eye, the
+widest sweeping eye ever given to man, he had no more?  It was to
+show how far flesh can go alone.  Could he help it, if God
+refused the prophet's vision?"
+
+"I'm sure, Samuel," interrupted his wife with a sorrowful
+earnestness, "your own eyes were as strong as a man's could be. 
+It was ten years after I wore spectacles that you began.  Only
+for that miserable fever, you could read shorthand now."
+
+Her own blue eyes filled with tears.  There was a sudden silence. 
+Margret shivered, as if some pain stung her.  Holding her
+father's bony hand in hers, she patted it on her knee.  The hand
+trembled a little.  Knowles's sharp eyes darted from one to the
+other; then, with a smothered growl, he shook himself, and rushed
+headlong into the old battle which he and the school-master had
+been waging now, off and on, some six years.  That was a fight, I
+can tell you!  None of your shallow, polite clashing of modern
+theories,--no talk of your Jeffersonian Democracy, your high-bred
+Federalism!  They took hold of the matter by the roots, clear at
+the beginning.
+
+Mrs. Howth's breath fairly left her, they went into the soul of
+the matter in such a dangerous way.  What if Joel should hear? 
+No doubt he would report that his master was an infidel,-- that
+would be the next thing they would hear.  He was in the kitchen
+now: he finished his wood-chopping an hour ago.  Asleep,
+doubtless; that was one comfort.  Well, if he were awake, he
+could not understand.  That class of people----And Mrs. Howth
+(into whose kindly brain just enough of her husband's creed had
+glimmered to make her say, "that class of people," in the tone
+with which Abraham would NOT have spoken of Dives over the gulf)
+went tranquilly back to her knitting, wondering why Dr. Knowles
+should come ten times now where he used to come once, to provoke
+Samuel into these wearisome arguments.  Ever since their
+misfortune came on them, he had been there every night, always at
+it.  She should think he might be a little more considerate.  Mr.
+Howth surely had enough to think of, what with his--his
+misfortune, and the starvation waiting for them, and poor
+Margret's degradation, (she sighed here,) without bothering his
+head about the theocratic principle, or the Battle of Armageddon. 
+She had hinted as much to Dr. Knowles one day, and he had
+muttered out something about its being "the life of the dog,
+Ma'am."  She wondered what he meant by that!  She looked over at
+his bearish figure, snuff-drabbled waistcoat, and shock of black
+hair.  Well, poor man, he could not help it, if he were coarse,
+and an Abolitionist, and a Fourierite, and----She was getting a
+little muddy now, she was conscious, so turned her mind back to
+the repose of her stocking.  Margret took it very quietly, seeing
+her father flaming so.  But Margret never had any opinions to
+express.  She was not like the Parnells: they were noted for
+their clear judgment.  Mrs. Howth was a Parnell.
+
+     "The combat deepens,--on, ye brave!"
+
+The Doctor's fat, leathery face was quite red now, and his
+sentences were hurled out in a sarcastic bass, enough to wither
+the marrow of a weak man.  But the school-master was no weak man. 
+His foot was entirely on his native heath, I assure you.  He knew
+every inch of the ground, from the domination of the absolute
+faith in the ages of Fetichism, to its pseudo-presentment in the
+tenth century, and its actual subversion in the nineteenth. 
+Every step.  Our politicians might have picked up an idea or two
+there, I should think!  Then he was so cool about it, so skilful! 
+He fairly rubbed his hands with glee, enjoying the combat.  And
+he was so sure that the Doctor was savagely in earnest: why, any
+one with half an ear could hear that!  He did not see how, in the
+very heat of the fray, his eyes would wander off listlessly.  But
+Mr. Howth did not wander; there was nothing careless or two-sided
+in the making of this man,--no sham about him, or borrowing. 
+They came down gradually, or out,--for, as I told you, they dug
+into the very heart of the matter at first,--they came out
+gradually to modern times.  Things began to assume a more
+familiar aspect.  Spinoza, Fichte, Saint Simon,--one heard about
+them now.  If you could but have heard the school-master deal
+with these his enemies!  With what tender charity for the man,
+what relentless vengeance for the belief, he pounced on them,
+dragging the soul out of their systems, holding it up for slow
+slaughter!  As for Humanity, (how Knowles lingered on that word,
+with a tenderness curious in so uncouth a mass of flesh!)--as for
+Humanity, it was a study to see it stripped and flouted and
+thrown out of doors like a filthy rag by this poor old Howth, a
+man too child-hearted to kill a spider.  It was pleasanter to
+hear him when he defended the great Past in which his ideal truth
+had been faintly shadowed.  How he caught the salient tints of
+the feudal life!  How the fine womanly nature of the man rose
+exulting in the free picturesque glow of the day of crusader and
+heroic deed!  How he crowded in traits of perfected manhood in
+the conqueror, simple trust in the serf, to colour and weaken his
+argument, not seeing that he weakened it!  How, when he thought
+he had cornered the Doctor, he would colour and laugh like a boy,
+then suddenly check himself, lest he might wound him!  A curious
+laugh, genial, cheery,--bubbling out of his weak voice in a way
+that put you in mind of some old and rare wine.  When he would
+check himself in one of these triumphant glows, he would turn to
+the Doctor with a deprecatory gravity, and for a few moments be
+almost submissive in his reply.  So earnest and worn it looked
+then, the poor old face, in the dim light!  The black clothes he
+wore were so threadbare and shining at the knees and elbows, the
+coarse leather shoes brought to so fine a polish!  The Doctor
+idly wondered who had blacked them, glancing at Margret's
+fingers.
+
+There was a flower stuck in the button-hole of the
+school-master's coat, a pale tea-rose.  If Dr. Knowles had been a
+man of fine instincts, (which his opaque shining eyes would seem
+to deny,) he might have thought it was not unapt or ill-placed
+even in the shabby, scuffed coat.  A scholar, a gentleman, though
+in patched shoes and trousers a world too short.  Old and gaunt,
+hunger-bitten even it may be, with loose-jointed, bony limbs, and
+yellow face; clinging, loyal and brave, to the quaint, delicate
+fancies of his youth, that were dust and ashes to other men.  In
+the very haggard face you could find the quiet purity of the
+child he had been, and the old child's smile, fresh and
+credulous, on the mouth.
+
+The Doctor had not spoken for a moment.  It might be that he was
+careless of the poetic lights with which Mr. Howth tenderly
+decorated his old faith, or it might be, that even he, with the
+terrible intentness of a real life-purpose in his brain, was
+touched by the picture of the far old chivalry, dead long ago. 
+The master's voice grew low and lingering now.  It was a labour
+of love, this.  Oh, it is so easy to go back out of the broil of
+dust and meanness and barter into the clear shadow of that old
+life where love and bravery stand eternal verities,--never to be
+bought and sold in that dusty town yonder!  To go back?  To dream
+back, rather.  To drag out of our own hearts, as the hungry old
+master did, whatever is truest and highest there, and clothe it
+with name and deed in the dim days of chivalry.  Make a poem of
+it,--so much easier than to make a life!
+
+Knowles shuffled uneasily, watching the girl keenly, to know how
+the picture touched her.  Was, then, she thought, this grand,
+dead Past so shallow to him?  These knights, pure, unstained,
+searching until death for the Holy Grail, could he understand the
+life-long agony, the triumph of their conflict over Self?  These
+women, content to live in solitude forever because they once had
+loved, could any man understand that?  Or the dead queen, dead
+that the man she loved might be free and happy,--why, this WAS
+life,--this death!  But did pain, and martyrdom, and victory lie
+back in the days of Galahad and Arthur alone?  The homely face
+grew stiller than before, looking out into the dun sweep of
+moorland,--cold, unrevealing.  It baffled the man that looked at
+it.  He shuffled, chewed tobacco vehemently, tilted his chair on
+two legs, broke out in a thunder-gust at last.
+
+"Dead days for dead men!  The world hears a bugle-call to-day
+more noble than any of your piping troubadours.  We have
+something better to fight for than a vacant tomb."
+
+The old man drew himself up haughtily.
+
+"I know what you would say,--Liberty for the low and vile.  It is
+a good word.  That was a better which they hid in their hearts in
+the old time,--Honour!"
+
+Honour!  I think, Calvinist though he was, that word was his
+religion.  Men have had worse.  Perhaps the Doctor thought this;
+for he rose abruptly, and, leaning on the old man's chair, said,
+gently,--
+
+"It is better, even here.  Yet you poison this child's mind.  You
+make her despise To-Day; make honour live for her now."
+
+"It does not," the school-master said, bitterly.  "The world's a
+failure.  All the great old dreams are dead.  Your own phantom,
+your Republic, your experiment to prove that all men are born
+free and equal,--what is it to-day?"
+
+Knowles lifted his head, looking out into the brown twilight. 
+Some word of pregnant meaning flashed in his eye and trembled on
+his lip; but he kept it back.  His face glowed, though, and the
+glow and strength gave to the huge misshapen features a grand
+repose.
+
+"You talk of To-Day," the old man continued, querulously.  "I am
+tired of it.  Here is its type and history," touching a county
+newspaper,--"a fair type, with its cant, and bigotry, and weight
+of uncomprehended fact.  Bargain and sale,--it taints our
+religion, our brains, our flags,--yours and mine, Knowles, with
+the rest.  Did you never hear of those abject spirits who entered
+neither heaven nor hell, who were neither faithful to God nor
+rebellious, caring only for themselves?"
+
+He paused, fairly out of breath.  Margret looked up.  Knowles was
+silent.  There was a smothered look of pain on the coarse face;
+the school-master's words were sinking deeper than he knew.
+
+"No, father," said Margret, hastily ending his quotation, " `io
+non averei creduto, che [vita] tanta n' avesse disfatta.' " 
+
+Skilful Margret!  The broil must have been turbid in the old
+man's brain which the grand, slow-stepping music of the
+Florentine could not calm.  She had learned that long ago, and
+used it as a nurse does some old song to quiet her pettish
+infant.  His face brightened instantly.
+
+"Do not believe, then, child," he said, after a pause.  "It is a
+noble doubt, in Dante or in you."
+
+The Doctor had turned away; she could not see his face.  The
+angry scorn was gone from the old master's countenance; it was
+bent with its usual wistful eagerness on the floor.  A moment
+after he looked up with a flickering smile.
+
+" `Onorate l' altissmo poeta!' " he said, gently  lifting his
+finger to his forehead in a military fashion.  "Where is my cane,
+Margret?  The Doctor and I will go and walk on the porch before
+it grows dark."
+
+The sun had gone down long before, and the stars were out; but no
+one spoke of this.  Knowles lighted the school-master's pipe and
+his own cigar, and then moved the chairs out of their way,
+stepping softly that the old man might not hear him.  Margret, in
+the room, watched them as they went, seeing how gentle the rough,
+burly man was with her father, and how, every time they passed
+the sweet-brier, he bent the branches aside, that they might not
+touch his face.  Slow, childish tears came into her eyes as she
+saw it; for the school-master was blind.  This had been their
+regular walk every evening, since it grew too cold for them to go
+down under the lindens.  The Doctor had not missed a night since
+her father gave up the school, a month ago: at first, under
+pretence of attending to his eyes; but since the day he had told
+them there was no hope of cure, he had never spoken of it again. 
+Only, since then, he had grown doubly quarrelsome,--standing
+ready armed to dispute with the old man every inch of every
+subject in earth or air, keeping the old man in a state of boyish
+excitement during the long, idle days, looking forward to this
+nightly battle.
+
+It was very still; for the house, with its half-dozen acres, lay
+in an angle of the hills, looking out on the river, which shut
+out all distant noises.  Only the men's footsteps broke the
+silence, passing and repassing the window.  Without, the October
+starlight lay white and frosty on the moors, the old barn, the
+sharp, dark hills, and the river, which was half hidden by the
+orchard.  One could hear it, like some huge giant moaning in his
+sleep, at times, and see broad patches of steel blue glittering
+through the thick apple-trees and the bushes.  Her mother had
+fallen into a doze.  Margret looked at her, thinking how sallow
+the plump, fair face had grown, and how faded the kindly blue
+eyes were now.  Dim with crying,--she knew that, though she never
+saw her shed a tear.  Always cheery, going placidly about the
+house in her gray dress and Quaker cap, as if there were no such
+things in the world as debt or blindness.  But Margret knew,
+though she said nothing.  When her mother came in from those
+wonderful foraging expeditions in search of late pease or corn,
+she could see the swollen circle round the eyes, and hear her
+breath like that of a child which has sobbed itself tired.  Then,
+one night, when she had gone into her mother's room, after she
+was in bed, the blue eyes were set in a wild, hopeless way, as if
+staring down into years of starvation and misery.  The fire on
+the hearth burned low and clear; the old worn furniture stood out
+cheerfully in the red glow, and threw a maze of twisted shadow on
+the floor.  But the glow was all that was cheerful.  To-morrow,
+when the hard daylight should jeer away the screening shadows, it
+would unbare a desolate, shabby home.  She knew; struck with the
+white leprosy of poverty; the blank walls, the faded hangings,
+the old stone house itself, looking vacantly out on the fields
+with a pitiful significance of loss.  Upon the mantel-shelf there
+was a small marble figure, one of the Dancing Graces: the other
+two were gone, gone in pledge.  This one was left, twirling her
+foot, and stretching out her hands in a dreary sort of ecstasy,
+with no one to respond.  For a moment, so empty and bitter seemed
+her home and her life, that she thought the lonely dancer with
+her flaunting joy mocked her,--taunted them with the slow, gray
+desolation that had been creeping on them for years.  Only for a
+moment the morbid fancy hurt her.
+
+The red glow was healthier, suited her temperament better.  She
+chose to fancy the house as it had been once,--should be again,
+please God.  She chose to see the old comfort and the old beauty
+which the poor school-master had gathered about their home.  Gone
+now.  But it should return.  It was well, perhaps, that he was
+blind, he knew so little of what had come on them.  There, where
+the black marks were on the wall, there had hung two pictures. 
+Margret and her father religiously believed them to be a Tintoret
+and Copley.  Well, they were gone now.  He had been used to dust
+them with a light brush every morning, himself, but now he said
+always,--
+
+"You can clean the pictures to-day, Margret.  Be careful, my
+child."
+
+And Margret would remember the greasy Irishman who had tucked
+them under his arm, and flung them into a cart, her blood growing
+hotter in her veins.
+
+It was the same through all the house; there was not a niche in
+the bare rooms that did not recall a something gone,--something
+that should return.  She willed that, that evening, standing by
+the dim fire.  What women will, whose eyes are slow, attentive,
+still, as this Margret's, usually comes to pass.
+
+The red fire-glow suited her; another glow, warming her floating
+fancy, mingled with it, giving her every-day purpose the trait of
+heroism.  The old spirit of the dead chivalry, of succour to the
+weak, life-long self-denial,--did it need the sand waste of
+Palestine or a tournament to call it into life?  Down in that
+trading town, in the thick of its mills and drays, it could live,
+she thought.  That very night, perhaps, in some of those fetid
+cellars or sunken shanties, there were vigils kept of purpose as
+unselfish, prayer as heaven-commanding, as that of the old
+aspirants for knighthood.  She, too,--her quiet face stirred with
+a simple, childish smile, like her father's.
+
+"Why, mother!" she said, stroking down the gray hair under the
+cap, "shall you sleep here all night?" laughing.
+
+A cheery, tender laugh, this woman's was,-- seldom heard,--not
+far from tears.
+
+Mrs. Howth roused herself.  Just then, a broad, high-shouldered
+man, in a gray flannel shirt, and shoes redolent of the stable,
+appeared at the door.  Margret looked at him as if he were an
+accusing spirit,--coming down, as woman must, from heights of
+self-renunciation or bold resolve, to an undarned stocking or an
+uncooked meal.
+
+"Kittle's b'ilin'," he announced, flinging in the information as
+a general gratuity.
+
+"That will do, Joel," said Mrs. Howth.
+
+The tone of stately blandness which Mrs. Howth erected as a
+shield between herself and "that class of people" was a study: a
+success; the resume of her experience in the combat that had
+devoured half her life, like that of other American
+house-keepers.  "Be gentle, but let them know their place, my
+dear!"  The class having its type and exponent in Joel, stopped
+at the door, and hitched up its suspenders.
+
+"That will DO, Joel," with a stern suavity.
+
+Some idea was in Joel's head under the brush of red
+hair,--probably the "anarchic element."
+
+"Uh was wishin' toh read the G'zette." Whereupon he advanced into
+the teeth of the enemy and bore off the newspaper, going before
+Margret, as she went to the kitchen, and seating himself beside a
+flaring tallow-candle on the table.
+
+Reading, with Joel, was not the idle pastime that more trivial
+minds find it; a thing, on the contrary, to be gone into with
+slow spelling, and face knitted up into savage sternness,
+especially now, when, as he gravely explained to Margret, "in HIS
+opinion the crissis was jest at hand, and ev'ry man must be
+seein' ef the gover'ment was carryin' out the views of the
+people."
+
+With which intent, Joel, in company with five thousand other
+sovereigns, consulted, as definitive oracle, "The Daily Gazette"
+of Towbridge.  The school-master need not have grumbled for the
+old time: feodality in the days of Warwick and of "The Daily
+Gazette" was not so widely different as he and Joel thought.
+
+Now and then, partly as an escape-valve for his overcharged
+conviction, partly in compassion to the ignorance of women in
+political economics, he threw off to Margret divers commentaries
+on the text, as she passed in and out.
+
+If she had risen to the full level of Joel's views, she might
+have considered these views tinctured with radicalism, as they
+consisted in the propriety of the immediate "impinging of the
+President."  Besides, (Joel was a good-natured man, too, merciful
+to his beast,) Nero-like, he wished, with the tiger drop of blood
+that lies hid in everybody's heart, that the few millions who
+differed with himself and the "Gazette" had but one neck for
+their more convenient hanging, "It's all that'll save the
+kentry," he said, and believed it, too.
+
+If Margret fell suddenly from the peak of outlook on life to the
+homely labor of cooking supper, some of the healthy heroic flush
+of the knightly days and the hearth-fire went down with her, I
+think.  It brightened and reddened the square kitchen with its
+cracked stove and meagre array of tins; she bustled about in her
+quaint way, as if it had been filled up and running over with
+comforts.  It brightened and reddened her face when she came in
+to put the last dish on the table,--a cosy, snug table, set 
+for four.  Heroic dreams with poets, I suppose, make them unfit
+for food other than some feast such as Eve set for the angel. 
+But then Margret was no poet.  So, with the kindling of her hope,
+its healthful light struck out, and warmed and glorified these
+common things.  Such common things!  Only a coarse white cloth,
+redeemed by neither silver nor china, the amber coffee, (some
+that Knowles had brought out to her father--"thrown on his hands;
+he couldn't use it,--product of slave-labour!--never, Sir!") the
+delicate brown fish that Joel had caught, the bread her mother
+had made, the golden butter,--all of them touched her nerves with
+a quick sense of beauty and pleasure.  And more, the gaunt face
+of the blind old man, his bony hand trembling as he raised the
+cup to his lips, her mother and the Doctor managing silently to
+place everything he liked best near his plate.  Wasn't it all
+part of the fresh, hopeful glow burning in her consciousness?  It
+brightened and deepened.  It blotted out the hard, dusty path of
+the future, and showed warm and clear the success at the end. 
+Not much to show, you think.  Only the old home as it once was,
+full of quiet laughter and content; only her mother's eyes clear
+shining again; only that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no
+man anything but courtesy.  The glow deepened, as she thought of
+it.  It was strange, too, that, with the deep, slow-moving nature
+of this girl, she should have striven so eagerly to throw this
+light over the future.  Commoner natures have done more and hoped
+less.  It was a poor gift, you think, this of the labour of a
+life for so plain a duty; hardly heroic.  She knew it.  Yet, if
+there lay in this coming labour any pain, any wearing effort, she
+clung to it desperately, as if this should banish, it might be,
+worse loss.  She tried desperately, I say, to clutch the far,
+uncertain hope at the end, to make happiness out of it, to give
+it to her silent gnawing heart to feed on.  She thrust out of
+sight all possible life that might have called her true self into
+being, and clung to this present shallow duty and shallow reward. 
+Pitiful and vain so to cling!  It is the way of women.  As if any
+human soul could bury that which might have been, in that which
+is!
+
+The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes,
+heeded the transient flush of enthusiasm but little.  Even the
+pleasant cheery talk that pleased her father so was but
+surface-deep, he knew.  The woman he must conquer for his great
+end lay beneath, dark and cold.  It was only for that end he
+cared for her.  Through what cold depths of solitude her soul
+breathed faintly mattered  little.  Yet an idle fancy touched
+him, what a triumph the man had gained, whoever he might be, who
+had held the master-key to a nature so rare as this, who had the
+kingly power in his hand to break its silence into electric
+shivers of laughter and tears,--terrible subtile pain, or joy as
+terrible.  Did he hold the power still?  He wondered.  Meanwhile
+she sat there, unread.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+The evening came on, slow and cold.  Life itself, the Doctor
+thought, impatiently, was cool and tardy here among the hills. 
+Even he fell into the tranquil tone, and chafed under it. 
+Nowhere else did the evening gray and sombre into the mysterious
+night impalpably as here.  The quiet, wide and deep, folded him
+in, forced his trivial heat into silence and thought.  The world
+seemed to think there.  Quiet in the dead seas of fog, that
+filled the valleys like restless vapour curdled into silence;
+quiet in the listening air, stretching gray up to the stars,--in
+the solemn mountains, that stood motionless, like hoary-headed
+prophets, waiting with uplifted hands, day and night, to hear the
+Voice, silent now for centuries; the very air, heavy with the
+breath of the sleeping pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like
+some human voice weary with preaching to unbelieving hearts of a
+peace on earth.  This man's heart was unbelieving; he chafed in
+the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling mockery to a sick and
+hungry world,--a dead torpor of indifference.  Years of hot and
+turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret of the
+night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with
+the needs and suffering of the countless lives that hemmed him
+in, to accept the great prophetic calm.  He was blind to the
+prophecy written on the earth since the day God first bade it
+tell thwarted man of the great To-Morrow.
+
+He turned from the night in-doors.  Human hearts were his proper
+study.  The old house, he thought, slept with the rest.  One did
+not wonder that the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow. 
+The frantic, nervous haste of town-clocks chorded better with the
+pulse of human life.  Yet life in the veins of these people
+flowed slow and cool; their sorrows and joys were few and
+life-long.  The enduring air suited this woman, Margret Howth. 
+Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden gusts of passion,
+like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one current,
+absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the
+other, one love or one hate.  Whatever power was in the tide
+should be his, in its entirety.  It was his right.  Was not his
+aim high, the highest?  It was his right.
+
+Margret, looking up, saw the man's eye fixed on her.  She met it
+coolly.  All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the
+weak, had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at
+her childish, dreamy apathy, driving her from effort to effort
+with a scourge of contempt.  What did he want now with her?  Her
+duty was light; she took it up,--she was glad to take it up; what
+more would he have?  She put the whole matter away from her.
+
+It grew late.  She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her
+father, as usual.  Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in
+half-asleep; the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and
+listened, as he did everything else, intently.  It was an old
+story that she read,-- the story of a man who walked the fields
+and crowded streets of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago. 
+Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without
+in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its
+course to listen.  Perhaps the simple story carried a deeper
+meaning to these brooding mountains and solemn sky than to the
+purblind hearts within.  It was a far-off story to them,--very
+far off.  The old school-master heard it with a lowered head,
+with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his
+leader's orders.  Was not the leader a knights the knight of
+truest courage?  All that was high, chivalric in the old man
+sprang up to own him Lord.  That he not only preached to, but ate
+and drank with publicans and sinners, was a requirement of his
+mission; nowadays----.  Joel heard the "good word" with a
+bewildered consciousness of certain rules of honesty to be
+observed next day, and a maze of crowns and harps shining
+somewhere beyond.  As for any immediate connection between the
+teachings of this book and "The Daily Gazette," it was pure
+blasphemy to think of it.  The Lord held those old Jews in His
+hand, of course; but as for the election next month, that was
+quite another thing.  If Joel thrust the history out of the touch
+of common life, the Doctor brought it down, and held it there on
+trial.  To him it was the story of a Reformer who, eighteen
+centuries ago, had served his day.  Could he serve this day? 
+Could he?  The need was desperate.  Was there anything in this
+Christianity, freed from bigotry, to work out the awful problem
+which the ages had left for America to solve? He doubted it. 
+People called this old Knowles an infidel, said his brain was as
+unnatural and distorted as his body.  God, looking down into his
+heart that night, saw the savage wrestling there, and judged him
+with other eyes than theirs.
+
+The story stood alive in his throbbing brain demanding hearing. 
+All things were real to this man, this uncouth mass of flesh that
+his companions sneered at; most real of all, the unhelped pain of
+life, the great seething mire of dumb wretchedness in streets and
+alleys, the cry for aid from the starved souls of the world.  You
+and I have other work to do than to listen,--pleasanter.  But he,
+coming out of the mire, his veins thick with the blood of a
+despised race, had carried up their pain and hunger with him: it
+was the most real thing on earth to him,--more real than his own
+share in the unseen heaven or hell.  By the reality, the peril of
+the world's instant need, he tried the offered help from Calvary. 
+It was the work of years, not of this night.  Perhaps, if they
+who preach Christ crucified had doubted him as this man did,
+their work in the coming heaven might be higher,--and ours, who
+hear them.  When the girl had finished reading, she went out into
+the cool air.  The Doctor passed her without notice.  He went, in
+his lumbering way, down the hill into the city; glad to go; the
+trustful, waiting quiet oppressed, taunted him.  It sent him back
+more mad against Destiny, his heart more bitter in its great
+pity.  Let him go to the great city, with its stifling
+gambling-hells, its negro-pens, its foul cellars;--his place and
+work.  If he stumble blindly against unconquerable ills, and die,
+others have so stumbled and so died.  Do you think their work is
+lost?
+
+Margret stood looking down at the sloping moors and fog.  She,
+too, had her place and work.  She thought that night she saw it
+clearly, and kept her eyes fixed on it, as I said.  They plodded
+steadily down the wide years opening before her.  Whatever slow,
+unending toil lay in them, whatever hungry loneliness, or
+coarseness of deed, she saw it all, shrinking from nothing.  She
+looked at the big blue-corded veins in her wrist, full of
+untainted blood,--gauged herself coolly, her lease of life, her
+power of endurance,--measured it out against the work waiting for
+her.  No short task, she knew that.  She would be old before it
+was finished, quite an old woman, hard, mechanical, worn out. 
+But the day would be so bright, when it came, it would atone for
+all: the day would be bright, the home warm again; it would hold
+all that life had promised her of good.
+
+All?  Oh, Margret, Margret!  Was there no sullen doubt in the
+brave resolve?  Was there no shadow just then, dark, ironical,
+blotting out father and mother and home, creeping nearer, less
+alien to your soul than these, than even your God?
+
+If any such cold, masterful shadow rose out of years gone, and
+clutched at the truest life of her heart, she stifled it, and
+thrust it down.  And yet, leaning on the gate, and thinking 
+vacantly, she remembered a time when through that shadow, she
+believed more in a God than she did now.  When, by the help of
+that very dead hope, He of whom she read to-night stood close, an
+infinitely tender Helper, that with the differing human loves she
+knew, had loved His mother and Mary.  Therefore, a Helper.  Now,
+struggle as she would for warmth or healthy hopes, the world was
+gray and silent.  Her defeated woman's nature called it so,
+bitterly.  Christ was a dim, ideal power, heaven far-off.  She
+doubted if it held anything as real as that which she had lost.
+
+As if to bring back the old times more vividly to her, there
+happened one of those curious little coincidences with which
+Fate, we think, has nothing to do.  She heard a quick step along
+the clay road, and a muddy little terrier jumped up, barking,
+beside her.  She stopped with a suddenness strange in her slow
+movements.  "TIGER!" she said, stroking its head with passionate
+eagerness.  The dog licked her hand, smelt her clothes to know if
+she were the same: it was two years since he had seen her.  She
+sat there, softly stroking him.  Presently there was a sound of
+wheels jogging down the road, and a voice singing snatches of
+some song, one of those cheery street-songs that the boys
+whistle.  It was a low, weak voice, but very pleasant.  Margret
+heard it through the dark: she kissed the dog with a strange
+paleness on her face, and stood up, quiet, attentive as before. 
+Tiger still kept licking her hand, as it hung by her side: it was
+cold, and trembled as he touched it.  She waited a moment, then
+pushed him from her, as if his touch, even, caused her to break
+some vow.  He whined, but she hurried away, not waiting to know
+how he came, or with whom.  Perhaps, if Dr. Knowles had seen her
+face as she looked back at him, he would have thought there were
+depths in her nature which his probing eyes had never reached.
+
+The wheels came close, and directly a cart stopped at the gate. 
+It was one of those little wagons that hucksters drive; only this
+seemed to be a home-made affair, patched up with wicker-work and
+bits of board.  It was piled up with baskets of vegetables, eggs,
+and chickens, and on a broken bench in the middle sat the driver,
+a woman.  You could not help laughing, when you looked at the
+whole turn-out, it had such a make-shift look altogether.  The
+reins were twisted rope, the wheels uneven.  It went jolting
+along in such a careless, jolly way, as if it would not care in
+the least, should it go to pieces any minute just there in the
+road.  The donkey that drew it was bony and blind of one eye; but
+he winked the other knowingly at you, to ask if you saw the joke
+of the thing.  Even the voice of the owner of the establishment,
+chirruping some idle song, as I told you, was one of the
+cheeriest sounds you ever heard.  Joel, up at the barn, forgot
+his dignity to salute it with a prolonged "Hillo!" and presently
+appeared at the gate.
+
+"I'm late, Joel," said the weak voice.  It sounded like a
+child's, near at hand.
+
+"We can trade in the dark, Lois, both bein' honest," he
+responded, graciously, hoisting a basket of tomatoes into the
+cart, and taking out a jug of vinegar.
+
+"Is that Lois?" said Mrs. Howth, coming to the gate.  "Sit still,
+child.  Don't get down."
+
+But the child, as she called her, had scrambled off the cart, and
+stood beside her, leaning on the wheel, for she was helplessly
+crippled.
+
+"I thought you would be down to-night.  I put some coffee on the
+stove.  Bring it out, Joel."
+
+Mrs. Howth never put up the shield between herself and this
+member of "the class,"-- because, perhaps, she was so wretchedly
+low in the social scale.  However, I suppose she never gave a
+reason for it even to herself.  Nobody could help being kind to
+Lois, even if he tried.  Joel brought the coffee with more
+readiness than he would have waited on Mrs. Howth.
+
+"Barney will be jealous," he said, patting the bare ribs of the
+old donkey, and glancing wistfully at his mistress.
+
+"Give him his supper, surely," she said, taking the hint.
+
+It was a real treat to see how Lois enjoyed her supper, sipping
+and tasting the warm coffee, her face in a glow, like an epicure
+over some rare Falernian.  You would be sure, from just that
+little thing, that no sparkle of warmth or pleasure in the world
+slipped by her which she did not catch and enjoy and be thankful
+for to the uttermost.  You would think, perhaps, pitifully, that
+not much pleasure or warmth would ever go down so low, within her
+reach.  Now that she stood on the ground, she scarcely came up to
+the level of the wheel; some deformity of her legs made her walk
+with a curious rolling jerk, very comical to see.  She laughed at
+it, when other people did; if it vexed her at all, she never
+showed it.  She had turned back her calico sun-bonnet, and stood
+looking up at Mrs. Howth and Joel, laughing as they talked with
+her.  The face would have startled you on so old and stunted a
+body.  It was a child's face, quick, eager, with that pitiful
+beauty you always see in deformed people.  Her eyes, I think,
+were the kindliest, the hopefullest I ever saw.  Nothing but the
+livid thickness of her skin betrayed the fact that set Lois apart
+from even the poorest poor,--the taint in her veins of black
+blood.
+
+"Whoy! be n't this Tiger?" said Joel, as the dog ran yelping
+about him.  "How comed yoh with him, Lois?"
+
+"Tiger an' his master's good friends o' mine,--you remember they
+allus was.  An' he's back now, Mr. Holmes,--been back for a
+month."
+
+Margret, walking in the porch with her father, stopped.
+
+"Are you tired, father?  It is late."
+
+"And you are worn out, poor child!  It was selfish in me to
+forget.  Good-night, dear!"
+
+Margret kissed him, laughing cheerfully, as she led him to his
+room-door.  He lingered, holding her dress.
+
+"Perhaps it will be easier for you to-morrow than it was to-day?"
+hesitating.
+
+"I am sure it will.  To-morrow will be sure to be better than
+to-day."
+
+She left him, and went away with a step that did not echo the
+promise of her words.
+
+Joel, meanwhile, consulted apart with his mistress.
+
+"Of course," she said, emphatically.--"You must stay until
+morning, Lois.  It is too late.  Joel will toss you up a bed in
+the loft."
+
+The queer little body hesitated.
+
+"I can stay," she said, at last.  "It's his watch at the mill
+to-night."
+
+"Whose watch?" demanded Joel.
+
+Her face brightened.
+
+"Father's.  He's back, mum."
+
+Joel caught himself in a whistle.
+
+"He's very stiddy, Joel,--as stiddy as yoh."
+
+"I am very glad he has come back, Lois," said Mrs. Howth,
+gravely.
+
+At every place where Lois had been that day she had told her bit
+of good news, and at every place it had been met with the same
+kindly smile and "I'm glad he's back, Lois."
+
+Yet Joe Yare, fresh from two years in the penitentiary, was not
+exactly the person whom society usually welcomes with open arms. 
+Lois had a vague suspicion of this, perhaps; for, as she hobbled
+along the path, she added to her own assurance of his
+"stiddiness" earnest explanations to Joel of how he had a place
+in the Croft Street woollen-mills, and how Dr. Knowles had said
+he was as ready a stoker as any in the furnace-rooms.
+
+The sound of her weak, eager voice was silent presently, and
+nothing broke the solitary cold of the night.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The morning, when it came long after, came quiet and cool,--the
+warm red dawn helplessly smothered under great waves of gray
+cloud.  Margret, looking out into the thick fog, lay down wearily
+again, closing her eyes.  What was the day to her?
+
+Very slowly the night was driven back.  An hour after, when she
+lifted her head again, the stars were still glittering through
+the foggy arch, like sparks of brassy blue, and hills and valleys
+were one drifting, slow-heaving mass of ashy damp.  Off in the
+east a stifled red film groped through.  It was another day
+coming; she might as well get up, and live the rest of her life
+out;--what else had she to do?
+
+Whatever this night had been to the girl, it left one thought
+sharp, alive, in the exhausted quiet of her brain: a cowardly
+dread of the trial of the day, when she would see him again.  Was
+the old struggle of years before coming back?  Was it all to go
+over again?  She was worn out.  She had been quiet in these two
+years: what had gone before she never looked back upon; but it
+made her thankful for even this stupid quiet.  And now, when she
+had planned her life, busy, useful, contented, why need God have
+sent the old thought to taunt her?  A wild, sickening sense of
+what might have been struggled up: she thrust it down,-- she had
+kept it down all night; the old pain should not come back,--it
+should not.  She did not think of the love she had given up as a
+dream, as verse-makers or sham people do; she knew it to be the
+quick seed of her soul.  She cried for it even now, with all the
+fierce strength of her nature; it was the best she knew; through
+it she came nearest to God.  Thinking of the day when she had
+given it up, she remembered it with a vague consciousness of
+having fought a deadly struggle with her fate, and that she had
+been conquered,--never had lived again.  Let it be; she could not
+bear the struggle again.
+
+She went on dressing herself in a dreary, mechanical way.  Once,
+a bitter laugh came on her face, as she looked into the glass,
+and saw the dead, dull eyes, and the wrinkle on her forehead. 
+Was that the face to be crowned with delicate caresses and love? 
+She scorned herself for the moment, grew sick of herself, balked,
+thwarted in her true life as she was.  Other women whom God has
+loved enough to probe to the depths of their nature have done the
+same,--saw themselves as others saw them: their strength drying
+up within them, jeered at, utterly alone.  It is a trial we laugh
+at.  I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter subjects
+for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many a
+slighted woman or a selfish man.  They come out of the trial as
+out of martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks
+sometimes in a frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and
+starved eyes to the grave; you see its victory in the freshest,
+fullest lives in the earth.  This woman had accepted her trial,
+but she took it up as an inflexible fate which she did not
+understand; it was new to her; its solitude, its hopeless thirst
+were freshly bitter.  She loathed herself as one whom God had
+thought unworthy of every woman's right,--to love and be loved.
+
+She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold. 
+Any one with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this
+woman, the protruding brain, the eyes deep, concealing, would
+have foretold that she would conquer in the fight; force her soul
+down,-- but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid
+body spent and dead.  One thing was certain: no curious eyes
+would see the struggle; the body might be nerveless or sickly,
+but it had the great power of reticence; the calm with which she
+faced the closest gaze was natural to her,--no mask.  When she
+left her room and went down, the same unaltered quiet that had
+baffled Knowles steadied her step and cooled her eyes.
+
+After you have made a sacrifice of yourself for others, did you
+ever notice how apt you were to doubt, as soon as the deed was
+irrevocable, whether, after all, it were worth while to have done
+it?  How mean seems the good gained!  How new and unimagined the
+agony of empty hands and stifled wish!  Very slow the angels are,
+sometimes, that are sent to minister!
+
+Margret, going down the stairs that morning, found none of the
+chivalric unselfish glow of the night before in her home.  It was
+an old, bare house in the midst of dreary stubble fields, in
+which her life was slowly to be worn out: working for those who
+did not comprehend her; thanked her little,--that was all.  It
+did not matter; life was short: she could thank God for that at
+least.
+
+She opened the house-door.  A draught of cold morning air struck
+her face, sweeping from the west; it had driven the fog in great
+gray banks upon the hills, or in shimmering swamps into the cleft
+hollows: a vague twilight filled the space left bare.  Tiger,
+asleep in the hall, rushed out into the meadow, barking, wild
+with the freshness and cold, then back again to tear round her
+for a noisy good-morning.  The touch of the dog seemed to bring
+her closer to his master; she put him away; she dared not suffer
+even that treachery to her purpose: the very circumstances that
+had forced her to give him up made it weak cowardice to turn
+again.  It was a simple story, yet one which she dared not tell
+to herself; for it was not altogether for her father's sake she
+had made the sacrifice.  She knew, that, though she might be near
+to this man Holmes as his own soul, she was a clog on him,--stood
+in his way,--kept him back.  So she had quietly stood aside,
+taken up her own solitary burden, and left him with his clear
+self-reliant life,--with his Self, dearer to him than she had
+ever been.  Why should it not be dearer?  She
+thought,--remembering the man as he was, a master among men: fit
+to be a master.  She,--what was she compared to him?  He was back
+again; she must see him.  So she stood there with this persistent
+dread running through her brain.
+
+Suddenly, in the lane by the house, she heard a voice talking to
+Joel,--the huckster-girl.  What a weak, cheery sound it was in
+the cold and fog!  It touched her curiously: broke through her
+morbid thought as anything true and healthy should have done. 
+"Poor Lois!" she thought, with an eager pity, forgetting her own
+intolerable future for the moment, as she gathered up some
+breakfast and went with it down the lane.  Morning had come;
+great heavy bars of light fell from behind the hills athwart the
+banks of gray and black fog; there was shifting, uneasy,
+obstinate tumult among the shadows; they did not mean to yield to
+the coming dawn.  The hills, the massed woods, the mist opposed
+their immovable front, scornfully.  Margret did not notice the
+silent contest until she reached the lane.  The girl Lois,
+sitting in her cart, was looking, attentive, at the slow surge of
+the shadows, and the slower lifting of the slanted rays.
+
+"T' mornin' comes grand here, Miss Marg'et!" she said, lowering
+her voice.
+
+Margret said nothing in reply; the morning, she thought, was gray
+and cold, like her own life.  She stood leaning on the low cart;
+some strange sympathy drew her to this poor wretch, dwarfed,
+alone in the world,--some tie of equality, which the odd childish
+face, nor the quaint air of content about the creature, did not
+lessen.  Even when Lois shook down the patched skirt of her
+flannel frock straight, and settled the heaps of corn and
+tomatoes about her, preparatory for a start, Margret kept her
+hand on the side of the cart, and walked slowly by it down the
+road.  Once, looking at the girl, she thought with a half smile
+how oddly clean she was.  The flannel skirt she arranged so
+complacently had been washed until the colours had run madly into
+each other in sheer desperation; her hair was knotted with
+relentless tightness into a comb such as old women wear.  The
+very cart, patched as it was, had a snug, cosy look; the masses
+of vegetables, green and crimson and scarlet, were heaped with a
+certain reference to the glow of colour, Margret noticed,
+wondering if it were accidental.  Looking up, she saw the girl's
+brown eyes fixed on her face.  They were singularly soft,
+brooding brown.
+
+"Ye 'r' goin' to th' mill, Miss Marg'et?" she asked, in a half
+whisper.
+
+"Yes.  You never go there now, Lois?"
+
+"No, 'm."
+
+The girl shuddered, and then tried to hide it in a laugh. 
+Margret walked on beside her, her hand on the cart's edge. 
+Somehow this creature, that Nature had thrown impatiently aside
+as a failure, so marred, imperfect, that even the dogs were kind
+to her, came strangely near to her, claimed recognition by some
+subtile instinct.
+
+Partly for this, and partly striving to forget herself, she
+glanced furtively at the childish face of the distorted little
+body, wondering what impression the shifting dawn made on the
+unfinished soul that was looking out so intently through the
+brown eyes.  What artist sense had she,--what could she know--the
+ignorant huckster--of the eternal laws of beauty or grandeur? 
+Nothing.  Yet something in the girl's face made her think that
+these hills, this air and sky, were in fact alive to her,--real;
+that her soul, being lower, it might be, than ours, lay closer to
+Nature, knew the language of the changing day, of these
+earnest-faced hills, of the very worms crawling through the brown
+mould.  It was an idle fancy; Margret laughed at herself for it,
+and turned to watch the slow morning-struggle which Lois followed
+with such eager eyes.
+
+The light was conquering.  Up the gray arch the soft, dewy blue
+crept gently, deepening, broadening; below it, the level bars of
+light struck full on the sullen black of the west, and worked
+there undaunted, tinging it with crimson and imperial purple. 
+Two or three coy mist-clouds, soon converted to the new
+allegiance, drifted giddily about, mere flakes of rosy blushes. 
+The victory of the day came slowly, but sure, and then the full
+morning flushed out, fresh with moisture and light and delicate
+perfume.  The bars of sunlight fell on the lower earth from the
+steep hills like pointed swords; the foggy swamp of wet vapour
+trembled and broke, so touched, rose at last, leaving patches of
+damp brilliance on the fields, and floated majestically up in
+radiant victor clouds, led by the conquering wind.  Victory: it
+was in the cold, pure ether filling the heavens, in the solemn
+gladness of the hills.  The great forests thrilling in the soft
+light, the very sleepy river wakening under the mist, chorded
+with a grave bass in the rising anthem of welcome to the new life
+which God had freshly given to the world.  From the sun himself,
+come forth as a bridegroom from his chamber, to the flickering
+raindrops on the road-side mullein, the world seemed to rejoice,
+exultant in victory.  Homely, cheerier sounds broke the outlined
+grandeur of the morning, on which Margret looked wearily.  Lois
+lost none of them; no morbid shadow of her own balked life kept
+their meaning from her.
+
+The light played on the heaped vegetables in the old cart; the
+bony legs of the donkey trotted on with fresh vigour.  There was
+not a lowing cow in the distant barns, nor a chirping swallow on
+the fence-bushes, that did not seem to include the eager face of
+the little huckster in their morning greetings.  Not a golden
+dandelion on the road-side, not a gurgle of the plashing brown
+water from the well-troughs, which did not give a quicker
+pleasure to the glowing face.  Its curious content stung the
+woman walking by her side.  What secret of recompense had the
+poor wretch found?
+
+"Your father is here, Lois," she said carelessly, to break the
+silence.  "I saw him at the mill yesterday."
+
+Her face kindled instantly.
+
+"He's home, Miss Marg'et,--yes.  An' it's all right wid him. 
+Things allus do come right, some time," she added, in a
+reflective tone, brushing a fly off Barney's ear.
+
+Margret smiled.
+
+"Always?  Who brings them right for you, Lois?"
+
+"The Master," she said, turning with an answering smile.
+
+Margret was touched.  The owner of the mill was not a more real
+verity to this girl than the Master of whom she spoke with such
+quiet knowledge.
+
+"Are things right in the mill?" she said, testing her.
+
+A shadow came on her face; her eyes wandered uncertainly, as if
+her weak brain were confused,--only for a moment.
+
+
+"They'll come right!" she said, bravely "The Master'll see to
+it!"
+
+But the light was gone from her eyes; some old pain seemed to be
+surging through her narrow thought; and when she began to talk,
+it was in a bewildered, doubtful way.
+
+"It's a black place, th' mill," she said, in a low voice.  "It
+was a good while I was there: frum seven year old till sixteen. 
+'T seemed longer t' me 'n 't was.  'T seemed as if I'd been there
+allus,--jes' forever, yoh know.  'Fore I went in, I had the
+rickets, they say: that's what ails me.  'T hurt my head, they've
+told me,-- made me different frum other folks."
+
+She stopped a moment, with a dumb, hungry look in her eyes. 
+After a while she looked at Margret furtively, with a pitiful
+eagerness.
+
+"Miss Marg'et, I think there BE something wrong in my head.  Did
+YOH ever notice it?"
+
+Margret put her hand kindly on the broad, misshapen forehead.
+
+"Something is wrong everywhere, Lois," she said, absently.
+
+She did not see the slow sigh with which the girl smothered down
+whatever hope had risen just then, listened half-attentive as the
+huckster maundered on.
+
+"It was th' mill," she said at last.  "I kind o' grew into that
+place in them years: seemed  to me like as I was part o' th'
+engines, somehow.  Th' air used to be thick in my mouth, black
+wi' smoke 'n' wool 'n' smells.
+
+"In them years I got dazed in my head, I think.  'T was th' air
+'n' th' work.  I was weak allus.  'T got so that th' noise o' th'
+looms went on in my head night 'n' day,--allus thud, thud.  'N'
+hot days, when th' hands was chaffin' 'n' singin', th' black
+wheels 'n' rollers was alive, starin' down at me, 'n' th'
+shadders o' th' looms was like snakes creepin',--creepin' anear
+all th' time.  They was very good to me, th' hands was,--very
+good.  Ther' 's lots o' th' Master's people down there, though
+they never heard His name: preachers don't go there.  But He'll
+see to 't.  He'll not min' their cursin' o' Him, seein' they
+don't know His face, 'n' thinkin' He belongs to th' gentry.  I
+knew it wud come right wi' me, when times was th' most bad.  I
+knew"----
+
+The girl's hands were working together, her eyes set, all the
+slow years of ruin that had eaten into her brain rising before
+her, all the tainted blood in her veins of centuries of slavery
+and heathenism struggling to drag her down.  But above all, the
+Hope rose clear, simple: the trust in the Master: and shone in
+her scarred face,-- through her marred senses.
+
+"I knew it wud come right, allus.  I was alone then: mother was
+dead, and father was gone, 'n' th' Lord thought 't was time to
+see to me,--special as th' overseer was gettin' me an enter to
+th' poor-house.  So He sent Mr. Holmes along.  Then it come
+right!"
+
+Margret did not speak.  Even this mill-girl could talk of him,
+pray for him; but she never must take his name on her lips!
+
+"He got th' cart fur me, 'n' this blessed old donkey, 'n' my
+room.  Did yoh ever see my room, Miss Marg'et?"
+
+Her face lighted suddenly with its peculiar childlike smile.
+
+"No?  Yoh'll come some day, surely?  It's a pore place, yoh'll
+think; but it's got th' air,--th' air."
+
+She stopped to breathe the cold morning wind, as if she thought
+to find in its fierce freshness the life and brains she had lost.
+
+"Ther' 's places in them alleys 'n' dark holes, Miss Marg'et,
+like th' openin's to hell, with th' thick smells 'n' th' sights
+yoh'd see."
+
+She went back with a terrible clinging pity to the Gehenna from
+which she had escaped.  The ill of life was real enough to
+her,--a hungry devil down in those alleys and dens.  Margret
+listened, waked reluctantly to the sense of a different pain in
+the world from her own,--lower deeps from which women like
+herself draw delicately back, lifting their gauzy dresses.
+
+"Miss Marg'et!"
+
+Her face flashed.
+
+"Well, Lois?"
+
+"Th' Master has His people 'mong them very lowest, that's not for
+such as yoh to speak to.  He knows 'em: men 'n' women starved 'n'
+drunk into jails 'n' work-houses, that 'd scorn to be cowardly or
+mean,--that shows God's kindness, through th' whiskey 'n'
+thievin', to th' orphints or--such as me.  Ther' 's things th'
+Master likes in them, 'n' it'll come right, it'll come right at
+last; they'll have a chance--somewhere."
+
+Margret did not speak; let the poor girl sob herself into quiet. 
+What had she to do with this gulf of pain and wrong?  Her own
+higher life was starved, thwarted.  Could it be that the blood of
+these her brothers called against HER from the ground?  No wonder
+that the huckster-girl sobbed, she thought, or talked heresy.  It
+was not an easy thing to see a mother drink herself into the
+grave.  And yet--was she to blame?  Her Virginian blood was cool,
+high-bred; she had learned conservatism in her cradle.  Her life
+in the West had not yet quickened her pulse.  So she put aside
+whatever social mystery or wrong faced her in this girl, just as
+you or I would have done.  She had her own pain to bear.  Was she
+her brother's keeper? It was true, there was wrong; this woman's
+soul lay shattered by it; it was the fault of her blood, of her
+birth, and Society had finished the work.  Where was the help? 
+She was free,-- and liberty, Dr. Knowles said, was the cure for
+all the soul's diseases, and----
+
+Well, Lois was quiet now,--ready to be drawn into a dissertation
+on Barney's vices and virtues, or her room, where "th' air was so
+strong, 'n' the fruit 'n' vegetables allus stayed fresh,-- best
+in THIS town," she said, with a bustling pride.
+
+They went on down the road, through the corn-fields sometimes, or
+on the river-bank, or sometimes skirting the orchards or
+barn-yards of the farms.  The fences were well built, she
+noticed,--the barns wide and snug-looking: for this county in
+Indiana is settled by New England people, as a general thing, or
+Pennsylvanians.  They both leave their mark on barns or fields, I
+can tell you!  The two women were talking all the way.  In all
+his life Dr. Knowles had never heard from this silent girl words
+as open and eager as she gave to the huckster about paltry,
+common things,--partly, as I said, from a hope to forget herself,
+and partly from a vague curiosity to know the strange world which
+opened before her in this disjointed talk.  There were no morbid
+shadows in this Lois's life, she saw.  Her pains and pleasures
+were intensely real, like those of her class.  If there were
+latent powers in her distorted brain, smothered by hereditary
+vice of blood, or foul air and life, she knew nothing of it.  She
+never probed her own soul with fierce self-scorn, as this quiet
+woman by her side did;--accepted, instead, the passing moment,
+with keen enjoyment.  For the rest, childishly trusted "the
+Master."
+
+This very drive, now, for instance,--although she and the cart
+and Barney went through the same routine every day, you would
+have thought it was a new treat for a special holiday, if you had
+seen the perfect abandon with which they all threw themselves
+into the fun of the thing.  Not only did the very heaps of ruby
+tomatoes, and corn in delicate green casings, tremble and shine
+as though they enjoyed the fresh light and dew, but the old
+donkey cocked his ears, and curved his scraggy neck, and tried to
+look as like a high-spirited charger as he could.  Then everybody
+along the road knew Lois, and she knew everybody, and there was a
+mutual liking and perpetual joking, not very refined, perhaps,
+but hearty and kind.  It was a new side of life for Margret.  She
+had no time for thoughts of self-sacrifice, or chivalry, ancient
+or modern, watching it.  It was a very busy ride,-- something to
+do at every farm-house: a basket of eggs to be taken in, or some
+egg-plants, maybe, which Lois laid side by side, Margret
+noticed,--the pearly white balls close to the heap of royal
+purple.  No matter how small the basket was that she stopped for,
+it brought out two or three to put it in; for Lois and her cart
+were the event of the day for the lonely farm-houses.  The wife
+would come out, her face ablaze from the oven, with an anxious
+charge about that butter; the old man would hail her from the
+barn to know "ef she'd thought toh look in th' mail yes'rday;"
+and one or the other was sure to add, "Jes' time for breakfast,
+Lois."  If she had no baskets to stop for, she had "a bit o'
+business," which turned out to be a paper she had brought for the
+grandfather, or some fresh mint for the baby, or "jes' to inquire
+fur th' fam'ly."
+
+As to the amount that cart carried, it was a perpetual mystery to
+Lois.  Every day since she and the cart went into partnership,
+she had gone into town with a dead certainty in the minds of
+lookers-on that it would break down in five minutes, and a
+triumphant faith in hers in its unlimited endurance.  "This cart
+'ll be right side up fur years to come," she would assert,
+shaking her head.  "It 's got no more notion o' givin' up than me
+nor Barney,--not a bit."  Margret had her doubts,--and so would
+you, if you had heard how it creaked under the load,--how they
+piled in great straw panniers of apples: black apples with yellow
+hearts, scarlet veined,--golden pippin apples, that held the
+warmth and light longest,--russet apples with a hot blush on
+their rough brown skins,--plums shining coldly in their delicate
+purple bloom,--peaches with the crimson velvet of their cheeks
+aglow with the prisoned heat of a hundred summer days.
+
+I wish with all my heart somebody would paint me Lois and her
+cart!  Mr. Kitts, the artist in the city then, used to see it
+going past his room out by the coal-pits every day, and thought
+about it seriously.  But he had his grand battle-piece on hand
+then,--and after that he went the way of all geniuses, and died
+down into colourer for a photographer.  He met them, that day,
+out by the stone quarry, and touched his hat as he returned
+Lois's "Good-morning," and took a couple of great pawpaws from
+her.  She was a woman, you see, and he had some of the
+school-master's old-fashioned notions about women.  He was a
+sickly-looking soul.  One day Lois had heard him say that there
+were pawpaws on his mother's place in Ohio; so after that she
+always brought him some every day.  She was one of those people
+who must give, if it is nothing better than a Kentucky banana.
+
+After they passed the stone quarry, they left the country behind
+them, going down the stubble-covered hills that fenced in the
+town.  Even in the narrow streets, and through the warehouses,
+the strong, dewy air had quite blown down and off the fog and
+dust.  Morning (town morning, to be sure, but still morning) was
+shining in the red window-panes, in the tossing smoke up in the
+frosty air, in the very glowing faces of people hurrying from
+market with their noses nipped blue and their eyes watering with
+cold.  Lois and her cart, fresh with country breath hanging about
+them, were not so out of place, after all.  House-maids left the
+steps half-scrubbed, and helped her measure out the corn and
+beans, gossiping eagerly; the newsboys "Hi-d!" at her in a
+friendly, patronizing way; women in rusty black, with sharp, pale
+faces, hoisted their baskets, in which usually lay a scraggy bit
+of flitch, on to the wheel, their whispered bargaining ending
+oftenest in a low "Thank ye, Lois!"--for she sold cheaper to some
+people than they did in the market.
+
+Lois was Lois in town or country.  Some subtile power lay in the
+coarse, distorted body, in the pleading child's face, to rouse,
+wherever they went, the same curious, kindly smile.  Not, I
+think, that dumb, pathetic eye, common to deformity, that cries,
+"Have mercy upon me, O my friend, for the hand of God hath
+touched me!"--a deeper, mightier charm, rather: a trust down in
+the fouled fragments of her brain, even in the bitterest hour of
+her bare life,--a faith faith in God, faith in her fellow-man,
+faith in herself.  No human soul refused to answer its summons. 
+Down in the dark alleys, in the very vilest of the black and
+white wretches that crowded sometimes about her cart, there was
+an undefined sense of pride in protecting this wretch whose
+portion of life was more meagre and low than theirs.  Something
+in them struggled up to meet the trust in the pitiful
+eyes,--something which scorned to betray the trust,--some
+Christ-like power in their souls, smothered, dying, under the
+filth of their life and the terror of hell.  A something in them
+never to be lost.  If the Great Spirit of love and trust lives,
+not lost!
+
+Even in the cold and quiet of the woman walking by her side the
+homely power of the poor huckster was wholesome to strengthen. 
+Margret left her, turning into the crowded street leading to the
+part of the town where the factories lay.  The throng of
+anxious-faced men and women jostled and pushed, but she passed
+through them with a different heart from yesterday's.  Somehow,
+the morbid fancies were gone: she was keenly alive; the coarse
+real life of this huckster fired her, touched her blood with a
+more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader.  As she went down
+the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois's little
+cracked bell far off: it sounded like a Christmas song to her. 
+She half smiled, remembering how sometimes in her distempered
+brain the world had seemed a gray, dismal Dance of Death.  How
+actual it was to-day,--hearty, vigorous, alive with honest work
+and tears and pleasure!  A broad, good world to live and work in,
+to suffer or die, if God so willed it,--God, the good!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+She entered the vast, dingy factory; the woollen dust, the clammy
+air of copperas were easier to breathe in; the cramped, sordid
+office, the work, mere trifles to laugh at; and she bent over the
+ledger with its hard lines in earnest good-will, through the slow
+creeping hours of the long day.  She noticed that the unfortunate
+chicken was making its heart glad over a piece of fresh earth
+covered with damp moss.  Dr. Knowles stopped to look at it when
+he came, passing her with a surly nod.
+
+"So your master's not forgotten you," he snarled, while the blind
+old hen cocked her one eye up at him.
+
+Pike, the manager, had brought in some bills.
+
+"Who's its master?" he said, curiously, stopping by the door.
+
+"Holmes,--he feeds it every morning."
+
+The Doctor drawled out the words with a covert sneer, watching
+the cold face bending over the desk, meantime.
+
+Pike laughed.
+
+"Bah! it's the first thing he ever fed, then, besides himself. 
+Chickens must lie nearer his heart than men."
+
+Knowles scowled at him; he had no fancy for Pike's scurrilous
+gossip.
+
+The quiet face was unmoved.  When he heard the manager's foot on
+the ladder without, he tested it again.  He had a vague suspicion
+which he was determined to verify.
+
+"Holmes," he said, carelessly, "has an affinity for animals.  No
+wonder.  Adam must have been some such man as he, when the Lord
+gave him `dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
+the air.' "
+
+The hand paused courteously a moment, then resumed its quick,
+cool movement over the page.  He was not baffled.
+
+"If there were such a reality as mastership, that man was born to
+rule.  Pike will find him harder to cheat than me, when he takes
+possession here."
+
+She looked up now.
+
+"He came here to take my place in the mills,--buy me
+out,--articles will be signed in a day or two.  I know what you
+think,--no,--not worth a dollar.  Only brains and a soul, and he
+'s sold them at a high figure,--threw his heart in,--the
+purchaser being a lady.  It was light, I fancy,--starved out,
+long ago."
+
+The old man's words were spurted out in the bitterness of scorn. 
+The girl listened with a cool incredulity in her eyes, and went
+back to her work.
+
+"Miss Herne is the lady,--my partner's daughter.  Herne and
+Holmes they'll call the firm.  He is here every, day, counting
+future profit."
+
+Nothing could be read on the face; so he left her, cursing, as he
+went, men who put themselves up at auction,--worse than Orleans
+slaves.  Margret laughed to herself at his passion; as for the
+story he hinted, it was absurd.  She forgot it in a moment.
+
+Two or three gentlemen down in one of the counting-rooms, just
+then, looked at the story from another point of view.  They were
+talking low, out of hearing from the clerks.
+
+"It's a good thing for Holmes," said one, a burly, farmer-like
+man, who was choosing specimens of wool.
+
+"Cheap.  And long credit.  Just half the concern he takes."
+
+"There is a lady in the case?" suggested a young doctor, who, by
+virtue of having spent six months in the South, dropped his r-s,
+and talked of "niggahs" in a way to make a Georgian's hair stand
+on end.
+
+"A lady in the case?"
+
+"Of course.  Only child of Herne's.  HE comes down with the dust
+as dowry.  Good thing for Holmes.  'Stonishin' how he's made his
+way up.  If money 's what he wants in this world, he's making a
+long stride now to 't."
+
+The young doctor lighted his cigar, asserting that--
+
+"Ba George, some low people did get on, re-markably!  Mary Herne,
+now, was best catch in town."
+
+"Do you think money is what he wants?"  said a quiet little man,
+sitting lazily on a barrel,--a clergyman, Vandyke; whom his
+clerical brothers shook their heads when they named, but never
+argued with, and bowed to with uncommon deference.
+
+The wool-buyer hesitated with a puzzled look.
+
+"No," he said, slowly; "Stephen Holmes is not miserly.  I've
+knowed him since a boy.  To buy place, power, perhaps, eh?  Yet
+not that, neither," he added, hastily.  "We think a sight of him
+out our way, (self-made, you see,) and would have had him the
+best office in the State before this, only he was so cursedly
+indifferent."
+
+"Indifferent, yes.  No man cares much for stepping-stones in
+themselves," said Vandyke, half to himself.
+
+"Great fault of American society, especially in the West," said
+the young aristocrat.  "Stepping-stones lie low, as my reverend
+friend suggests; impudence ascends; merit and refinement scorn
+such dirty paths,"--with a mournful remembrance of the last dime
+in his waistcoat-pocket.
+
+"But do you," exclaimed the farmer, with sudden solemnity, "do
+you understand this scheme of Knowles's?  Every dollar he owns is
+in this mill, and every dollar of it is going into some castle in
+the air that no sane man can comprehend."
+
+"Mad as a March hare," contemptuously muttered the doctor.
+
+His reverend friend gave him a look,--after which he was silent.
+
+"I wish to the Lord some one would persuade him out of it,"
+persisted the wool-man, earnestly looking at the attentive face
+of his listener.  "We can't spare old Knowles's brain or heart
+while he ruins himself.  It's something of a Communist
+fraternity: I don't know the name, but I know the thing."
+
+Very hard common-sense shone out of his eyes just then at the
+clergyman, whom he suspected of being one of Knowles's abettors.
+
+"There's two ways for 'em to end.  If they're made out of the top
+of society, they get so refined, so idealized, that every
+particle flies off on its own special path to the sun, and the
+Community 's broke; and if they're made of the lower mud, they
+keep going down, down together,--they live to drink and eat, and
+make themselves as near the brutes as they can.  It isn't easy to
+believe, Sir, but it's true.  I have seen it.  I've seen every
+one of them the United States can produce.  It's FACTS, Sir; and
+facts, as Lord Bacon says, `are the basis of every sound
+speculation.' "
+
+The last sentence was slowly brought out, as quotations were not
+exactly his forte, but, as he said afterwards,--"You see, that
+nailed the parson."
+
+The parson nodded gravely.
+
+"You'll find no such experiment in the Bible," threw in the young
+doctor, alluding to "serious things" as a peace-offering to his
+reverend friend.
+
+"One, I believe," dryly.
+
+"Well," broke in the farmer, folding up his wool, "that's neither
+here nor there.  This experiment of Knowles's is like nothing
+known since the Creation.  Plan of his own.  He spends his days
+now hunting out the gallows-birds out of the dens in town here,
+and they're all to be transported into the country to start a new
+Arcadia.  A few men and women like himself, but the bulk is from
+the dens, I tell you.  All start fair, level ground, perpetual
+celibacy, mutual trust, honour, rise according to the stuff
+that's in them,--pah! it makes me sick!"
+
+"Knowles's inclination to that sort of people is easily
+explained," spitefully lisped the doctor.  "Blood, Sir.  His
+mother was a half-breed Creek, with all the propensities of the
+redskins to fire-water and 'itching palms.' Blood will out."
+
+"Here he is," maliciously whispered the woolman.  "No, it's
+Holmes," he added, after the doctor had started into a more
+respectful posture, and glanced around frightened.
+
+He, the doctor, rose to meet Holmes's coming footstep,--"a low
+fellah, but always sure to be the upper dog in the fight, goin'
+to marry the best catch," etc., etc.  The others, on the
+contrary, put on their hats and sauntered away into the street.
+
+The day broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars
+curdling up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along
+the dry gutters.  The old school-master in the shade of the great
+horse-chestnuts (brought from the homestead in the Piedmont
+country, every one) husked corn for his wife, composing,
+meanwhile, a page of his essay on the "Sirventes de Bertrand de
+Born."  Joel, up in the barn by himself,  worked through the long
+day in the old fashion,--pondering gravely (being of a religious
+turn) upon a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Clinche, reported in the
+"Gazette;" wherein that disciple of the meek Teacher invoked, as
+he did once a week, the curses of the law upon slaveholders,
+praying the Lord to sweep them immediately from the face of the
+earth.  Which rendering of Christian doctrine was so much
+relished by Joel, and the other leading members of Mr. Clinche's
+church, that they hinted to him it might be as well to continue
+choosing his texts from Moses and the Prophets until the
+excitement of the day was over.  The New Testament
+was,--well,--hardly suited for the-- emergency; did not, somehow,
+chime in with the lesson of the hour.  I may remark, in passing,
+that this course of conduct so disgusted the High Church rector
+of the parish, that he not only ignored all new devils, (as Mr. 
+Carlyle might have called them,) but talked as if the millennium
+were un fait accompli, and he had leisure to go and hammer at the
+poor dead old troubles of Luther's time.  One thing, though,
+about Joel: while he was joining in Mr. Clinche's petition for
+the "wiping out" of some few thousands, he was using up all the
+fragments of the hot day in fixing a stall for a half-dead old
+horse he had found by the road-side.
+
+Perhaps, even if the listening angel did not grant the prayer, he
+marked down the stall at least, as a something done for eternity.
+
+Margret, through the stifling air, worked steadily alone in the
+dusty office, her face bent over the books, never changing but
+once.  It was a trifle then; yet, when she looked back
+afterwards, the trifle was all that gave the day a name.  The
+room shook, as I said, with the thunderous, incessant sound of
+the engines and the looms; she scarcely heard it, being used to
+it.  Once, however, another sound came between,-- an iron tread,
+passing through the long wooden corridor,--so firm and measured
+that it sounded like the monotonous beatings of a clock.  She
+heard it through the noise in the far distance; it came slowly
+nearer, up to the door without,--passed it, going down the
+echoing plank walk.  The girl sat quietly, looking out at the
+dead brick wall.  The slow step fell on her brain like the
+sceptre of her master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he
+would have seen bared the secret of her life.  Holmes had gone
+by, unconscious of who was within the door.  She had not seen
+him; it was nothing but a step she heard.  Yet a power, the power
+of the girl's life, shook off all outward masks, all surface
+cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a terrible passion at
+the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul looked out, her
+soul as it was, as God knew it,--God and this man.  No longer a
+cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what a
+strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in
+heaven or in hell.  The man who held it in his grasp went on
+carelessly, not knowing that the mere sound of his step had
+raised it as from the dead.  She, and her right, and her pain,
+were nothing to him now, she remembered, staring out at the
+taunting hot sky.  Yet so vacant was the sudden life opened
+before her when he was gone, that, in the desperation of her
+weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again, she would
+have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step
+crush her life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking
+down the icy smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose,
+though it cost his own heart's life to do it.  He would trample
+her down, if she kept him back from his end; but be false to her,
+false to himself, that he would never be!
+
+The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable
+chicken peering out, grew sharper and more real.  Life was no
+morbid nightmare now; her weak woman's heart found it near,
+cruel.  There was not a pain nor a want, from the dumb question
+in the dog's eyes that passed her on the street, to her father's
+hopeless fancies, that did not touch her sharply through her own
+loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to do something to
+save others with this poor life left in her hands.
+
+So the day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring
+down like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or
+shams,--baking the hard earth in the streets harder for the
+horses' feet, drying up the bits of grass that grew between the
+boulders of the gutter, scaling off the paint from the brazen
+faces of the interminable brick houses.  He looked down in that
+city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live,
+on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day
+through the same monotonous routine.  Knowles, passing through
+the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange
+meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you
+and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it
+may be, you think?  A commonplace crowd like this in the street
+without: women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained,
+bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize- fighters,
+negroes.  Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in
+which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of
+uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,-- where creeds,
+philosophies, centuries old,  grappled hand to hand in their
+death-struggle,-- where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers
+of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred
+together, struggling for victory.
+
+Vulgar American life?  He thought it a life more potent, more
+tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone
+before.  People called him a fanatic.  It may be that he was one:
+yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some pain that I dare
+not tell you of; in his own life, looked into the depths of human
+loss with a mad desire to set it right.  On the very faces of
+those who sneered at him he found some trace of failure,
+something that his heart carried up to God with a loud and
+exceeding bitter cry.  The voice of the world, he thought, went
+up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great
+blind world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no
+help?
+
+The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it
+shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women, of
+these dogs and horses who walked the streets, problems whose end
+and beginning no eye could read.  There were places where it did
+not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the
+prison yonder: what riddles of life lay there he dared not think
+of.  God knows how the man groped for the light,--for any voice
+to make earth and heaven clear to him.
+
+There was another light by which the world was seen that day,
+rarer than the sunshine, and purer.  It fell on the dense
+crowds,--upon the just and the unjust.  It went into the fogs of
+the fetid dens from which the coarser light was barred, into the
+deepest mires of body where a soul could wallow, and made them
+clear.  It lighted the depths of the hearts whose outer pain and
+passion men were keen to read in the unpitying sunshine, and
+bared in those depths the feeble gropings for the right, the
+loving hope, the unuttered prayer.  No kind thought, no pure
+desire, no weakest faith in a God and heaven somewhere, could be
+so smothered under guilt that this subtile light did not search
+it out, glow about it, shine under it, hold it up in full view of
+God and the angels,--lighting the world other than the sun had
+done for six thousand years.  I have no name for the light: it
+has a name,--yonder.  Not many eyes were clear to see
+its--shining that day; and if they did, it was as through a
+glass, darkly.  Yet it belonged to us also, in the old time, the
+time when men could "hear the voice of the Lord God in the garden
+in the cool of the day."  It is God's light now alone.
+
+Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes,  of its
+heavenly clearness.  I think it was this light that made the
+burning of Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that
+showed her all the love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic
+which her eyes saw perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. 
+That evening, as she sat on the step of her frame-shanty,
+knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face and misshapen
+body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was this that gave to her
+face its homely, cheery smile.  It made her eyes quick to know
+the message in the depths of colour in the evening sky, or even
+the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its
+crimson cornucopias filled with hot shining.  She liked clear,
+vital colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues.  They answered
+her, somehow.  They could speak.  There were things in the world
+that like herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry
+to know: the gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens.  She
+cried sometimes, looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could
+not help it, with a vague sense of loss.  It seemed at those
+times so dreary for them to be alive,--or for her.  Other things
+her eyes were quicker to see than ours: delicate or grand lines,
+which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,--in the homeliest
+things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers,
+as in the eternal sculpture of the mountains.  Was it the disease
+of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,--that
+made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the
+flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some
+starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it
+scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know
+what they would say to us?  Was it weakness and ignorance that
+made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than
+to you or me?  She never got used to living as other people do;
+these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. 
+Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer
+noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in
+the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in
+a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she roused
+herself, weak and tired.
+
+She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,--knew nothing of
+Nature's laws, as you do.  Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of
+the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning,
+or, in the farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven
+exultant with the life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor
+vile thing she was, some coarse weight fell off, and something
+within, not the sickly Lois of the mill, went out, free, like an
+exile dreaming of home.
+
+You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature's
+brain, there were fragments of some artistic insight that made
+her thus rise above the level of her daily life, drunk with the
+mere beauty of form and colour.  I do not know,--not knowing how
+sham or real a thing you mean by artistic insight.  But I do know
+that the clear light I told you of shone for this girl dimly
+through this beauty of form and colour; alive.  The Life, rather;
+and ignorant, with no words for her thoughts, she believed in it
+as the Highest that she knew.  I think it came to her thus in
+imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints and lines, as
+to artists,)--a language, the same that Moses heard when he stood
+alone, with nothing between his naked soul and God, but the
+desert and the mountain and the bush that burned with fire.  I
+think the weak soul of the girl staggered from its dungeon, and
+groped through these heavy-browed hills, these colour-dreams,
+through the faces of dog or man upon the street, to find the God
+that lay behind.  So she saw the world, and its beauty and warmth
+being divine as near to her, the warmth and beauty became real in
+her, found their homely reflection in her daily life.  So she
+knew, too, the Master in whom she believed,  saw Him in
+everything that lived, more real than all beside.  The waiting
+earth, the prophetic sky, the very worm in the gutter was but a
+part of this man, something come to tell her of Him,--she dimly
+felt; though, as I said, she had no words for such a thought. 
+Yet even more real than this.  There was no pain nor temptation
+down in those dark cellars where she went that He had not
+borne,--not one.  Nor was there the least pleasure came to her or
+the others, not even a cheerful fire, or kind words, or a warm,
+hearty laugh, that she did not know He sent it and was glad to do
+it.  She knew that well!  So it was that He took part in her
+humble daily life, and became more real to her day by day.  Very
+homely shadows her life gave of His light, for it was His:
+homely, because of her poor way of living, and of the depth to
+which the heavy foot of the world had crushed her.  Yet they were
+there all the time, in her cheery patience, if nothing more. 
+To-night, for instance, how differently the surging crowd seemed
+to her from what it did to Knowles!  She looked down on it from
+her high wood-steps with an eager interest, ready with her weak,
+timid laugh to answer every friendly call from below.  She had no
+power to see them as types of great classes; they were just so
+many living people, whom she knew, and who, most of them, had
+been kind to her.  Whatever good there was in the vilest face,
+(and there was always something,) she was sure to see it.  The
+light made her poor eyes strong for that.
+
+She liked to sit there in the evenings, being alone, yet never
+growing lonesome; there was so much that was pleasant to watch
+and listen to, as the cool brown twilight came on.  If, as
+Knowles thought, the world was a dreary discord, she knew nothing
+of it.  People were going from their work now,--they had time to
+talk and joke by the way,--stopping, or walking slowly down the
+cool shadows of the pavement; while here and there a lingering
+red sunbeam burnished a window, or struck athwart the gray
+boulder-paved street.  From the houses near you could catch a
+faint smell of supper: very friendly people those were in these
+houses; she knew them all well.  The children came out with their
+faces washed, to play, now the sun was down: the oldest of them
+generally came to sit with her and hear a story.
+
+After it grew darker, you would see the girls in their neat blue
+calicoes go sauntering down the street with their sweethearts for
+a walk.  There was old Polston and his son Sam coming home from
+the coal-pits, as black as ink, with their little tin lanterns on
+their caps.  After a while Sam would come out in his suit of
+Kentucky jean, his face shining with the soap, and go sheepishly
+down to Jenny Ball's, and the old man would bring his pipe and
+chair out on the pavement, and his wife would sit on the steps. 
+Most likely they would call Lois down, or come over themselves,
+for they were the most sociable, cosiest old couple you ever
+knew.  There was a great stopping at Lois's door, as the girls
+walked past, for a bunch of the flowers she brought from the
+country, or posies, as they called them, (Sam never would take
+any to Jenny but "old man" and pinks,) and she always had them
+ready in broken jugs inside.  They were good, kind girls, every
+one of them,--had taken it in turn to sit up with Lois last
+winter all the time she had the rheumatism.  She never forgot
+that time,--never once.
+
+Later in the evening you would see a man coming along, close by
+the wall, with his head down, the same Margret had seen in the
+mill,--a dark man, with gray, thin hair,--Joe Yare, Lois's old
+father.  No one spoke to him,-- people always were looking away
+as he passed; and if old Mr. or Mrs. Polston were on the steps
+when he came up, they would say, "Good-evening, Mr. Yare," very
+formally, and go away presently.  It hurt Lois more than anything
+else they could have done.  But she bustled about noisily, so
+that he would not notice it.  If they saw the marks of the ill
+life he had lived on his old face, she did not; his sad,
+uncertain eyes may have been dishonest to them, but they were
+nothing but kind to the misshapen little soul that he kissed so
+warmly with a "Why, Lo, my little girl!"  Nobody else in the
+world ever called her by a pet name.
+
+Sometimes he was gloomy and silent, but generally he told her of
+all that had happened in the mill, particularly any little word
+of notice or praise he might have received, watching her
+anxiously until she laughed at it, and then rubbing his hands
+cheerfully.  He need not have doubted Lois's faith in him. 
+Whatever the rest did, she believed in him; she always had
+believed in him, through all the dark years, when he was at home,
+and in the penitentiary.  They were gone now, never to come back. 
+It had come right.  If the others wronged him, and it hurt her
+bitterly that they did, that would come right some day too, she
+would think, as she looked at the tired, sullen face of the old
+man bent to the window-pane, afraid to go out.  But they had very
+cheerful little suppers there by themselves in the odd, bare
+little room, as homely and clean as Lois herself.
+
+Sometimes, late at night, when he had gone to bed, she sat alone
+in the door, while the  moonlight fell in broad patches over the
+square, and the great poplars stood like giants whispering
+together.  Still the far sounds of the town came up cheerfully,
+while she folded up her knitting, it being dark, thinking how
+happy an ending this was to a happy day.  When it grew quiet, she
+could hear the solemn whisper of the poplars, and sometimes
+broken strains of music from the cathedral in the city floated
+through the cold and moonlight past her, far off into the blue
+beyond the hills.  All the keen pleasure of the day, the warm,
+bright sights and sounds, coarse and homely though they were,
+seemed to fade into the deep music, and make a part of it.
+
+Yet, sitting there, looking out into the listening night, the
+poor child's face grew slowly pale as she heard it.  It humbled
+her.  It made her meanness, her low, weak life so plain to her!
+There was no pain nor hunger she had known that did not find a
+voice in its articulate cry.  SHE! what was she?  The pain and
+wants of the world must be going up to God in that sound, she
+thought.  There was something more in it,--an unknown meaning of
+a great content that her shattered brain struggled to grasp.  She
+could not.  Her heart ached with a wild, restless longing.  She
+had no words for the vague, insatiate hunger to understand.  It 
+was because she was ignorant and low, perhaps; others could know. 
+She thought her Master was speaking.  She thought that unknown
+Joy linked all earth and heaven together, and made it plain.  So
+she hid her face in her hands, and listened, while the low
+harmony shivered through the air, unheeded by others, with the
+message of God to man.  Not comprehending, it may be,--the poor
+girl,--hungry still to know.  Yet, when she looked up, there were
+warm tears in her eyes, and her scarred face was bright with a
+sad, deep content and love.
+
+So the hot, long day was over for them all,--passed as thousands
+of days have done for us, gone down, forgotten: as that long, hot
+day we call life will be over some time, and go down into the
+gray and cold.  Surely, whatever of sorrow or pain may have made
+darkness in that day for you or me, there were countless openings
+where we might have seen glimpses of that other light than
+sunshine: the light of that great To-Morrow, of the land where
+all wrongs shall be righted.  If we had but chosen to see it,--if
+we only had chosen!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Now that I have come to the love part of my story, I am suddenly
+conscious of dingy common colors on the palette with which I have
+been painting.  I wish I had some brilliant dyes.  I wish, with
+all my heart, I could take you back to that "Once upon a time" in
+which the souls of our grandmothers delighted,--the time which
+Dr. Johnson sat up all night to read about in "Evelina,"--the
+time when all the celestial virtues, all the earthly graces were
+revealed in a condensed state to man through the blue eyes and
+sumptuous linens of some Belinda Portman or Lord Mortimer.  None
+of your good-hearted, sorely-tempted villains then!  It made your
+hair stand on end only to read of them,--going about perpetually
+seeking innocent maidens and unsophisticated old men to devour. 
+That was the time for holding up virtue and vice; no trouble then
+in seeing which were sheep and which were goats!  A person could
+write a story with a moral to it, then, I should hope! People
+that were born in those days had no fancy for going through the
+world with half-and-half characters, such as we put up with; so
+Nature turned out complete specimens of each class, with all the
+appendages of dress, fortune, et cetera, chording decently.  The
+heroine glides into life full-charged with rank, virtues, a name
+three-syllabled, and a white dress that never needs washing,
+ready to sail through dangers dire into a triumphant haven of
+matrimony;-- all the aristocrats have high foreheads and cold
+blue eyes; all the peasants are old women, miraculously grateful,
+in neat check aprons, or sullen-browed insurgents planning
+revolts in caves.
+
+Of course, I do not mean that these times are gone: they are
+alive (in a modern fashion) in many places in the world; some of
+my friends have described them in prose and verse.  I only mean
+to say that I never was there; I was born unlucky.  I am willing
+to do my best, but I live in the commonplace.  Once or twice I
+have rashly tried my hand at dark conspiracies, and women rare
+and radiant in Italian bowers; but I have a friend who is sure to
+say, "Try and tell us about the butcher next door, my dear."  If
+I look up from my paper now, I shall be just as apt to see our
+dog and his kennel as the white sky stained with blood and Tyrian
+purple.  I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life. 
+The coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother,
+and she a widow,--and a kinder son never lived.  Doubtless there
+are people capable of a love terrible in its strength; but I
+never knew such a case that some one did not consider its
+expediency as "a match" in the light of dollars and cents.  As
+for heroines, of course I have seen beautiful women, and good as
+fair.  The most beautiful is delicate and pure enough for a type
+of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm and holy.  (Very
+pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care about blood.) But at
+home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can do, she will
+sing, and sing through her nose; and on washing-days she often
+cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are
+not in order.  Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like
+that?  I have known old maids in abundance, with pathos and
+sunshine in their lives; but the old maid of novels I never have
+met, who abandoned her soul to gossip,--nor yet the other type, a
+life-long martyr of unselfishness.  They are mixed generally, and
+not unlike their married sisters, so far as I can see.  Then as
+to men, certainly I know heroes.  One man, I knew, as high a
+chevalier in heart as any Bayard of them all; one of those souls
+simple and gentle as a woman, tender in knightly honour.  He was
+an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier wig, who spent
+his life in a dingy village office.  You poets would have laughed
+at him.  Well, well, his history never will be written.  The
+kind, sad, blue eyes are shut now.  There is a little
+farm-graveyard overgrown with privet and wild grape-vines, and a
+flattened grave where he was laid to rest; and only a few who
+knew him when they were children care to go there, and think of
+what he was to them.  But it was not in the far days of Chivalry
+alone, I think, that true and proud souls have stood in the world
+unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away and dumbly
+died.  Let it be.  Their lives are not lost, thank God!
+
+I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my
+story seem coarse to you,--if the hero, unlike all other heroes,
+stopped to count the cost before he fell in love,--if it made his
+fingers thrill with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well
+as his mistress's hand,--not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a
+man to be despised?  A hero, rather, of a peculiar type,--a man,
+more than other men: the very mould of man, doubt it who will,
+that women love longest and most madly.  Of course, if I could, I
+would have blotted out every meanness before I showed him to you;
+I would have told you Margret was an impetuous, whole-souled
+woman, glad to throw her life down for her father, without one
+bitter thought of the wife and mother she might have been; I
+would have painted her mother tender, (as she was,) forgetting
+how pettish she grew on busy days: but what can I do?  I must
+show you men and women as they are in that especial State of the
+Union where I live.  In all the others, of course, it is very
+different.  Now, being prepared for disappointment, will you see
+my hero?
+
+He had sauntered out from the city for a morning walk,--not
+through the hills, as Margret went, going home, but on the other
+side, to the river, over which you could see the Prairie.  We are
+in Indiana, remember.  The sunlight was pure that morning,
+powerful, tintless, the true wine of life for body or spirit. 
+Stephen Holmes knew that, being a man of delicate animal
+instincts, and so used it, just as he had used the dumb-bells in
+the morning.  All things were made for man, weren't they?  He was
+leaning against the door of the school-house,-- a red, flaunting
+house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to it, he
+could not see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the
+beauty of the scene to act on him.  Suffered: in a man, according
+to his creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such
+as beauty, pain, religion, permitted to act under orders.  Of
+course.
+
+It was a peculiar landscape,--like the man who looked at it, of a
+thoroughly American type.  A range of sharp, dark hills, with a
+sombre depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides
+massed forests of scarlet and flame and crimson.  Above, the
+sharp peaks of stone rose into the wan blue, wan and pale
+themselves, and wearing a certain air of fixed calm, the type of
+an eternal quiet.  At the base of the hills lay the city, a dirty
+mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge flowed the
+river,--deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and
+curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and
+mud-covered rock.  Beyond it yawned the opening to the great
+West,--the Prairies.  Not the dreary deadness here, as farther
+west.  A plain, dark russet in hue,--for the grass was
+sun-scorched,--stretching away into the vague distance,
+intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that
+only made the vastness and silence more wide and heavy.  Its
+limitless torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached, stretching
+to find some break before the dull russet faded into the amber of
+the horizon and was lost.  An American landscape: of few
+features, simple, grand in outline as a face of one of the early
+gods.  It lay utterly motionless before him, not a fleck of cloud
+in the pure blue above, even where the mist rose from the river;
+it only had glorified the clear blue into clearer violet.
+
+Holmes stood quietly looking; he could have created a picture
+like this, if he never had seen one; therefore he was able to
+recognize it, accepted it into his soul, and let it do what it
+would there.
+
+Suddenly a low wind from the far Pacific coast struck from the
+amber line where the sun went down.  A faint tremble passed over
+the great hills, the broad sweeps of colour darkened from base to
+summit, then flashed again,--while below, the prairie rose and
+fell like a dun sea, and rolled in long, slow, solemn waves.
+
+The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes's face that he
+caught his breath.  It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the
+West there, whose breath blew on him,--the freedom of the
+primitive man, the untamed animal man, self-reliant and
+self-assertant, having conquered Nature.  Well, this fierce,
+masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes, doubtless. 
+It was old Knowles's vital air.  He wondered if the old man would
+succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and
+thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom. 
+They craved leave to live on sufferance now, not knowing their
+possible divinity.   It was a desperate remedy, this sense of
+unchecked liberty; but their disease was desperate.  As for
+himself, he did not need it; that element was not lacking.  In a
+mere bodily sense, to be sure.  He felt his arm.  Yes, the cold
+rigor of this new life had already worn off much of the clogging
+weight of flesh, strengthened the muscles.  Six months more in
+the West would toughen the fibres to iron.  He raised an iron
+weight that lay on the steps, carelessly testing them.  For the
+rest, he was going back here; something of the cold, loose
+freshness got into his brain, he believed.  In the two years of
+absence his power of concentration had been stronger, his
+perceptions more free from prejudice, gaining every day delicate
+point, acuteness of analysis.  He drew a long breath of the icy
+air, coarse with the wild perfume of the prairie.  No, his
+temperament needed a subtiler atmosphere than this, rarer essence
+than mere brutal freedom The East, the Old World, was his proper
+sphere for self-development.  He would go as soon as he could
+command the means, leaving all clogs behind.  ALL?  His idle
+thought balked here, suddenly; the sallow forehead contracted
+sharply, and his gray eyes grew in an instant shallow, careless,
+formal, as a man who holds back his thought.  There was a fierce
+warring in his brain for a moment.  Then he brushed his Kossuth
+hat with his arm, and put it on, looking out at the landscape
+again.  Somehow its meaning was dulled to him.  Just then a muddy
+terrier came up, and rubbed itself against his knee.  "Why, Tige,
+old boy!" he said, stooping to pat it kindly.  The hard, shallow
+look faded out; he half smiled, looking in the dog's eyes.  A
+curious smile, unspeakably tender and sad.  It was the
+idiosyncrasy of the man's face, rarely seen there.  He might have
+looked with it at a criminal, condemning him to death.  But he
+would have condemned him, and, if no hangman could be found,
+would have put the rope on with his own hands, and then most
+probably would have sat down pale and trembling, and analyzed his
+sensations on paper,--being sincere in all.
+
+He sat down on the school-house step, which the boys had hacked
+and whittled rough, and waited; for he was there by appointment,
+to meet Dr. Knowles.
+
+Knowles had gone out early in the morning to look at the ground
+he was going to buy for his Phalanstery, or whatever he chose to
+call it.  He was to bring the deed of sale of the mill out with
+him for Holmes.  The next day it was to be signed.  Holmes saw
+him at last lumbering across the prairie, wiping the perspiration
+from his forehead.  Summer or winter, he contrived to be always
+hot.  There was a cart drawn by an old donkey coming along beside
+him.  Knowles was talking to the driver.  The old man clapped his
+hands as stage-coachmen do, and drew in long draughts of air, as
+if there were keen life and promise in every breath.  They came
+up at last, the cart empty, and drying for the day's work after
+its morning's scrubbing, Lois's pock-marked face all in a glow
+with trying to keep Barney awake.  She grew quite red with
+pleasure at seeing Holmes, but went on quickly as the men began
+to talk.  Tige followed her, of course; but when she had gone a
+little way across the prairie, they saw her stop, and presently
+the dog came back with something in his mouth, which he laid down
+beside his master, and bolted off.  It was only a rough
+wicker-basket which she had filled with damp plushy moss, and
+half-buried in it clusters of plumy fern, delicate brown and
+ashen lichens, masses of forest-leaves all shaded green with a
+few crimson tints.  It had a clear woody smell, like far-off
+myrrh.  The Doctor laughed as Holmes took it up.
+
+"An artist's gift, if it is from a mulatto," he said.  "A born
+colourist."
+
+The men were not at ease,--for some reason; they seized on every
+trifle to keep off the subject which had brought them together.
+
+"That girl's artist-sense is pure, and her religion, down under
+the perversion and ignorance of her brain.  Curious, eh?"
+
+"Look at the top of her head, when you see her," said Holmes. 
+"It is necessity for such brains to worship.  They let the fire
+lick their blood, if they happen to be born Parsees.  This girl,
+if she had been a Jew when Christ was born, would have known him
+as Simeon did."
+
+Knowles said nothing,--only glanced at the massive head of the
+speaker, with its overhanging brow, square development at the
+sides, and lowered crown, and smiled significantly.
+
+"Exactly," laughed Holmes, putting his hand on his head. 
+"Crippled there by my Yorkshire blood,--my mother.  Never mind;
+outside of this life, blood or circumstance matters nothing."
+
+They walked on slowly towards town.  Surely there was nothing in
+the bill-of-sale which the old man had in his pocket but a mere
+matter of business; yet they were strangely silent about it, as
+if it brought shame to some one.  There was an embarrassed pause. 
+The Doctor went back to Lois for relief.
+
+"I think it is the pain and want of such as she that makes them
+susceptible to religion.  The self in them is so starved and
+humbled that it cannot obscure their eyes; they see God clearly."
+
+"Say rather," said Holmes, "that the soul is so starved and blind
+that it cannot recognize itself as God."
+
+The Doctor's intolerant eye kindled.
+
+"Humph!  So that's your creed!  Not Pantheism.  Ego sum.  Of
+course you go on with the conjugation: I have been, I shall be. 
+I,-- that covers the whole ground, creation, redemption, and
+commands the hereafter?"
+
+"It does so," said Holmes, coolly.
+
+"And this wretched huckster carries her deity about her,--her
+self-existent soul?  How, in God's name, is her life to set it
+free?"
+
+Holmes said nothing.  The coarse sneer could not be answered. 
+Men with pale faces and heavy jaws like his do not carry their
+religion on their tongue's end; their creeds leave them only in
+the slow oozing life-blood, false as the creeds may be.
+
+Knowles went on hotly, half to himself, seizing on the new idea
+fiercely, as men and women do who are yet groping for the truth
+of life.
+
+"What is it your Novalis says?  `The true Shechinah is man.'  You
+know no higher God?  Pooh! the idea is old enough; it began with
+Eve.  It works slowly, Holmes.  In six thousand years, taking
+humanity as one, this self-existent soul should have clothed
+itself with a freer, royaller garment than poor Lois's body,-- or
+mine," he added, bitterly.
+
+"It works slowly," said the other, quietly.  "Faster soon, in
+America.  There are yet many ills of life for the divinity within
+to conquer."
+
+"And Lois and the swarming mass yonder in those dens?  It is late
+for them to begin the fight?"
+
+"Endurance is enough for them here, and their religions teach
+them that.  They could not bear the truth.  One does not put a
+weapon into the hands of a man dying of the fetor and hunger of
+the siege."
+
+"But what will this life, or the lives to come, give to you,
+champions who know the truth?"
+
+"Nothing but victory," he said, in a low tone, looking away.
+
+Knowles looked at the pale strength of the iron face.
+
+"God help you, Stephen!" he broke out, his shallow jeering
+falling off.  "For there IS a God higher than we.  The ills of
+life you mean to conquer will teach it to you, Holmes.  You'll
+find the Something above yourself, if it's only to curse Him and
+die."
+
+Holmes did not smile at the old man's heat,-- walked gravely,
+steadily.
+
+There was a short silence.  Knowles put his hand gently on the
+other's arm.
+
+"Stephen," he hesitated, "you're a stronger man than I.  I know
+what you are; I've watched you from a boy.  But you're wrong
+here.  I'm an old man.  There's not much I know in life,--enough
+to madden me.  But I do know there's something stronger,--some
+God outside of the mean devil they call `Me.' You'll learn it,
+boy.  There's an old story of a man like you and the rest of your
+sect, and of the vile, mean, crawling things that God sent to
+bring him down.  There are such things yet.  Mean passions in
+your divine soul, low, selfish things, that will get the better
+of you, show you what you are.  You'll do all that man can do. 
+But they are coming, Stephen Holmes! they're coming!"
+
+He stopped, startled.  For Holmes had turned abruptly, glancing
+over at the city with a strange wistfulness.  It was over in a
+moment.  He resumed the slow, controlling walk beside him.  They
+went on in silence into town, and when they did speak, it was on
+indifferent subjects, not referring to the last.  The Doctor's
+heat, as it usually did, boiled out in spasms on trifles.  Once
+he stumped his toe, and, I am sorry to say, swore roundly about
+it, just as he would have done in the new Arcadia, if one of the
+jail-birds comprising that colony had been ungrateful for his
+advantages.  Philanthropists, for some curious reason, are not
+the most amiable members of small families.
+
+He gave Holmes the roll of parchment he had in his pocket,
+looking keenly at him, as he did so, but only saying, that, if he
+meant to sign it, it would be done to-morrow.  As Holmes took it,
+they stopped at the great door of the factory.  He went in alone,
+Knowles going down the street.  One trifle, strange in its way,
+he remembered afterwards.  Holding the roll of paper in his hand
+that would make the mill his, he went, in his slow, grave way,
+down the long passage to the loom-rooms.  There was a crowd of
+porters and firemen there, as usual, and he thought one of them
+hastily passed him in the dark passage, hiding behind an engine. 
+As the shadow fell on him, his teeth chattered with a chilly
+shudder.  He smiled, thinking how superstitious people would say
+that some one trod on his grave just then, or that Death looked
+at him, and went on.  Afterwards he thought of it.  Going through
+the office, the fat old book-keeper, Huff, stopped him with a
+story he had been keeping for him all day.  He liked to tell a
+story to Holmes; he could see into a joke; it did a man good to
+hear a fellow laugh like that.  Holmes did laugh, for the story
+was a good one, and stood a moment, then went in, leaving the old
+fellow chuckling over his desk.  Huff did not know how, lately,
+after every laugh, this man felt a vague scorn of himself, as if
+jokes and laughter belonged to a self that ought to have been
+dead long ago.  Perhaps, if the fat old book-keeper had known it,
+he would have said that the man was better than he knew.  But
+then,--poor Huff!  He passed slowly through the alleys between
+the great looms.  Overhead the ceiling looked like a heavy maze
+of iron cylinders and black swinging bars and wheels, all in
+swift, ponderous motion.  It was enough to make a brain dizzy
+with the clanging thunder of the engines, the whizzing spindles
+of red and yellow, and the hot daylight glaring over all.  The
+looms were watched by women, most of them bold, tawdry girls of
+fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from the hills, wives of
+the coal-diggers.  There was a breathless odour of copperas.  As
+he went from one room to another up through the ascending
+stories, he had a vague sensation of being followed.  Some shadow
+lurked at times behind the engines, or stole after him in the
+dark entries.  Were there ghosts, then, in mills in broad
+daylight?  None but the ghosts of Want and Hunger and Crime, he
+might have known, that do not wait for night to walk our streets:
+the ghosts that poor old Knowles hoped to lay forever.
+
+Holmes had a room fitted up in the mill, where he slept.  He went
+up to it slowly, holding the paper tightly in one hand, glancing
+at the operatives, the work, through his furtive half-shut eye. 
+Nothing escaped him.  Passing the windows, he did not once look
+out at the prophetic dream of beauty he had left without.  In the
+mill he was of the mill.  Yet he went slowly, as if he shrank
+from the task waiting for him.  Why should he?  It was a simple
+matter of business, this transfer of Knowles's share in the mill
+to himself; to-day he was to decide whether he would conclude the
+bargain.  If any dark history of wrong lay underneath, if this
+simple decision of his was to be the struggle for life and death
+with him, his cold, firm face told nothing of it.  Let us be just
+to him, stand by him, if we can, in the midst of his desolate
+home and desolate life, and look through his cold, sorrowful eyes
+at the deed he was going to do.  Dreary enough he looked, going
+through the great mill, despite the power in his quiet face.  A
+man who had strength for solitude; yet, I think, with all his
+strength, his mother could not have borne to look back from the
+dead that day, to see her boy so utterly alone.  The day was the
+crisis of his life, looked forward to for years; he held in his
+hand a sure passport to fortune.  Yet he thrust the hour off,
+perversely, trifling with idle fancies, pushing from him the one
+question which all the years past and to come had left for this
+day to decide.
+
+Some such idle fancy it may have been that made the man turn from
+the usual way down a narrow passage into which opened doors from
+small offices.  Margret Howth, he had learned to-day, was in the
+first one.  He hesitated before he did it, his sallow face
+turning a trifle paler; then he went on in his hard, grave way,
+wondering dimly if she remembered his step, if she cared to see
+him now.  She used to know it,--she was the only one in the world
+who ever had cared to know it,--silly child! Doubtless she was
+wiser now.  He remembered he used to think, that, when this woman
+loved, it would be as he himself would, with a simple trust which
+the wrong of years could not touch.  And once he had thought----
+Well, well, he was mistaken.  Poor Margret! Better as it was. 
+They were nothing to each other.  She had put him from her, and
+he had suffered himself to be put away.  Why, he would have given
+up every prospect of life, if he had done otherwise!  Yet he
+wondered bitterly if she had thought him selfish,--if she thought
+it was money he cared for, as the others did.  It mattered
+nothing what they thought, but it wounded him intolerably that
+she should wrong him.  Yet, with all this, whenever he looked
+forward to death, it was with the certainty that he should find
+her there beyond.  There would be no secrets then; she would know
+then how he had loved her always.  Loved her?  Yes; he need not
+hide it from himself, surely.
+
+He was now by the door of the office;-- she was within.  Little
+Margret, poor little Margret! struggling there day after day for
+the old father and mother.  What a pale, cold little child she
+used to be! such a child! yet kindling at his look or touch, as
+if her veins were filled with subtile flame.  Her soul was--like
+his own, he thought.  He knew what it was,-- he only.  Even now
+he glowed with a man's triumph to know he held the secret life of
+this woman bare in his hand.  No other human power could ever
+come near her; he was secure in possession.  She had put him from
+her;--it was better for both, perhaps.  Their paths were separate
+here; for she had some unreal notions of duty, and he had too
+much to do in the world to clog himself with cares, or to idle an
+hour in the rare ecstasy of even love like this.
+
+He passed the office, not pausing in his slow step.  Some sudden
+impulse made him put his hand on the door as he brushed against
+it: just a quick, light touch; but it had all the fierce passion
+of a caress.  He drew it back as quickly, and went on, wiping a
+clammy sweat from his face.
+
+The room he had fitted up for himself was whitewashed and barely
+furnished; it made one's bones ache to look at the iron bedstead
+and chairs.  Holmes's natural taste was more glowing, however
+smothered, than that of any saffron-robed Sybarite.  It needed
+correction, he knew; here was discipline.  Besides, he had set
+apart the coming three or four years of his life to make money
+in, enough for the time to come.  He would devote his whole
+strength to that work, and so be sooner done with it.  Money, or
+place, or even power, was nothing but a means to him: other men
+valued them because of their influence on others.  As his work in
+the world was only the development of himself, it was different,
+of course.  What would it matter to his soul the day after death,
+if millions called his name aloud in blame or praise?  Would he
+hear or answer then?  What would it matter to him then, if he had
+starved with them, or ruled over them?  People talked of
+benevolence.  What would it matter to him then, the misery or
+happiness of those yet working in this paltry life of ours?  In
+so far as the exercise of kindly emotions or self-denial
+developed the higher part of his nature, it was to be commended;
+as for its effect on others, that he had nothing to do with.  He
+practised self-denial constantly to strengthen the benevolent
+instincts.  That very morning he had given his last dollar to Joe
+Byers, a half-starved cripple.  "Chucked it at me," Joe said,
+"like as he'd give a bone to a dog, and be damned to him!  Who
+thanks him?"  To tell the truth, you will find no fairer exponent
+than this Stephen Holmes of the great idea of American
+sociology,--that the object of life is TO GROW.  Circumstances
+had forced it on him, partly.  Sitting now in his room, where he
+was counting the cost of becoming a merchant prince, he could
+look back to the time of a boyhood passed in the depths of
+ignorance and vice.  He knew what this Self within him was; he
+knew how it had forced him to grope his way up, to give this
+hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom and knowledge.  All men
+around him were doing the same,--thrusting and jostling and
+struggling, up, up.  It was the American motto, Go ahead; mothers
+taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of
+glittering prizes.  He at least saw the higher meaning of the
+truth; he had no low ambitions.  To lift this self up into a
+higher range of being when it had done with the uses of
+this,--that was his work.  Self-salvation, self-elevation,--the
+ideas that give birth to, and destroy half of our Christianity,
+half of our philanthropy! Sometimes, sleeping instincts in the
+man  struggled up to assert a divinity more terrible than this
+growing self-existent soul that he purified and analyzed day by
+day: a depth of tender pity for outer pain; a fierce longing for
+rest, on something, in something, he cared not what.  He stifled
+such rebellious promptings,--called them morbid.  He called it
+morbid, too, the passion now that chilled his strong blood, and
+wrung out these clammy drops on his forehead, at the mere thought
+of this girl below.
+
+He shut the door of his room tightly: he had no time to-day for
+lounging visitors.  For Holmes, quiet and steady, was sought for,
+if not popular, even in the free-and-easy West; one of those men
+who are unwillingly masters among men.  Just and mild, always;
+with a peculiar gift that made men talk their best thoughts to
+him, knowing they would be understood; if any core of eternal
+flint lay under the simple, truthful manner of the man, nobody
+saw it.
+
+He laid the bill of sale on the table; it was an altogether
+practical matter on which he sat in judgment, but he was going to
+do nothing rashly.  A plain business document: he took Dr.
+Knowles's share in the factory; the payments made with short
+intervals; John Herne was to be his endorser: it needed only the
+names to make it valid.  Plain enough; no hint there of the tacit
+understanding that the purchase-money was a wedding dowry; even
+between Herne and himself it never was openly put into words.  If
+he did not marry Miss Herne, the mill was her father's; that of
+course must be spoken of, arranged to-morrow.  If he took it,
+then? if he married her?  Holmes had been poor, was miserably
+poor yet, with the position and habits of a man, of refinement. 
+God knows it was not to gratify those tastes that he clutched at
+this money.  All the slow years of work trailed up before him,
+that were gone,--of hard, wearing work for daily bread, when his
+brain had been starving for knowledge, and his soul dulled,
+debased with sordid trading.  Was this to be always?  Were these
+few golden moments of life to be traded for the bread and meat he
+ate?  To eat and drink,--was that what he was here for?
+
+As he paced the floor mechanically, some vague recollection
+crossed his brain of a childish story of the man standing where
+the two great roads of life parted.  They were open before him
+now.  Money, money,--he took the word into his heart as a miser
+might do.  With it, he was free from these carking cares that
+were making his mind foul and muddy.  If he had money!  Slow,
+cool visions of triumphs rose before him outlined on the years to
+come, practical, if Utopian.  Slow and sure successes of science
+and art, where his brain could work, helpful and growing.  Far
+off, yet surely to come,--surely for him,--a day when a pure
+social system should be universal, should have thrust out its
+fibres of light, knitting into one the nations of the earth, when
+the lowest slave should find its true place and rightful work,
+and stand up, knowing itself divine.  "To insure to every man the
+freest development of his faculties:" he said over the hackneyed
+dogma again and again, while the heavy, hateful years of poverty
+rose before him that had trampled him down.  "To insure to him
+the freest development," he did not need to wait for St. Simon,
+or the golden year, he thought with a dreary gibe; money was
+enough, and--Miss Herne.
+
+It was curious, that, when this woman, whom he saw every day,
+came up in his mind, it was always in one posture, one costume. 
+You have noticed that peculiarity in your remembrance of some
+persons?  Perhaps you would find, if you looked closely, that in
+that look or indelible gesture which your memory has caught there
+lies some subtile hint of the tie between your soul and theirs. 
+Now, when Holmes had resolved coolly to weigh this woman, brain,
+heart, and flesh, to know how much of a hindrance she would be,
+he could only see her, with his artist's sense, as delicate a
+bloom of colouring as eye could crave, in one immovable
+posture,--as he had seen her once in some masquerade or tableau
+vivant.  June, I think it was, she chose to represent that
+evening,--and with her usual success; for no woman ever knew more
+thoroughly her material of shape or colour, or how to work it up. 
+Not an ill-chosen fancy, either, that of the moist, warm month. 
+Some tranced summer's day might have drowsed down into such a
+human form by a dank pool, or on the thick grass-crusted meadows. 
+There was the full contour of the limbs hid under warm green
+folds, the white flesh that glowed when you touched it as if some
+smothered heat lay beneath, the snaring eyes, the sleeping face,
+the amber hair uncoiled in a languid quiet, while yellow jasmines
+deepened its hue into molten sunshine, and a great tiger-lily
+laid its sultry head on her breast.  June?  Could June become
+incarnate with higher poetic meaning than that which this woman
+gave it?  Mr. Kitts, the artist I told you of, thought not, and
+fell in love with June and her on the spot, which passion became
+quite unbearable after she had graciously permitted him to sketch
+her,--for the benefit of Art.  Three medical students and one
+attorney, Miss Herne numbered as having been driven into a
+
+state of dogged despair on that triumphal occasion.  Mr. Holmes
+may have quarrelled with the rendering, doubting to himself if
+her lip were not too thick, her eye too brassy and pale a blue
+for the queen of months; though I do not believe he thought at
+all about it.  Yet the picture clung to his memory.
+
+As he slowly paced the room to-day, thinking of this woman as his
+wife, light blue eyes and yellow hair and the unclean sweetness
+of jasmine-flowers mixed with the hot sunshine and smells of the
+mill.  He could think of her in no other light.  He might have
+done so; for the poor girl had her other sides for view.  She had
+one of those sharp, tawdry intellects whose possessors are always
+reckoned "brilliant women, fine talkers."  She was (aside from
+the necessary sarcasm to keep up this reputation) a good-humoured
+soul enough,--when no one stood in her way.  But if her shallow
+virtues or vices were palpable at all to him, they became one
+with the torpid beauty of the oppressive summer day, and weighed
+on him alike with a vague disgust.  The woman luxuriated in
+perfume; some heavy odour always hung about her.  Holmes,
+thinking of her now, fancied he felt it stifling the air, and
+opened the window for breath.  Patchouli or copperas,--what was
+the difference?  The mill and his future wife came to him
+together; it was scarcely his fault, if he thought of them as
+one, or muttered, "Damnable clog!" as he sat down to write, his
+cold eye growing colder.  But he did not argue the question any
+longer; decision had come keenly in one moment, fixed,
+unalterable.
+
+If, through the long day, the starved heart of the man called
+feebly for its natural food, he called it a paltry weakness; or
+if the old thought of the quiet, pure little girl in the office
+below came back to him, he--he wished her well, he hoped she
+might succeed in her work, he would always be ready to lend her a
+helping hand.  So many years (he was ashamed to think how many)
+he had built the thought of this girl as his wife into the
+future, put his soul's strength into the hope, as if love and the
+homely duties of husband and father were what life was given for!
+A boyish fancy, he thought.  He had not learned then that all
+dreams must yield to self-reverence and self-growth.  As for
+taking up this life of poverty and soul-starvation for the sake
+of a little love, it would be an ignoble martyrdom, the sacrifice
+of a grand unmeasured life to a shallow pleasure.  He was no
+longer a young man now; he had no time to waste.  Poor Margret!
+he wondered if it hurt her?
+
+He signed the deed, and left it in the slow, quiet way natural to
+him, and after a while  stooped to pat the dog softly, who was
+trying to lick his hand,--with the hard fingers shaking a little,
+and a smothered fierceness in the half-closed eye, like a man who
+is tortured and alone.
+
+There is a miserable drama acted in other homes than the
+Tuileries, when men have found a woman's heart in their way to
+success, and trampled it down under an iron heel.  Men like
+Napoleon must live out the law of their natures, I suppose,--on a
+throne, or in a mill.
+
+So many trifles that day roused the undercurrent of old thoughts
+and old hopes that taunted him,--trifles, too, that he would not
+have heeded at another time.  Pike came in on business, a bunch
+of bills in his hand.  A wily, keen eye he had, looking over
+them,--a lean face, emphasized only by cunning.  No wonder Dr. 
+Knowles cursed him for a "slippery customer," and was cheated by
+him the next hour.  While he and Holmes were counting out the
+bills, a little white-headed girl crept shyly in at the door, and
+came up to the table,--oddly dressed, in a frock fastened with
+great horn buttons, and with an old-fashioned anxious pair of
+eyes, the color of blue Delft.  Holmes smoothed her hair, as she
+stood beside them; for he never could help caressing children or
+dogs.  Pike looked up sharply,--then half smiled, as he went on
+counting.
+
+"Ninety, ninety-five, AND one hundred, all right,"--tying a bit
+of tape about the papers.  "My Sophy, Mr. Holmes.  Good girl,
+Sophy is.  Bring her up to the mill sometimes," he said,
+apologetically, "on 'count of not leaving her alone.  She gets
+lonesome at th' house."
+
+Holmes glanced at Pike's felt hat lying on the table: there was a
+rusty strip of crape on it.
+
+"Yes," said Pike, in a lower tone, "I'm father and mother, both,
+to Sophy now."
+
+"I had not heard," said Holmes, kindly.  "How about the boys,
+now?"
+
+"Pete and John 's both gone West," the man said, his eyes
+kindling eagerly.  " 'S fine boys as ever turned out of Indiana. 
+Good eddications I give 'em both.  I've felt the want of that all
+my life..  Good eddications.  Says I, `Now, boys, you've got your
+fortunes, nothing to hinder your bein' President.  Let's see what
+stuff 's in ye,' says I.  So they're doin' well.  Wrote fur me to
+come out in the fall.  But I'd rather scratch on, and gather up a
+little for Sophy here, before I stop work."
+
+He patted Sophy's tanned little hand on the table, as if beating
+some soft tune.  Holmes folded up the bills.  Even this man could
+spare time out of his hard, stingy life to love, and be loved,
+and to be generous!  But then he had no higher aim, knew nothing
+better.
+
+"Well," said Pike, rising, "in case you take th' mill, Mr. 
+Holmes, I hope we'll be agreeable.  I'll strive to do my
+best,"--in the old fawning manner, to which Holmes nodded a curt
+reply.
+
+The man stopped for Sophy to gather up her bits of broken
+"chayney" with which she was making a tea-party on the table, and
+went down-stairs.
+
+Towards evening Holmes went out,--not going through the narrow
+passage that led to the offices, but avoiding it by a circuitous
+route.  If it cost him any pain to think why he did it, he showed
+none in his calm, observant face.  Buttoning up his coat as he
+went: the October sunset looked as if it ought to be warm, but he
+was deathly cold.  On the street the young doctor beset him again
+with bows and news: Cox was his name, I believe; the one, you
+remember, who had such a Talleyrand nose for ferreting out
+successful men.  He had to bear with him but for a few moments,
+however.  They met a crowd of workmen at the corner, one of whom,
+an old man freshly washed, with honest eyes looking out of horn
+spectacles, waited for them by a fire-plug.  It was Polston, the
+coal-digger,--an acquaintance, a far-off kinsman of Holmes, in
+fact.
+
+"Curious person making signs to you, yonder," said Cox; "hand, I
+presume."
+
+"My cousin Polston.  If you do not know him, you'll excuse me?"
+
+Cox sniffed the air down the street, and twirled his rattan, as
+he went.  The coal-digger was abrupt and distant in his greeting,
+going straight to business.
+
+"I will keep yoh only a minute, Mr. Holmes"----
+
+"Stephen," corrected Holmes.
+
+The old man's face warmed.
+
+"Stephen, then," holding out his hand, "sence old times dawn't
+shame yoh, Stephen.  That's hearty, now.  It's only a wured I
+want, but it's immediate.  Concernin' Joe Yare,--Lois's father,
+yoh know?  He's back."
+
+"Back?  I saw him to-day, following me in the mill.  His hair is
+gray?  I think it was he."
+
+"No doubt.  Yes, he's aged fast, down in the lock-up; goin' fast
+to the end.  Feeble, pore-like.  It's a bad life, Joe Yare's; I
+wish 'n' 't would be better to the end"----
+
+He stopped with a wistful look at Holmes, who stood outwardly
+attentive, but with little thought to waste on Joe Yare.  The old
+coal-digger drummed on the fire-plug uneasily.
+
+"Myself, 't was for Lois's sake I thowt on it.  To speak
+plain,--yoh'll mind that Stokes affair, th' note Yare forged? 
+Yes?  Ther' 's none knows o' that but yoh an' me.  He's safe,
+Yare is, only fur yoh an' me.  Yoh speak the wured an' back he
+goes to the lock-up.  Fur life.  D' yoh see?"
+
+"I see."
+
+"He's tryin' to do right, Yare is."
+
+The old man went on, trying not to be eager, and watching
+Holmes's face.
+
+"He's tryin'.  Sendin' him back--yoh know how THAT'll end.  Seems
+like as we'd his soul in our hands.  S'pose,--what d' yoh think,
+if we give him a chance?  It's yoh he fears.  I see him
+a-watchin' yoh; what d' yoh think, if we give him a chance?"
+catching Holmes's sleeve.  "He's old, an' he's tryin'.  Heh?"
+
+Holmes smiled.
+
+"We didn't make the law he broke.  Justice before mercy.  Haven't
+I heard you talk to Sam in that way, long ago?"
+
+The old man loosened his hold of Holmes's arm, looked up and down
+the street, uncertain, disappointed.
+
+"The law.  Yes.  That's right!  Yoh're just man, Stephen Holmes."
+
+"And yet?"----
+
+"Yes.  I dun'no'.  Law's right, but Yare's had a bad chance, an'
+he's tryin'.  An' we're sendin' him to hell.  Somethin' 's wrong. 
+But I think yoh're a just man," looking keenly in Holmes's face.
+
+"A hard one, people say," said Holmes, after a pause, as they
+walked on.
+
+He had spoken half to himself, and received no answer.  Some
+blacker shadow troubled him than old Yare's fate.
+
+"My mother was a hard woman,--you knew her?" he said, abruptly.
+
+"She was just, like yoh.  She was one o' th' elect, she said. 
+Mercy's fur them,--an' outside, justice.  It's a narrer showin',
+I'm thinkin'."
+
+"My father was outside," said Holmes, some old bitterness rising
+up in his tone, his gray eye lighting with some unrevenged wrong.
+
+Polston did not speak for a moment.
+
+"Dunnot bear malice agin her.  They're dead, now.  It wasn't left
+fur her to judge him out yonder.  Yoh've yer father's Stephen,
+'times.  Hungry, pitiful, like women's.  His got desper't' 't th'
+last.  Drunk hard,--died of 't, yoh know.  But SHE killed
+him,--th' sin was writ down fur her.  Never was a boy I loved
+like him, when we was boys."
+
+There was a short silence.
+
+"Yoh're like yer mother," said Polston, striving for a lighter
+tone.  "Here,"--motioning to the heavy iron jaws.  "She
+never--let go.  Somehow, too, she'd the law on her side in
+outward showin', an' th' right.  But I hated  religion, knowin'
+her.  Well, ther' 's a day of makin' things clear, comin'."
+
+They had reached the corner now, and Polston turned down the
+lane.
+
+"Yoh 'll think o' Yare's case?" he said.
+
+"Yes.  But how can I help it," Holmes said, lightly, "if I am
+like my mother, here?"-- putting his hand to his mouth.
+
+"God help us, how can yoh?  It's hard to think father and mother
+leave their souls fightin' in their childern, cos th' love was
+wantin' to make them one here."
+
+Something glittered along the street as he spoke: the silver
+mountings of a low-hung phaeton drawn by a pair of Mexican
+ponies.  One or two gentlemen on horseback were alongside,
+attendant on a lady within, Miss Herne.  She turned her fair
+face, and pale, greedy eyes, as she passed, and lifted her hand
+languidly in recognition of Holmes.  Polston's face coloured.
+
+"I've heered," he said, holding out his grimy hand.  "I wish yoh
+well, Stephen, boy.  So'll the old 'oman.  Yoh'll come an' see
+us, soon? Ye'r' lookin' fagged, an' yer eyes is gettin' more like
+yer father's.  I'm glad things is takin' a good turn with yoh;
+an' yoh'll never be like him, starvin' fur th' kind wured, an'
+havin' to die without it.  I'm glad yoh've got true love.  She'd
+a fair face, I think.  I wish yoh well, Stephen."
+
+Holmes shook the grimy hand, and then stood a moment looking back
+to the mill, from which the hands were just coming, and then down
+at the phaeton moving idly down the road.  How cold it was
+growing!  People passing by had a sickly look, as if they were
+struck by the plague.  He pushed the damp hair back, wiping his
+forehead, with another glance at the mill-women coming out of the
+gate, and then followed the phaeton down the hill.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+An hour after, the evening came on sultry, the air murky, opaque,
+with yellow trails of colour dragging in the west: a sullen
+stillness in the woods and farms; only, in fact, that dark,
+inexplicable hush that precedes a storm.  But Lois, coming down
+the hill-road, singing to herself, and keeping time with her
+whip-end on the wooden measure, stopped when she grew conscious
+of it.  It seemed to her blurred fancy more than a deadening sky:
+a something solemn and unknown, hinting of evil to come.  The
+dwarf-pines on the road-side scowled weakly at her through the
+gray; the very silver minnows in the pools she passed, flashed
+frightened away, and darkened into the muddy niches.  There was a
+vague dread in the sudden silence.  She called to the old donkey,
+and went faster down the hill, as if escaping from some
+overhanging peril, unseen.  She saw Margret coming up the road. 
+There was a phaeton behind Lois, and some horsemen: she jolted
+the cart off into the stones to let them pass, seeing Mr.
+Holmes's face in the carriage as she did so.  He did not look at
+her; had his head turned towards the gray distance.  Lois's vivid
+eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him.  The face
+hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel.  She
+was dressed in yellow: the colour seemed jeering and mocking to
+the girl's sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle.  She
+did not know that it is the colour of shams, and that women like
+this are the most deadly of shams.  As the phaeton went slowly
+down, Margret came nearer, meeting it on the road-side, the dust
+from the wheels stifling the air.  Lois saw her look up, and then
+suddenly stand still, holding to the fence, as they met her. 
+Holmes's cold, wandering eye turned on the little dusty figure
+standing there, poor and despised.  Polston called his eyes
+hungry: it was a savage hunger that sprang into them now; a gray
+shadow creeping over his set face, as he looked at her, in that
+flashing moment.  The phaeton was gone in an instant, leaving her
+alone in the road.  One of the men looked back, and then
+whispered something to the lady with a laugh.  She turned to
+Holmes, when he had finished, fixing her light, confusing eyes on
+his face, and softening her voice.
+
+"Fred swears that woman we passed was your first love.  Were you,
+then, so chivalric? Was it to have been a second romaunt of `King
+Cophetua and the Beggar Maid?' "
+
+He met her look, and saw the fierce demand through the softness
+and persiflage.  He gave it no answer, but, turning to her,
+kindled into the man whom she was so proud to show as her
+capture,--a man far off from Stephen Holmes.  Brilliant she
+called him,--frank, winning, generous.  She thought she knew him
+well; held him a slave to her fluttering hand.  Being proud of
+her slave, she let the hand flutter down now somehow with some
+flowers it held until it touched his hard fingers, her cheek
+flushing into rose.  The nerveless, spongy hand,--what a
+death-grip it had on his life!  He did not look back once at the
+motionless, dusty figure on the road.  What was that Polston had
+said about starving to death for a kind word?  LOVE?  He was sick
+of the sickly talk,--crushed it out of his heart with a savage
+scorn.  He remembered his father, the night he died, had said in
+his weak ravings that God was love.  Was He?  No wonder, then, He
+was the God of women, and children, and unsuccessful men.  For
+him, he was done with it.  He was here with stronger purpose than
+to yield to weaknesses of the flesh.  He had made his choice,--a
+straight, hard path upwards; he was deaf now and forever to any
+word of kindness or pity.  As for this woman beside him, he would
+be just to her, in justice to himself: she never should know the
+loathing in his heart: just to her as to all living creatures. 
+Some little, mean doubt kept up a sullen whisper of bought and
+sold,--sold,--but he laughed it down.  He sat there with his head
+steadily turned towards her: a kingly face, she called it, and
+she was right,--it was a kingly face: with the same shallow,
+fixed smile on his mouth,--no weary cry went up to God that day
+so terrible in its pathos, I think: with the same dull
+consciousness that this was the trial night of his life,--that
+with the homely figure on the road-side he had turned his back on
+love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all that was weak and
+useless in the world.  He had made his choice; he would abide by
+it,--he would abide by it.  He said that over and over again,
+dulling down the death-gnawing of his outraged heart.
+
+Miss Herne was quite contented, sitting by him, with herself, and
+the admiring world.  She had no notion of trial nights in life. 
+Not many temptations pierced through her callous, flabby
+temperament to sting her to defeat or triumph.  There was for her
+no under-current of conflict, in these people whom she passed,
+between self and the unseen power that Holmes sneered at, whose
+name was love; they were nothing but movables, pleasant or ugly
+to look at, well- or ill-dressed.  There were no dark iron bars
+across her life for her soul to clutch and shake madly,--nothing
+"in the world amiss, to be unriddled by and by."  Little Margret,
+sitting by the muddy road, digging her fingers dully into the
+clover-roots, while she looked at the spot where the wheels had
+passed, looked at life differently, it may be;--or old Joe Yare
+by the furnace-fire, his black face and gray hair bent over a
+torn old spelling-book Lois had given him.  The night, perhaps,
+was going to be more to them than so many rainy hours for
+sleeping,--the time to be looked back on through coming lives as
+the hour when good and ill came to them, and they made their
+choice, and, as Holmes said, did abide by it.
+
+It grew cool and darker.  Holmes left the phaeton before they
+entered town, and turned back.  He was going to see this Margret
+Howth, tell her what he meant to do.  Because he was going to
+leave a clean record.  No one should accuse him of want of
+honour.  This girl alone of all living beings had a right to see
+him as he stood, justified to himself.  Why she had this right, I
+do not think he answered to himself.  Besides, he must see her,
+if only on business.  She must keep her place at the mill: he
+would not begin his new life by an act of injustice, taking the
+bread out of Margret's mouth.  LITTLE MARGRET!  He stopped
+suddenly, looking down into a deep pool of water by the
+road-side.  What madness of weariness crossed his brain just then
+I do not know.  He shook it off.  Was he mad?  Life was worth
+more to him than to other men, he thought; and perhaps he was
+right.  He went slowly through the cool dusk, looking across the
+fields, up at the pale, frightened face of the moon hooded in
+clouds: he did not dare to look, with all his iron nerve, at the
+dark figure beyond him on the road.  She was sitting there just
+where he had left her: he knew she would be.  When he came
+closer, she got up, not looking towards him; but he saw her clasp
+her hands behind her, the fingers plucking weakly at each other. 
+It was an old, childish fashion of hers, when she was frightened
+or hurt.  It would only need a word, and he could be quiet and
+firm,--she was such a child compared to him: he always had
+thought of her so.  He went on up to her slowly, and stopped;
+when she looked at him, he untied the linen bonnet that hid her
+face, and threw it back.  How thin and tired the little face had
+grown!  Poor child!  He put his strong arm kindly about her, and
+stooped to kiss her hand, but she drew it away.  God! what did
+she do that for?  Did not she know that he could put his head
+beneath her foot then, he was so mad with pity for the woman he
+had wronged?  Not love, he thought, controlling himself,--it was
+only justice to be kind to her.
+
+"You have been ill, Margret, these two years, while I was gone?"
+
+He could not hear her answer; only saw that she looked up with a
+white, pitiful smile.  Only a word it needed, he thought,--very
+kind and firm: and he must be quick,--he could not bear this
+long.  But he held the little worn fingers, stroking them with an
+unutterable tenderness.
+
+"You must let these fingers work for me, Margret," he said, at
+last, "when I am master in the mill."
+
+"It is true, then, Stephen?"
+
+"It is true,--yes."
+
+She lifted her hand to her head, uncertainly: he held it tightly,
+and then let it go.  What right had he to touch the dust upon her
+shoes,--he, bought and sold?  She did not speak for a time; when
+she did, it was a weak and sick voice.
+
+"I am glad.  I saw her, you know.  She is very beautiful."
+
+The fingers were plucking at each other again; and a strange,
+vacant smile on her face, trying to look glad.
+
+"You love her, Stephen?"
+
+He was quiet and firm enough now.
+
+"I do not.  Her money will help me to become what I ought to be. 
+She does not care for love.  You want me to succeed, Margret?  No
+one ever understood me as you did, child though you were."
+
+Her whole face glowed.
+
+"I know!  I know!  I did understand you!"
+
+She said, lower, after a little while,--
+
+"I knew you did not love her."
+
+"There is no such thing as love in real life," he said, in his
+steeled voice.  "You will know that, when you grow older.  I used
+to believe in it once, myself."
+
+She did not speak, only watched the slow motion of his lips, not
+looking into his eyes,--as she used to do in the old time. 
+Whatever secret account lay between the souls of this man and
+woman came out now, and stood bare on their faces.
+
+"I used to think that I, too, loved," he went on, in his low,
+hard tone.  "But it kept me back, Margret, and"----
+
+He was silent.
+
+"I know, Stephen.  It kept you back"----
+
+"And I put it away.  I put it away to-night, forever."
+
+She did not speak; stood quite quiet, her head bent on her
+breast.  His conscience was clear now.  But he almost wished he
+had not said it, she was such a weak, sickly thing.  She sat down
+at last, burying her face in her hands, with a shivering sob.  He
+dared not trust him self to speak again.
+
+"I am not proud,--as a woman ought to be," she said, wearily,
+when he wiped her clammy forehead.
+
+"You loved me, then?" he whispered.
+
+Her face flashed at the unmanly triumph; her puny frame started
+up, away from him.
+
+"I did love you, Stephen.  I did love you,-- as you might be, not
+as you are,--not with those inhuman eyes.  I do understand you,--
+I do.  I know you for a better man than you know yourself this
+night."
+
+She turned to go.  He put his hand on her arm; something we have
+never seen on his face struggled up,--the better soul that she
+knew.
+
+"Come back," he said, hoarsely; "don't leave me with myself. 
+Come back, Margret."
+
+She did not come; stood leaning, her sudden strength gone,
+against the broken wall.  There was a heavy silence.  The night
+throbbed slow about them.  Some late bird rose from the sedges of
+the pool, and with a frightened cry flapped its tired wings, and
+drifted into the dark.  His eyes, through the gathering shadow,
+devoured the weak, trembling body, met the soul that looked at
+him, strong as his own.  Was it because it knew and trusted him
+that all that was pure and strongest in his crushed nature
+struggled madly to be free?  He thrust it down; the self-learned
+lesson of years was not to be conquered in a moment.
+
+"There have been times," he said, in a smothered, restless voice,
+"when I thought you belonged to me.  Not here, but before this
+life.  My soul and body thirst and hunger for you, then,
+Margret."
+
+She did not answer; her hands worked feebly together, the dull
+blood fainting in her veins.
+
+Knowing only that the night yawned intolerable about her, that
+she was alone,--going mad with being alone.  No thought of heaven
+or God in her soul: her craving eyes seeing him only.  The
+strong, living man that she loved: her tired-out heart goading,
+aching to lie down on his brawny breast for one minute, and die
+there,--that was all.
+
+She did not move: underneath the pain there was power, as Knowles
+thought.
+
+He came nearer, and held up his arms to where she stood,--the
+heavy, masterful face pale and wet.
+
+"I need you, Margret.  I shall be nothing without you, now. 
+Come, Margret, little Margret!"
+
+She came to him, then, and put her hands in his.
+
+"No, Stephen," she said.
+
+If there were any pain in her tone, she kept it down, for his
+sake.
+
+"Never, I could never help you,--as you are.  It might have been,
+once.  Good-by, Stephen."
+
+Her childish way put him in mind of the old days when this girl
+was dearer to him than his own soul.  She was so yet.  He held
+her close to his breast, looking down into her eyes.  She moved
+uneasily; she dared not trust herself.
+
+"You will come?" he said.  "It might have been,--it shall be
+again."
+
+"It may be," she said, humbly.  "God is good.  And I believe in
+you, Stephen.  I will be yours some time: we cannot help it, if
+we would: but not as you are."
+
+"You do not love me?" he said, flinging her off, his face
+whitening.
+
+She said nothing, gathered her damp shawl around her, and turned
+to go.  Just a moment they stood, looking at each other.  If the
+dark square figure standing there had been an iron fate trampling
+her young life down into hopeless wretchedness, she forgot it
+now.  Women like Margret are apt to forget.  His eye never abated
+in its fierce question.
+
+"I will wait for you yonder, if I die first," she whispered.
+
+He came closer, waiting for an answer.
+
+"And--I love you, Stephen."
+
+He gathered her in his arms, and put his cold lips to hers,
+without a word; then turned, and left her slowly.
+
+She made no sign, shed no tear, as she stood, watching him go. 
+It was all over: she had willed it, herself, and yet--he could
+not go! God would not suffer it!  Oh, he could not leave her,--he
+could not!--He went down the hill, slowly.  If it were a trial of
+life and death for her, did he know or care?--He did not look
+back.  What if he did not? his heart was true; he suffered in
+going; even now he walked wearily.  God forgive her, if she had
+wronged him!--What did it matter, if he were hard in this life,
+and it hurt her a little?  It would come right,--beyond, some
+time.  But life was long.--She would not sit down, sick as she
+was: he might turn, and it would vex him to see her suffer.--He
+walked slowly; once he stopped to pick up something.  She saw the
+deep-cut face and half-shut eyes.  How often those eyes had
+looked into her soul, and it had answered!  They never would look
+so any more.--There was a tree by the place where the road turned
+into town.  If he came back, he would be sure to turn there.--How
+tired he walked, and slow!--If he was sick, that beautiful woman
+could be near him,--help him.-- SHE never would touch his hand
+again,--never  again, never,--unless he came back now.-- He was
+near the tree: she closed her eyes, turning away.  When she
+looked again, only the bare road lay there, yellow and wet.  It
+was over, now.
+
+How long she sat there she did not know.  She tried once or twice
+to go to the house, but the lights seemed so far off that she
+gave it up and sat quiet, unconscious, except of the damp
+stone-wall her head leaned on, and the stretch of muddy road. 
+Some time, she knew not when, there was a heavy step beside her,
+and a rough hand shook hers where she stooped, feebly tracing out
+the lines of mortar between the stones.  It was Knowles.  She
+looked up, bewildered.
+
+"Hunting catarrhs, eh?" he growled, eying her keenly.  "Got your
+father on the Bourbons, so took the chance to come and find you. 
+He'll not miss ME for an hour.  That man has a natural hankering
+after treason against the people.  Lord, Margret! what a stiff
+old head he'd have carried to the guillotine!  How he'd have
+looked at the canaille!"
+
+He helped her up gently enough.
+
+"Your bonnet's like a wet rag,"--with a furtive glance at the
+worn-out face.  A hungry face always, with her life unfed by its
+stingy few crumbs of good; but to-night it was vacant with utter
+loss.
+
+She got up, trying to laugh cheerfully, and went beside him down
+the road.
+
+"You saw that painted Jezebel to-night, and"----stopping
+abruptly.
+
+She had not heard him, and he followed her doggedly, with an
+occasional snort or grunt or other inarticulate damn at the
+obstinate mud.  She stopped at last, with a quick gasp.  Looking
+at her, he chafed her limp hands,--his huge, uncouth face growing
+pale.  When she was better, he said, gravely,--
+
+"I want you, Margret.  Not at home, child.  I want to show you
+something."
+
+He turned with her suddenly off the main road into a by-path,
+helping her along, watching her stealthily, but going on with his
+disjointed, bearish growls.  If it stung her from her pain,
+vexing her, he did not care.
+
+"I want to show you a bit of hell: outskirt.  You're in a fit
+state: it'll do you good.  I'm minister there.  The clergy can't
+attend to it just now: they're too busy measuring God's truth by
+the States'--Rights doctrine, or the Chicago Platform. 
+Consequence, religion yields to majorities.  Are you able?  It's
+only a step."
+
+She went on indifferently.  The night was breathless and dark. 
+Black, wet gusts dragged now and then through the skyless fog,
+striking her face with a chill.  The Doctor quit talking,
+hurrying her, watching her anxiously.  They came at last to the
+railway-track, with long trains of empty freight-cars.
+
+"We are nearly there," he whispered.  "It's time you knew your
+work, and forgot your weakness.  The curse of pampered
+generations.  `High Norman blood,'--pah!"
+
+There was a broken gap in the fence.  He led her through it into
+a muddy yard.  Inside was one of those taverns you will find in
+the suburbs of large cities, haunts of the lowest vice.  This one
+was a smoky frame, standing on piles over an open space where
+hogs were rooting.  Half a dozen drunken Irishmen were playing
+poker with a pack of greasy cards in an out-house.  He led her up
+the rickety ladder to the one room, where a flaring tallow-dip
+threw a saffron glare into the darkness.  A putrid odour met them
+at the door.  She drew back, trembling.
+
+"Come here!" he said, fiercely, clutching her hand.  "Women as
+fair and pure as you have come into dens like this,--and never
+gone away.  Does it make your delicate breath faint?  And you a
+follower of the meek and lowly Jesus!  Look here! and here!"
+
+The room was swarming with human life.  Women, idle trampers,
+whiskey-bloated, filthy, lay half-asleep, or smoking, on the
+floor, and set up a chorus of whining begging when they entered. 
+Half-naked children crawled about in rags.  On the damp, mildewed
+walls there was hung a picture of the Benicia Boy, and close by,
+Pio Nono, crook in hand, with the usual inscription, "Feed my
+sheep."  The Doctor looked at it.
+
+" `Tu es Petrus, et super hanc'----  Good God! what IS truth?" he
+muttered, bitterly.
+
+He dragged her closer to the women, through the darkness and foul
+smell.
+
+"Look in their faces," he whispered.  "There is not one of them
+that is not a living lie.  Can they help it?  Think of the
+centuries of serfdom and superstition through which their blood
+has crawled.  Come closer,--here."
+
+In the corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks.  Going on the
+underground railroad to Canada.  Stolid, sensual wretches, with
+here and there a broad, melancholy brow, and desperate jaws.  One
+little pickaninny rubbed its sleepy eyes, and laughed at them.
+
+"So much flesh and blood out of the market, unweighed!"
+
+Margret took up the child, kissing its brown face.  Knowles
+looked at her.
+
+"Would you touch her?  I forgot you were born down South.  Put it
+down, and come on."
+
+They went out of the door.  Margret stopped, looking back.
+
+"Did I call it a bit of hell?  It 's only a glimpse of the
+under-life of America,--God help us!--where all men are born free
+and equal."
+
+The air in the passage grew fouler.  She leaned back faint and
+shuddering.  He did not heed her.  The passion of the man, the
+terrible pity for these people, came out of his soul now,
+writhing his face, and dulling his eyes.
+
+"And you," he said, savagely, "you sit by the road-side, with
+help in your hands, and Christ in your heart, and call your life
+lost, quarrel with your God, because that mass of selfishness has
+left you,--because you are balked in your puny hope!  Look at
+these women.  What is their loss, do you think? Go back, will
+you, and drone out your life whimpering over your lost dream, and
+go to Shakspeare for tragedy when you want it?  Tragedy!  Come
+here,--let me hear what you call this."
+
+He led her through the passage, up a narrow flight of stairs.  An
+old woman in a flaring cap sat at the top, nodding,--wakening now
+and then, to rock herself to and fro, and give the shrill Irish
+keen.
+
+"You know that stoker who was killed in the mill a month ago?  Of
+course not,--what are such people to you?  There was a girl who
+loved him,--you know what that is?  She's dead now, here.  She
+drank herself to death,--a most unpicturesque suicide.  I want
+you to look at her.  You need not blush for her life of shame,
+now; she's dead.--Is Hetty here?"
+
+The woman got up.
+
+"She is, Zur.  She is, Mem.  She's lookin' foine in her Sunday
+suit.  Shrouds is gone out, Mem, they say."
+
+She went tipping over the floor to something white that lay on a
+board, a candle at the head, and drew off the sheet.  A girl of
+fifteen, almost a child, lay underneath, dead,--her lithe,
+delicate figure decked out in a dirty plaid skirt, and stained
+velvet bodice,--her neck and arms bare.  The small face was
+purely cut, haggard, patient in its sleep,--the soft, fair hair
+gathered off the tired forehead.  Margret leaned over her,
+shuddering, pinning her handkerchief about the child's dead neck.
+
+"How young she is!" muttered Knowles.  "Merciful God, how young
+she is!--What is that you say?" sharply, seeing Margret's lips
+move.
+
+" `He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone
+at her.' "
+
+"Ah, child, that is old-time philosophy.  Put your hand here, on
+her dead face.  Is your loss like hers?" he said lower, looking
+into the dull pain in her eyes.  Selfish pain he called it.
+
+"Let me go," she said.  "I am tired."
+
+He took her out into the cool, open road, leading her tenderly
+enough,--for the girl suffered, he saw.
+
+"What will you do?" he asked her then.  "It is not too
+late,--will you help me save these people?"
+
+She wrung her hands helplessly.
+
+"What do you want with me?" she cried.  "I have enough to bear."
+
+The burly black figure before her seemed to tower and strengthen;
+the man's face in the wall light showed a terrible life-purpose
+coming out bare.
+
+"I want you to do your work.  It is hard, it will wear out your
+strength and brain and heart.  Give yourself to these people. 
+God calls you to it.  There is none to help them.  Give up love,
+and the petty hopes of women.  Help me.  God calls you to the
+work."
+
+She went, on blindly: he followed her.  For years he had set
+apart this girl to help him in his scheme: he would not be balked
+now.  He had great hopes from his plan: he meant to give all he
+had: it was the noblest of aims.  He thought some day it would
+work like leaven through the festering mass under the country he
+loved so well, and raise it to a new life.  If it failed,--if it
+failed, and saved one life, his work was not lost.  But it could
+not fail.
+
+"Home!" he said, stopping her as she reached the stile,--"oh,
+Margret, what is home?  There is a cry going up night and day
+from homes like that den yonder, for help,--and no man listens."
+
+She was weak; her brain faltered.
+
+"Does God call me to this work?  Does He call me?" she moaned.
+
+He watched her eagerly.
+
+"He calls you.  He waits for your answer.  Swear to me that you
+will help His people.  Give up father and mother and love, and go
+down as Christ did.  Help me to give liberty and truth and Jesus'
+love to these wretches on the brink of hell.  Live with them,
+raise them with you."
+
+She looked up, white; she was a weak, weak woman, sick for her
+natural food of love.
+
+"Is it my work?"
+
+"It is your work.  Listen to me, Margret," softly.  "Who cares
+for you?  You stand alone to-night.  There is not a single human
+heart that calls you nearest and best.  Shiver, if you will,--it
+is true.  The man you wasted your soul on left you in the night
+and cold to go to his bride,--is sitting by her now, holding her
+hand in his."
+
+He waited a moment, looking down at her, until she should
+understand.
+
+"Do you think you deserved this of God? I know that yonder on the
+muddy road you looked up to Him, and knew it was not just; that
+you had done right, and this was your reward.  I know that for
+these two years you have trusted in the Christ you worship to
+make it right, to give you your heart's desire.  Did He do it? 
+Did He hear your prayer?  Does He care for your weak love, when
+the nations of the earth are going down?  What is your poor hope
+to Him, when the very land you live in is a wine-press that will
+be trodden some day by the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God? 
+O Christ!--if there be a Christ,--help me to save it!"
+
+He looked up,--his face white with pain.  After a time he said to
+her,--
+
+"Help me, Margret!  Your prayer was selfish; it was not heard. 
+Give up your idle hope that Christ will aid you.  Swear to me,
+this night when you have lost all, to give yourself to this
+work."
+
+The storm had been dark and windy: it cleared now slowly, the
+warm summer rain falling softly, the fresh blue stealing broadly
+from behind the gray.  It seemed to Margret like a blessing; for
+her brain rose up stronger, more healthful.
+
+"I will not swear," she said, weakly.  "I think He heard my
+prayer.  I think He will answer it.  He was a man, and loved as
+we do.  My love is not selfish; it is the best gift God has given
+me."
+
+Knowles went slowly with her to the house.  He was not baffled. 
+He knew that the struggle was yet to come; that, when she was
+alone, her faith in the far-off Christ would falter; that she
+would grasp at this work, to fill her empty hands and starved
+heart, if for no other reason,--to stifle by a sense of duty her
+unutterable feeling of loss.  He was keenly read in woman's
+heart, this Knowles.  He left her silently, and she passed
+through the dark passage to her own room.
+
+Putting her damp shawl off, she sat down on the floor, leaning
+her head on a low chair,--one her father had given her for a
+Christmas gift when she was little.  How fond Holmes and her
+father used to be of each other!  Every Christmas he spent with
+them.  She remembered them all now.  "He was sitting by her now,
+holding her hand in his."  She said that over to herself, though
+it was not hard to understand.
+
+After a long time, her mother came with a candle to the door.
+
+"Good-night, Margret.  Why, your hair is wet, child!"
+
+For Margret, kissing her good-night, had laid her head down a
+minute on her breast.  She stroked the hair a moment, and then
+turned away.
+
+"Mother, could you stay with me to-night?"
+
+"Why, no, Maggie,--your father wants me to read to him."
+
+"Oh, I know.  Did he miss me to-night,-- father?"
+
+"Not much; we were talking old times over,--in Virginia, you
+know."
+
+"I know; good-night."
+
+She went back to the chair.  Tige was there,--for he used to
+spend half of his time on the farm.  She put her arm about his
+head.  God knows how lonely the poor child was when she drew the
+dog so warmly to her heart: not for his master's sake alone; but
+it was all she had.  He grew tired at last, and whined, trying to
+get out.
+
+"Will you go, Tige?" she said, and opened the window.
+
+He jumped out, and she watched him going towards town.  Such a
+little thing, it was! But not even a dog "called her nearest and
+best."
+
+Let us be silent; the story of the night is not for us to read. 
+Do you think that He, who in the far, dim Life holds the worlds
+in His hand, knew or cared how alone the child was?  What if she
+wrung her thin hands, grew sick with the slow, mad, solitary
+tears?--was not the world to save, as Knowles said?
+
+He, too, had been alone; He had come unto His own, and His own
+received him not: so, while the struggling world rested,
+unconscious, in infinite calm of right, He came close to her with
+human eyes that had loved, and not been loved, and had suffered
+with that pain.  And, trusting Him, she only said, "Show me my
+work!  Thou that takest away the pain of the world, have mercy
+upon me!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt
+and indecision; one of his natures was conquered,--finally, he
+thought.  Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street
+slowly home to the mill, would have remembered his mother's the
+day she died.  How the stern old woman met death half-way! why
+should she fear? she was as strong as he.  Wherein had she failed
+of duty? her hands were clean: she was going to meet her just
+reward.
+
+It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent
+soul.  It was life he accepted to-night, he thought,--a life of
+growth, labour, achievement,--eternal.
+
+"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast,"--favourite words with him.  He liked
+to study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think,
+it was like his own,--a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite
+capability of love, and hate, and suffering, and over all, (the
+peculiar identity of the man,) a cold, speculative eye of reason,
+that looked down into the passion and depths of his growing self,
+and calmly noted them, a lesson for all time.
+
+
+"Ohne Hast." Going slowly through the night, he strengthened
+himself by marking how all things in Nature accomplish a
+perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,-- each
+life complete in itself: why not his own, then?  The windless
+gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone in the
+universe, each working out its own soul into deed.  If there were
+any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see
+it.  Knowles--that old sceptic--believed in it, and called it
+Love.  Even Goethe himself, what was it he said? "Der
+Allumfasser, der Allerhalter, fasst und  erhalt er nicht, dich,
+mich, sich selbst?"
+
+There was a curious power in the words, as he lingered over them,
+like half-comprehended music,--as simple and tender as if they
+had come from the depths of a woman's heart: it touched him
+deeper than his power of control.  Pah! it was a dream of
+Faust's; he, too, had his Margaret; he fell, through that love.
+
+He went on slowly to the mill.  If the name or the words woke a
+subtile remorse or longing, he buried them under restful
+composure.  Whether they should ever rise like angry ghosts of
+what might have been, to taunt the man, only the future could
+tell.
+
+Going through the gas-lit streets, Holmes met some cordial
+greeting at every turn.  What a just, clever fellow he was!
+people said: one of those men improved by success: just to the
+defrauding of himself: saw the true worth of everybody, the very
+lowest: hadn't one spark of self-esteem: despised all humbug and
+show, one could see, though he never said it: when he was a boy,
+he was moody, with passionate likes and dislikes; but success had
+improved him, vastly.  So Holmes was popular, though the beggars
+shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders never held their
+tambourines up to him.
+
+The mill street was dark; the building threw its great shadow
+over the square.  It was empty, he supposed; only one hand
+generally remained to keep in the furnace-fires.  Going through
+one of the lower passages, he heard voices, and turned aside to
+examine.  The management was not strict, and in case of a fire
+the mill was not insured: like Knowles's carelessness.
+
+It was Lois and her father,--Joe Yare being feeder that night. 
+They were in one of the great furnace-rooms in the cellar,--a
+very comfortable place that stormy night.  Two or three doors of
+the wide brick ovens were open, and the fire threw a ruddy glow
+over the stone floor, and shimmered into the dark recesses of the
+shadows, very home-like after the rain and mud without.  Lois
+seemed to think so, at any rate, for she had made a table of a
+store-box, put a white cloth on it, and was busy getting up a
+regular supper for her father,--down on her knees before the red
+coals, turning something on an iron plate, while some slices of
+ham sent up a cloud of juicy, hungry smell.
+
+The old stoker had just finished slaking the out-fires, and was
+putting some blue plates on the table, gravely straightening
+them.  He had grown old, as Polston said,--Holmes saw, stooped
+much, with a low, hacking cough; his coarse clothes were
+curiously clean: that was to please Lois, of course.  She put the
+ham on the table, and some bubbling coffee, and then, from a
+hickory board in front of the fire, took off, with a jerk, brown,
+flaky slices of Virginia johnny-cake.
+
+"Ther' yoh are, father, hot 'n' hot," with her face on
+fire,--"ther'--yoh--are,--coaxin' to be eatin'.--Why, Mr. 
+Holmes!  Father!  Now, ef yoh jes' hedn't hed yer supper?"
+
+She came up, coaxingly.  What brooding brown eyes the poor
+cripple had!  Not many years ago he would have sat down with the
+two poor souls, and made a hearty meal of it: he had no heart for
+such follies now.
+
+Old Yare stood in the background, his hat in his hand, stooping
+in his submissive negro fashion, with a frightened watch on
+Holmes.
+
+"Do you stay here, Lois?" he asked, kindly, turning his back on
+the old man.
+
+"On'y to bring his supper.  I couldn't bide all night 'n th'
+mill," the old shadow coming on her face,--"I couldn't, yoh know. 
+HE doesn't mind it."
+
+She glanced quickly from one to the other in silence, seeing the
+fear on her father's face.
+
+"Yoh know father, Mr. Holmes?  He's back now.  This is him."
+
+The old man came forward, humbly.
+
+"It's me, Marster Stephen."
+
+The sullen, stealthy face disgusted Holmes.  He nodded, shortly.
+
+"Yoh've been kind to my little girl while I was gone," he said,
+catching his breath.  "I thank yoh, Marster."
+
+"You need not.  It was for Lois."
+
+" 'T was fur her I comed back hyur. 'T was a resk,"--with a dumb
+look of entreaty at Holmes,--"but fur her I thort I'd try it.  I
+know't was a resk; but I thort them as cared fur Lo wud be
+merciful.  She's a good girl, Lo.  She's all I hev."
+
+Lois brought a box over, lugging it heavily.
+
+"We hev n't chairs; but yoh'll sit down, Mr.  Holmes?" laughing
+as she covered it with a cloth.  "It'd a warm place, here. 
+Father studies 'n his watch, 'n' I'm teacher,"--showing the torn
+old spelling-book.
+
+The old man came eagerly forward, seeing the smile flicker on
+Holmes's face.
+
+"It's slow work, Marster,--slow.  But Lo's a good teacher, 'n'
+I'm tryin',--I'm tryin' hard."
+
+"It's not slow, Sir, seein' father hed n't 'dvantages, like me. 
+He was a"----
+
+She stopped, lowering her voice, a hot flush of shame on her
+face.
+
+"I know."
+
+"Be n't that'll 'xcuse, Marster, seein' I knowed noght at the
+beginnin'?  Thenk o' that, Marster.  I'm tryin' to be a different
+man.  Fur Lo.  I AM tryin'."
+
+Holmes did not notice him.
+
+"Good-night, Lois," he said, kindly, as she lighted his lamp.
+
+He put some money on the table.
+
+"You must take it," as she looked uneasy.  "For Tiger's board,
+say.  I never see him now.  A bright new frock, remember."
+
+She thanked him, her eyes brightening, looking at her father's
+patched coat.
+
+The old man followed Holmes out.
+
+"Marster Holmes"----
+
+"Have done with this," said Holmes, sternly.  "Whoever breaks law
+abides by it.  It is no affair of mine."
+
+The old man clutched his hands together fiercely, struggling to
+be quiet.
+
+"Ther' 's none knows it but yoh," he said, in a smothered voice. 
+"Fur God's sake be merciful!  It'll kill my girl,--it 'll kill
+her.  Gev me a chance, Marster."
+
+"You trouble me.  I must do what is just."
+
+"It's not just," he said, savagely.  "What good'll it do me to go
+back ther'?  I was goin' down, down, an' bringin' th' others with
+me.  What good'll it do you or the rest to hev me ther'?  To make
+me afraid?  It's poor learnin' frum fear.  Who taught me what was
+right?  Who cared?  No man cared fur my soul, till I thieved 'n'
+robbed; 'n' then judge 'n' jury 'n' jailers was glad to pounce on
+me.  Will yoh gev me a chance? will yoh?"
+
+It was a desperate face before him; but Holmes never knew fear.
+
+"Stand aside," he said, quietly.  "To-morrow I will see you.  You
+need not try to escape."
+
+He passed him, and went slowly up through the vacant mill to his
+chamber.
+
+The man sat down on the lower step a few moments, quite quiet,
+crushing his hat up in a slow, steady way, looking up at the
+mouldy cobwebs on the wall.  He got up at last, and went in to
+Lois.  Had she heard?  The old scarred face of the girl looked
+years older, he thought,--but it might be fancy.  She did not say
+anything for a while, moving slowly, with a new gentleness, about
+him; her very voice was changed, older.  He tried to be cheerful,
+eating his supper: she need not know until to-morrow.  He would
+get out of the town to-night, or----  There were different ways
+to escape.  When he had done, he told her to go; but she would
+not.
+
+"Let me stay til' night," she said.  "I be n't afraid o' th'
+mill."
+
+"Why, Lo," he said, laughing, "yoh used to say yer death was hid
+here, somewheres."
+
+"I know.  But ther' 's worse nor death.  But it'll come right,"
+she said, persistently, muttering to herself, as she leaned her
+face on her knees, watching,--"it'll come right."
+
+The glimmering shadows changed and faded for an hour.  The man
+sat quiet.  There was not much in the years gone to soften his
+thought, as it grew desperate and cruel: there was oppression and
+vice heaped on him, and flung back out of his bitter heart.  Nor
+much in the future: a blank stretch of punishment to the end.  He
+was an old man: was it easy to bear?  What if he were black? 
+what if he were born a thief?  what if all the sullen revenge of
+his nature had made him an outcast from the poorest poor?  Was
+there no latent good in this soul for which Christ died, that a
+kind hand might not have brought to life?
+
+None?  Something, I think, struggled up in the touch of his hand,
+catching the skirt of his child's dress, when it came near him,
+with the timid tenderness of a mother touching her dead baby's
+hair,--as something holy, far off, yet very near: something in
+his old crime- marked face,--a look like this dog's, putting his
+head on my knee,--a dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the
+slow memory of a wrong done to his soul in a day long past.  A
+wrong to both, you say, perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and
+never to be recompensed.  Never?
+
+"Yoh must go, my little girl," he said at last.
+
+Whatever he did must be done quickly.  She came up, combing the
+thin gray hairs through her fingers.
+
+"Father, I dunnot understan' what it is, rightly.  But stay with
+me,--stay, father!"
+
+"Yoh've a many frien's, Lo," he said, with a keen flash of
+jealousy.  "Ther' 's none like yoh,--none."
+
+"Father, look here."
+
+She put her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand,
+where he could see them.  If it had ever hurt her to be as she
+was, if she had ever compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved
+women, she was glad now, and thankful, for every fault and
+deformity that brought her nearer to him, and made her dearer.
+
+"They're kind, but ther' 's not many loves me with true love,
+like yoh.  Stay, father!  Bear it out, whatever it be.  Th' good
+time 'll come, father."
+
+He kissed her, saying nothing, and went with her down the street. 
+When he left her, she waited, and, creeping back, hid near the
+mill.  God knows what vague dread was in her brain; but she came
+back to watch and help.
+
+Old Yare wandered through the great loom rooms of the mill with
+but one fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,--that
+above him the man lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than
+death on him to-morrow.  Up and down, aimlessly, with his
+stoker's torch in hand, going over the years gone and the years
+to come, with the dead hatred through all of the pitiless man
+above him,--with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought of
+things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,--of the
+corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in "th'
+Alabam',"--of the scow his young master gave him once, the first
+thing he really owned: he was almost as proud of it as he was of
+Lois when she was born.  Most of all remembering the good times
+in his life, he went back to Lois.  It was all good, there, to go
+back to.  What a little chub she used to be!  Remembering, with
+bitter remorse, how all his life he had meant to try and do
+better, on her account, but had kept putting off and putting off
+until now.  And now---- Did nothing lie before him but to go back
+and rot yonder?  Was that the end, because he never had learned
+better, and was a "dam' nigger"?
+
+"I'll NOT leave my girl!" he muttered, going up and down,--"I'll
+NOT leave my girl!"
+
+If Holmes did sleep above him, the trial of the day, of which we
+have seen nothing, came back sharper in sleep.  While the strong
+self in the man lay torpid, whatever holier power was in him came
+out, undaunted by defeat, and unwearied, and took the form of
+dreams, those slighted messengers of God, to soothe and charm and
+win him out into fuller, kindlier life.  Let us hope that they
+did so win him; let us hope that even in that unreal world the
+better nature of the man triumphed at last, and claimed its
+reward before the terrible reality broke upon him.
+
+Lois, over in the damp, fresh-smelling lumber-yard, sat coiled up
+in one of the creviced houses made by the jutting boards.  She
+remembered how she used to play in them, before she went into the
+mill.  The mill,--even now, with the vague dread of some
+uncertain evil to come, the mill absorbed all fear in its old
+hated shadow.  Whatever danger was coming to them lay in it, came
+from it, she knew, in her confused, blurred way of thinking.  It
+loomed up now, with the square patch of ashen sky above, black,
+heavy with years of remembered agony and loss.  In Lois's
+hopeful, warm life this was the one uncomprehended monster.  Her
+crushed brain, her unwakened powers, resented their wrong dimly
+to the mass of iron and work and impure smells, unconscious of
+any remorseless power that wielded it.  It was a monster, she
+thought, through the sleepy, dreading night,--a monster that kept
+her wakeful with a dull, mysterious terror.
+
+When the night grew sultry and deepest, she started from her
+half-doze to see her father come stealthily out and go down the
+street.  She must have slept, she thought, rubbing her eyes, and
+watching him out of sight,--and then, creeping out, turned to
+glance at the mill.  She cried out, shrill with horror.  It was a
+live monster now,--in one swift instant, alive with fire,--quick,
+greedy fire, leaping like serpents' tongues out of its hundred
+jaws, hungry sheets of flame maddening and writhing towards her,
+and under all a dull and hollow roar that shook the night.  Did
+it call her to her death?  She turned to fly, and then----He was
+alone, dying!  He had been so kind to her!  She wrung her hands,
+standing there a moment.  It was a brave hope that was in her
+heart, and a prayer on her lips never left unanswered, as she
+hobbled, in her lame, slow way, up to the open black door, and,
+with one backward look, went in.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+There was a dull smell of camphor; a farther sense of coolness
+and prickling wet on Holmes's hot, cracking face and hands; then
+silence and sleep again.  Sometime--when, he never knew--a gray
+light stinging his eyes like pain, and again a slow sinking into
+warm, unsounded darkness and unconsciousness.  It might be years,
+it might be ages.  Even in after-life, looking back, he never
+broke that time into weeks or days: people might so divide it for
+him, but he was uncertain, always: it was a vague vacuum in his
+memory: he had drifted out of coarse, measured life into some
+out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm.  When, by long
+degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was
+feebly done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet clinging to
+him, as if he had been drowned in Lethe, and had brought its
+calming mist with him out of the shades.
+
+The low chatter of voices, the occasional lifting of his head on
+the pillow, the very soothing  draught, came to him unreal at
+first: parts only of the dull, lifeless pleasure.  There was a
+sharper memory pierced it sometimes, making him moan and try to
+sleep,--a remembrance of great, cleaving pain, of falling
+giddily, of owing life to some one, and being angry that he owed
+it, in the pain.  Was it he that had borne it?  He did not
+know,--nor care: it made him tired to think.  Even when he heard
+the name, Stephen Holmes, it had but a far-off meaning: he never
+woke enough to know if it were his or not.  He learned, long
+after, to watch the red light curling among the shavings in the
+grate when they made a fire in the evenings, to listen to the
+voices of the women by the bed, to know that the pleasantest
+belonged to the one with the low, shapeless figure, and to call
+her Lois, when he wanted a drink, long before he knew himself.
+
+They were very long, pleasant days in early December.  The
+sunshine was pale, but it suited his hurt eyes better: it crept
+slowly in the mornings over the snuff-coloured carpet on the
+floor, up the brown foot-board of the bed, and, when the wind
+shook the window-curtains, made little crimson pools of mottled
+light over the ceiling,--curdling pools, that he liked to watch:
+going off, from the clean gray walls, and rustling curtain, and
+transparent crimson, into sleeps that lasted all day.
+
+He was not conscious how he knew he was in a hospital: but he did
+know it, vaguely; thought sometimes of the long halls outside of
+the door, with ranges of rooms opening into them, like this, and
+of very barns of rooms on the other side of the building with
+rows of white cots where the poorer patients lay: a stretch of
+travel from which his brain came back to his snug fireplace,
+quite tired, and to Lois sitting knitting by it.  He called the
+little Welsh-woman, "Sister," too, who used to come in a stuff
+dress, and white bands about her face, to give his medicine, and
+gossip with Lois in the evening: she had a comical voice, like a
+cricket chirping.  There was another with a real Scotch brogue,
+who came and listened sometimes, bringing a basket of undarned
+stockings: the doctor told him one day how fearless and skilful
+she was, every summer going to New Orleans when the yellow fever
+came.  She died there the next June: but Holmes never, somehow,
+could realize a martyr in the cheery, freckled-faced woman whom
+he always remembered darning stockings in the quiet fire-light. 
+It was very quiet; the voices about him were pleasant and low. 
+If he had drifted from any shock of pain into a sleep like death,
+some of the stillness hung about him yet; but the outer life was
+homely and fresh and natural.
+
+The doctor used to talk to him a little; and sometimes one or two
+of the patients from the eye-ward would grow tired of sitting
+about in the garden-alleys, and would loiter in, if Lois would
+give them leave; but their talk wearied him, jarred him as
+strangely as if one had begun on politics and price-currents to
+the silent souls in Hades.  It was enough thought for him to
+listen to the whispered stories of the sisters in the long
+evenings, and, half-heard, try and make an end to them; to look
+drowsily down into the garden, where the afternoon sunshine was
+still so summer-like that a few holly-hocks persisted in showing
+their honest red faces along the walls, and the very leaves that
+filled the paths would not wither, but kept up a wholesome ruddy
+brown.  One of the sisters had a poultry-yard in it, which he
+could see: the wall around it was of stone covered with a brown
+feathery lichen, which every rooster in that yard was determined
+to stand on, or perish in the attempt; and Holmes would watch,
+through the quiet, bright mornings, the frantic ambition of the
+successful aspirant with an amused smile.
+
+"One 'd thenk," said Lois, sagely, "a chicken never stood on a
+wall before, to hear 'em, or a hen laid an egg."
+
+Nor did Holmes smile once because the chicken burlesqued man: his
+thought was too single for that yet.  It was long, too, before he
+thought of the people who came in quietly to see him as anything
+but shadows, or wished for them to come again.  Lois, perhaps,
+was the most real thing in life then to him: growing conscious,
+day by day, as he watched her, of his old life over the gulf. 
+Very slowly conscious: with a weak groping to comprehend the
+sudden, awful change that had come on him, and then forgetting
+his old life, and the change, and the pity he felt for himself,
+in the vague content of the fire-lit room, and his nurse with her
+interminable knitting through the long afternoons, while the sky
+without would thicken and gray, and a few still flakes of snow
+would come drifting down to whiten the brown fields,--with no
+chilly thought of winter, but only to make the quiet autumn more
+quiet.  Whatever honest, commonplace affection was in the man
+came out in a simple way to this Lois, who ruled his sick whims
+and crotchets in such a quiet, sturdy fashion.  Not because she
+had risked her life to save his; even when he understood that, he
+recalled it with an uneasy, heavy gratitude; but the drinks she
+made him, and the plot they laid to smuggle in some oysters in
+defiance of all rules, and the cheerful, pock-marked face, he
+never forgot.
+
+Doctor Knowles came sometimes, but seldom: never talked, when he
+did come: late in the evening generally: and then would punch his
+skin, and look at his tongue, and shake the bottles on the
+mantel-shelf with a grunt that terrified Lois into the belief
+that the other doctor was a quack, and her patient was totally
+undone.  He would sit, grum enough, with his feet higher than his
+head, chewing an unlighted cigar, and leave them both thankful
+when he saw proper to go.
+
+The truth is, Knowles was thoroughly out of place in these little
+mending-shops called sick-chambers, where bodies are taken to
+pieces, and souls set right.  He had no faith in your slow,
+impalpable cures: all reforms were to be accomplished by a
+wrench, from the abolition of slavery to the pulling of a tooth.
+
+He had no especial sympathy with Holmes, either: the men were
+started in life from opposite poles: and with all the real
+tenderness under his surly, rugged habit, it would have been hard
+to touch him with the sudden doom fallen on this man, thrown
+crippled and penniless upon the world, helpless, it might be, for
+life.  He would have been apt to tell you, savagely, that "he
+wrought for it."
+
+Besides, it made him out of temper to meet the sisters.  Knowles
+could have sketched for you with a fine decision of touch the
+role played by the Papal power in the progress of humanity,--how
+far it served as a stepping-stone, and the exact period when it
+became a wearisome clog.  The world was done with it now,--
+utterly.  Its breath was only poisoned, with coming death.  So
+the homely live charity of these women, their work, which no
+other hands were ready to take, jarred against his abstract
+theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run
+into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart
+of a matter.  Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle
+of a world, in spite of the Positive Philosophy, you know.
+
+Don't sneer at Knowles.  Your own clear, tolerant brain, that
+reflects all men and creeds alike, like colourless water, drawing
+the truth from all, is very different, doubtless, from this
+narrow, solitary soul, who thought the world waited for him to
+fight down his one evil before it went on its slow way.  An
+intolerant fanatic, of course.  But the truth he did know was so
+terribly real to him, there was such sick, throbbing pity in his
+heart for men who suffered as he had done!  And then, fanatics
+must make history for conservative men to learn from, I suppose.
+
+If Knowles shunned the hospital, there was another place he
+shunned more,--the place where his Communist buildings were to
+have stood.  He went out there once, as one might go alone to
+bury his dead out of his sight, the day after the mill was
+burnt,--looking first at the smoking mass of hot bricks and
+charred shingles, so as clearly to understand how utterly dead
+his life-long scheme was.  He stalked gravely around it, his
+hands in his pockets; the hodmen who were raking out their
+winter's firewood from the ashes remarking, that "old Knowles
+didn't seem a bit cut up about it."  Then he went out to the farm
+he had meant to buy, as I told you, and looked at it in the same
+stolid way.  It was a dull day in October.  The river crawled
+moodily past his feet, the dingy prairie stretched drearily away
+on the other side, while the heavy-browed Indiana hills stood
+solemnly looking down the plateau where the buildings were to
+have risen.
+
+Well, most men have some plan of life, into which all the
+strength and the keen, fine feeling of their nature enter; but
+generally they try to make it real in early youth, and, balked
+then, laugh ever afterwards at their own folly.  This poor old
+Knowles had begun to block out his dream when he was a gaunt,
+gray-haired man of sixty.  I have known men so build their
+heart's blood, and brains into their work, that, when it tumbled
+down, their lives went with it.  His fell that dull day in
+October; but if it hurt him, no man knew it.  He sat there,
+looking at the broad plateau, whistling softly to himself, a long
+time.  He had meant that a great many hearts should be made
+better and happier there; he had dreamed----God knows what he had
+dreamed, of which this reality was the foundation,--of how much
+world-freedom, or beauty, or kindly life this was the heart or
+seed.  It was all over now.  All the afternoon the muddy sky hung
+low over the hills and dull prairie, while he sat there looking
+at the dingy gloom: just as you and I have done, perhaps, some
+time, thwarted in some true hope,--sore and bitter against God,
+because He did not see how much His universe needed our pet
+reform.
+
+He got up at last, and without a sigh went slowly away, leaving
+the courage and self-reliance of his life behind him, buried with
+that one beautiful, fair dream of life.  He never came back
+again.  People said Knowles was quieter since his loss; but I
+think only God saw the depth of the difference.  When he was
+leaving the plateau, that day, he looked back at it, as if to say
+good-bye,--not to the dingy fields and river, but to the
+Something he had nursed so long in his rugged heart, and given up
+now forever.  As he looked, the warm, red sun came out, lighting
+up with a heartsome warmth the whole gray day.  Some blessing
+power seemed to look at him from this grave yard of his hopes,
+from the gloomy hills, the prairie, and the river, which he never
+was to see again.  His hope accomplished could not have looked at
+him with surer content and fulfilment.  He turned away,
+ungrateful and moody.  Long afterwards he remembered the calm and
+brightness which his hand had not been raised to make, and
+understood the meaning of its promise.
+
+He went to work now in earnest: he had to work for his
+bread-and-butter, you understand?  Restless, impatient at first;
+but we will forgive him that: you yourself were not altogether
+submissive, perhaps, when the slow-built expectation of life was
+destroyed by some chance, as you called it, no more controllable
+than this paltry burning of a mill.  Yet, now that the great hope
+was gone on which his brain had worked with rigid, fierce
+intentness, now that his hands were powerless to redeem a
+perishing class, he had time to fall into careless, kindly habit:
+he thought it wasted time, remorsefully, of course.  He was
+seized with a curiosity to know what plan in living these people
+had who crossed his way on the streets; if they were
+disappointed, like him.  Humbled, he hardly knew why: vague,
+uncertain in action.  Quit dogging old Huff with his advice;
+trotted about the streets with a cowed look, that, if one could
+have seen into the jaded old heart under his snuffy waistcoat,
+would have seemed pitiful enough.  He went sometimes to read the
+papers to old Tim Poole, who was bed-ridden, and did not pish or
+pshaw once at his maundering about secession, or the misery in
+his back.  Went to church sometimes: the sermons were bigotry,
+always, to his notion, sitting on a back seat, squirting
+tobacco-juice about him; but the simple, old-fashioned hymns
+brought the tears to his eyes:--"They sounded to him like his
+mother's voice, singing in Paradise:" he hoped she could not see
+how things had gone on here,--how all that was honest and strong
+in his life had fallen in that infernal mill.  Once or twice he
+went down Crane Alley, and lumbered up three pair of stairs to
+the garret where Kitts had his studio,--got him orders, in fact,
+for two portraits; and when that pale-eyed young man, in a fit of
+confidence, one night, with a very red face drew back the curtain
+from his grand "Fall of Chapultepec," and watched him with a lean
+and hungry look, Knowles, who knew no more about painting than a
+gorilla, walked about, looking through his fist at it, saying,
+"how fine the chiaroscuro was, and that it was a devilish good
+thing altogether."  "Well, well," he soothed his conscience,
+going downstairs, "maybe that bit of canvas is as much to that
+poor chap as the Phalanstery was once to another fool."  And so
+went on through the gas-lit streets into his parishes in cellars
+and alleys, with a sorer heart, but cheerfuller words, now that
+he had nothing but words to give.
+
+The only place where he hardened his heart was in the hospital
+with Holmes.  After he had wakened to full consciousness, Knowles
+thought the man a beast to sit there uncomplaining day after day,
+cold and grave, as if the lifeful warmth of the late autumn were
+enough for him.  Did he understand the iron fate laid on him? 
+Where was the strength of the self-existent soul now?  Did he
+know that it was a balked, defeated life, that waited for him,
+vacant of the triumphs he had planned?  "The self-existent soul!
+stopped in its growth by chance, this omnipotent deity,--the
+chance burning of a mill!"  Knowles muttered to himself, looking
+at Holmes.  With a dim flash of doubt, as he said it, whether
+there might not, after all, be a Something,--some deep of calm,
+of eternal order, where he and Holmes, these coarse chances,
+these wrestling souls, these creeds, Catholic or Humanitarian,
+even that namby-pamby Kitts and his picture, might be
+unconsciously working out their part.  Looking out of the
+hospital-window, he saw the deep of the stainless blue,
+impenetrable, with the stars unconscious in their silence of the
+maddest raging of the petty world.  There was such calm! such
+infinite love and justice! it was around, above him; it held him,
+it held the world,--all Wrong, all Right!  For an instant the
+turbid heart of the man cowered, awestruck, as yours or mine has
+done when some swift touch of music or human love gave us a
+cleaving glimpse of the great I AM.  The next, he opened the
+newspaper in his hand.  What part in the eternal order could THAT
+hold? or slavery, or secession, or civil war?  No harmony could
+be infinite enough to hold such discords, he thought, pushing the
+whole matter from him in despair.  Why, the experiment of
+self-government, the problem of the ages, was crumbling in ruin! 
+So he despaired, just as Tige did the night the mill fell about
+his ears, in full confidence that the world had come to an end
+now, without hope of salvation,--crawling out of his cellar in
+dumb amazement, when the sun rose as usual the next morning.
+
+Knowles sat, peering at Holmes over his paper,  watching the
+languid breath that showed how deep the hurt had been, the maimed
+body, the face outwardly cool, watchful, reticent as before.  He
+fancied the slough of disappointment into which God had crushed
+the soul of this man: would he struggle out?  Would he take Miss
+Herne as the first step in his stair-way, or be content to be
+flung down in vigorous manhood to the depth of impotent poverty?
+He could not tell if the quiet on Holmes's face were stolid
+defiance or submission: the dumb kings might have looked thus
+beneath the feet of Pharaoh.  When he walked over the floor, too,
+weak as he was it was with the old iron tread.  He asked Knowles
+presently what business he had gone into.
+
+"My old hobby in an humble way,--the House of Refuge."
+
+They both laughed.
+
+"Yes, it is true.  The janitor points me out to visitors as
+`under-superintendent, a philanthropist in decayed
+circumstances.'  Perhaps it is my life-work,"--growing sad and
+earnest.
+
+"If you can inoculate these infant beggars and thieves with your
+theory, it will be practice when you are dead."
+
+"I think that," said Knowles, gravely, his eye kindling,--"I
+think that."
+
+"As thankless a task as that of Moses," said the other, watching
+him curiously.  "For YOU will not see the pleasant land,--YOU
+will not go over."
+
+The old man's flabby face darkened.
+
+"I know," he said.
+
+He glanced involuntarily out at the blue, and the clear-shining,
+eternal stars.
+
+"I suppose," he said, after a while, cheerfully, "I must content
+myself with Lois's creed, here,--`It'll come right some time.' "
+
+Lois looked up from the saucepan she was stirring, her face
+growing quite red, nodding emphatically some half-dozen times.
+
+"After all," said Holmes, kindly, "this chance may have forced
+you on the true road to success for your new system of Sociology. 
+Only untainted natures could be fitted for self-government.  Do
+you find the fallow field easily worked?"
+
+Knowles fidgeted uneasily.
+
+"No.  Fact is, I'm beginning to think there 's a good deal of an
+obstacle in blood.  I find difficulty, much difficulty, Sir, in
+giving to the youngest child true ideas of absolute freedom, and
+unselfish heroism."
+
+"You teach them these by reason alone?" said Holmes, gravely.
+
+"Well,--of course,--that is the true theory; reason is the only
+yoke that should be laid upon a free-born soul; but I--I find it
+necessary to have them whipped, Mr. Holmes."
+
+Holmes stooped suddenly to pat Tiger, hiding a furtive smile. 
+The old man went on, anxiously,--
+
+"Old Mr. Howth says that is the end of all self-governments: from
+anarchy to despotism, he says.  Brute force must come in.  Old
+people are apt to be set in their ways, you know.  Honestly, we
+do not find unlimited freedom answer in the House.  I hope much
+from a woman's assistance: I have destined her for this work
+always: she has great latent power of sympathy and endurance,
+such as can bring the Christian teaching home to these wretches."
+
+"The Christian?" said Holmes.
+
+"Well, yes.  I am not a believer myself, you know; but I find
+that it takes hold of these people more vitally than more
+abstract faiths: I suppose because of the humanity of Jesus.  In
+Utopia, of course, we shall live from scientific principles; but
+they do not answer in the House."
+
+"Who is the woman?" asked Holmes, carelessly.
+
+The other watched him keenly.
+
+"She is coming for five years.  Margret Howth."
+
+He patted the dog with the same hard, unmoved touch.
+
+"It is a religious duty with her.  Besides, she must do
+something.  They have been almost starving since the mill was
+burnt."
+
+Holmes's face was bent; he could not see it.  When he looked up,
+Knowles thought it more rigid, immovable than before.
+
+When Knowles was going away, Holmes said to him,--
+
+"When does Margret Howth go into that devils' den?"
+
+"The House?  On New-Year's."  The scorn in him was too savage to
+be silent.  "It is the best time to begin a new life.  Yourself,
+now, you will have fulfilled your design by that time,--of
+marriage?"
+
+Holmes was leaning on the mantel-shelf; his very lips were pale.
+
+"Yes, I shall, I shall,"--in his low, hard tone.
+
+Some sudden dream of warmth and beauty flashed before his gray
+eyes, lighting them as Knowles never had seen before.
+
+"Miss Herne is beautiful,--let me congratulate you, in Western
+fashion."
+
+The old man did not hide his sneer.
+
+Holmes bowed.
+
+"I thank you, for her."
+
+Lois held the candle to light the Doctor out of the long
+passages.
+
+"Yoh hev n't seen Barney out 't Mr. Howth's, Doctor?  He's ther'
+now."
+
+"No.  When shall you have done waiting on this--man, Lois?  God
+help you, child!"
+
+Lois's quick instinct answered,--
+
+"He's very kind.  He's like a woman fur kindness to such as me. 
+When I come to die, I'd like eyes such as his to look at, tender,
+pitiful."
+
+"Women are fools alike," grumbled the Doctor.  "Never mind. 
+`When you come to die?' What put that into your head?  Look up."
+
+The child sheltered the flaring candle with her hand.
+
+"I've no tho't o' dyin'," she said, laughing.
+
+There was a gray shadow about her eyes, a peaked look to the
+face, he never saw before, looking at her now with a physician's
+eyes.
+
+"Does anything hurt you here?" touching her chest.
+
+"It's better now.  It was that night o' th' fire.  Th' breath o'
+th' mill, I thenk,--but it's nothin'."
+
+"Burning copperas?  Of course it's better!  Oh, that's nothing!"
+he said, cheerfully.
+
+When they reached the door, he held out his hand, the first time
+he ever had done it to her, and then waited, patting her on the
+head.
+
+"I think it'll come right, Lois," he said, dreamily, looking out
+into the night.  "You're a good girl.  I think it'll all come
+right.  For you and me.  Some time.  Good-night, child."
+
+After he was a long way down the street, he turned to nod
+good-night again to the comical little figure in the door-way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+If Knowles hated anybody that night, he hated the man he had left
+standing there with pale, heavy jaws, and heart of iron; he could
+have cursed him, standing there.  He did not see how, after he
+was left alone, the man lay with his face to the wall, holding
+his bony hand to his forehead, with a look in his eyes that if
+you had seen, you would have thought his soul had entered on that
+path whose steps take hold on hell.
+
+There was no struggle in his face; whatever was the resolve he
+had reached in the solitary hours when he had stood so close upon
+the borders of death, it was unshaken now; but the heart, crushed
+and stifled before, was taking its dire revenge.  If ever it had
+hungered, through the cold, selfish days, for God's help, or a
+woman's love, it hungered now, with a craving like death.  If
+ever he had thought how bare and vacant the years would be, going
+down to the grave with lips that never had known a true wife's
+kiss, he remembered it now, when it was too late, with bitterness
+such as wrings a man's heart but once in a lifetime.  If ever he
+had denied to his own soul this Margret, called her alien or
+foreign, it called her now, when it was too late, to her rightful
+place; there was not a thought nor a hope in the darkest depths
+of his nature that did not cry out for her help that night,--for
+her, a part of himself,--now, when it was too late.  He went over
+all the years gone, and pictured the years to come; he remembered
+the money that was to help his divine soul upward; he thought of
+it with a curse, getting up and pacing the floor of the narrow
+room, slowly and quietly.  Looking out into the still starlight
+and the quaint garden, he tried to fancy this woman as he knew
+her, after the restless power of her soul should have been
+chilled and starved into a narrow, lifeless duty.  He fancied her
+old, and stern, and sick of life, she that might have been what
+might they not have been, together? And he had driven her to this
+for money,--money!
+
+It was of no use to repent of it now.  He had frozen the love out
+of her heart, long ago.  He remembered (all that he did remember
+of the blank night after he was hurt) that he had seen her white,
+worn-out face looking down at him; that she did not touch him;
+and that, when one of the sisters told her she might take her
+place, and sponge his forehead, she said, bitterly, she had no
+right to do it, that he was no friend of hers.  He saw and heard
+that, unconscious to all else; he would have known it, if he had
+been dead, lying there.  It was too late now: why need he think
+of what might have been?  Yet he did think of it through the long
+winter's night,--each moment his thought of the life to come, or
+of her, growing more tender and more bitter.  Do you wonder at
+the remorse of this man?  Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he
+had done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face
+with God and death.  Wait until you go down so close to eternity
+that the life you have lived stands out before you in the
+dreadful bareness in which God sees it,--as you shall see it some
+day from heaven or hell: money, and hate, and love will stand in
+their true light then.  Yet, coming back to life again, he held
+whatever resolve he had reached down there with his old iron
+will: all the pain he bore in looking back to the false life
+before, or the ceaseless remembrance that it was too late now to
+atone for that false life, made him the stronger to abide by that
+resolve, to go on the path self-chosen, let the end be what it
+might.  Whatever the resolve was, it did not still the gnawing 
+hunger in his heart that night, which every trifle made more
+fresh and strong.
+
+There was a wicker-basket that Lois had left by the fire, piled
+up with bits of cloth and leather out of which she was
+manufacturing Christmas gifts; a pair of great woollen socks,
+which one of the sisters had told him privately Lois meant for
+him, lying on top.  As with all of her people, Christmas was the
+great day of the year to her.  Holmes could not but smile,
+looking at them.  Poor Lois!--Christmas would be here soon, then? 
+And sitting by the covered fire, he went back to Christmases
+gone, the thought of all others that brought Margret nearest and
+warmest to him: since he was a boy they had been together on that
+day.  With his hand over his eyes, he sat quiet by the fire until
+morning.  He heard some boy going by in the gray dawn call to
+another that they would have holiday on Christmas week.  It was
+coming, he thought, rousing himself,-- but never as it had been:
+that could never be again.  Yet it was strange how this thought
+of Christmas took hold of him, after this,-- famished his heart. 
+As it approached in the slow-coming winter, the days growing
+shorter, and the nights longer and more solitary, so Margret
+became more real to him,--not rejected and lost, but as the wife
+she might have been, with the simple, passionate love she gave
+him once.  The thought grew intolerable to him; yet there was not
+a homely pleasure of those years gone, when the old school-master
+kept high holiday on Christmas, that he did not recall and linger
+over with a boyish yearning, now that these things were over
+forever.  He chafed under his weakness.  If the day would but
+come when he could go out and conquer his fate, as a man ought to
+do!  On Christmas eve he would put an end to these torturing
+taunts, be done with them, let the sacrifice be what it might. 
+For I fear that even now Stephen Holmes thought of his own need
+and his own hunger.
+
+He watched Lois knitting and patching her poor little gifts, with
+a vague feeling that every stitch made the time a moment shorter
+until he should be free, with his life in his hand again.  She
+left the hospital at last, sorrowfully enough, but he made her
+go: he fancied the close air was hurting her, seeing at night the
+strange shadow growing on her face.  I do not think he ever said
+to her that he knew all she had done for him, or thanked her; but
+no dog or woman that Stephen Holmes loved could look into his
+eyes, and doubt that love.  Sad, masterful eyes, such as are seen
+but once or twice in a lifetime: no woman but would wish, like
+Lois, for such eyes to be near her when she came to die, for her
+to remember the world's love in.  She came hobbling back every
+day to see him after she had gone, and would stay to make his
+soup, telling him, child-like, how many days it was until
+Christmas.  He knew that, as well as she, waiting through the
+cold, slow hours, in his solitary room.  He thought sometimes she
+had some eager petition to offer him, when she stood watching him
+wistfully, twisting her hands together; but she always smothered
+it with a sigh, and, tying her little woollen cap, went away,
+walking more slowly, he thought, every day.
+
+Do you remember how Christmas came that year? how there was a
+waiting pause, when the States stood still, and from the peoples
+came the first awful murmurs of the storm that was to shake the
+earth? how men's hearts failed them for fear, how women turned
+pale, and held their children closer to their breasts, while they
+heard a far cry of lamentation for their country that had fallen? 
+Do you remember how, amidst the fury of men's anger, the
+storehouses of God were opened for that land? how the very
+sunshine gathered new splendours, the rains more fruitful
+moisture, until the earth poured forth an unknown fulness of life
+and beauty?  Was there no promise there, no prophecy?  Do you
+remember, while the very life of the people hung in doubt before
+them, while the angel of death came again to pass over the land,
+and there was no blood on any door-post to keep him from that
+house, how serenely the old earth folded in her harvest, dead,
+till it should waken to a stronger life? how quietly, as the time
+came near for the birth of Christ, this old earth made ready for
+his coming, heedless of the clamour of men? how the air grew
+fresher above, day by day, and the gray deep silently opened for
+the snow to go down and screen and whiten and make holy that
+fouled earth?  I think the slow-falling snow did not fail in its
+quiet warning; for I remember that men, too, in a feeble way
+tried to make ready for the birth of Christ.  There was a
+healthier glow than terror stirred in their hearts; because of
+the vague, great dread without, it may be, they drew closer
+together round household fires, were kindlier in the good
+old-fashioned way; old friendships were wakened, old times talked
+over, fathers and mothers and children planned homely ways to
+show the love in their hearts and to welcome in Christmas.  Who
+knew but it might be the last?  Let us be thankful for that happy
+Christmas-day.  What if it were the last?  What if, when another
+comes, and another, one voice, the kindest and cheerfullest then,
+shall never say "Happy Christmas" to us again?  Let us be
+thankful for that day the more,--accept it the more as a sign of
+that which will surely come.
+
+Holmes, even, in his dreary room and drearier thought, felt the
+warmth and expectant stir creeping through the land as the day
+drew near.  Even in the hospital, the sisters were in a busy
+flutter, decking their little chapel with flowers, and preparing
+a fete for their patients.  The doctor, as he bandaged his broken
+arm, hinted at faint rumours in the city of masquerades and
+concerts.  Even Knowles, who had not visited the hospital for
+weeks, relented and came back, moody and grum.  He brought Kitts
+with him, and started him on talking of how they kept Christmas
+in Ohio on his mother's farm; and the poor soul, encouraged by
+the silence of two of his auditors, and the intense interest of
+Lois in the background, mazed on about Santa-Claus trees and
+Virginia reels until the clock struck twelve, and Knowles began
+to snore.
+
+Christmas was coming.  As he stood, day after day, looking out of
+the gray window, he could see the signs of its coming even in the
+shop-windows glittering with miraculous toys, in the market-carts
+with their red-faced drivers and heaps of ducks and turkeys, in
+every stage-coach or omnibus that went by crowded with boys home
+for the holidays, hallooing for Bell or Lincoln, forgetful that
+the election was over, and Carolina out.
+
+Pike came to see him one day, his arms full of a bundle, which
+turned out to be an accordion for Sophy.
+
+"Christmas, you know," he said, taking off the brown paper, while
+he was cursing the Cotton States the hardest, and gravely
+kneading at the keys, and stretching it until he made as much
+discord as five Congressmen.  "I think Sophy will like that," he
+said, looking at it sideways, and tying it up carefully.
+
+"I am sure she will," said Holmes,--and did not think the man a
+fool for one moment.
+
+Always going back, this Holmes, when he was alone, to the
+certainty that home-comings or children's kisses or Christmas
+feasts were not for such as he,--never could be, though he sought
+for the old time in bitterness of heart; and so, dully
+remembering his resolve, and waiting for Christmas eve, when he
+might end it all.  Not one of the myriads of happy children
+listened more intently to the clock clanging off hour after hour
+than the silent, stern man who had no hope in that day that was
+coming.
+
+He learned to watch even for poor Lois coming up the corridor
+every day,--being the only tie that bound the solitary man to the
+inner world of love and warmth.  The deformed little body was
+quite alive with Christmas now, and brought its glow with her, in
+her weak way.  Different from the others, he saw with a curious
+interest.  The day was more real to her than to them.  Not
+because, only, the care she had of everybody, and everybody had
+of her seemed to reach its culmination of kindly thought for the
+Christmas time; not because, as she sat talking slowly, stopping
+for breath, her great fear seemed to be that she would not have
+gifts enough to go round; but deeper than that,--the day was real
+to her.  As if it were actually true that the Master in whom she
+believed was freshly born into the world once a year, to waken
+all that was genial and noble and pure in the turbid, worn-out
+hearts; as if new honour and pride and love did flash into the
+realms below heaven with the breaking of Christmas morn.  It was
+a beautiful faith; he almost wished it were his.  A beautiful
+faith! it gave a meaning to the old custom of gifts and kind
+words.  LOVE coming into the world!--the idea pleased his
+artistic taste, being simple and sublime.  Lois used to tell him,
+while she feebly tried to set his room in order, of all her
+plans,-- of how Sam Polston was to be married on New-Year's,--but
+most of all of the Christmas coming out at the old
+school-master's: how the old house had been scrubbed from top to
+bottom, was fairly glowing with shining paint and hot fires,--how
+Margret and her mother worked, in terror lest the old man should
+find out how poor and bare it was,--how he and Joel had some
+secret enterprise on foot at the far end of the plantation out in
+the swamp, and were gone nearly all day.
+
+She ceased coming at last.  One of the sisters went out to see
+her, and told him she was too weak to walk, but meant to be
+better soon,--quite well by the holidays.  He wished the poor
+thing had told him what she wanted of him,--wished it anxiously,
+with a dull presentiment of evil.
+
+The days went by, cold and slow.  He watched grimly the
+preparations the hospital physician was silently making in his
+case, for fever, inflammation.
+
+"I must be strong enough to go out cured on Christmas eve," he
+said to him one day, coolly.
+
+The old doctor glanced up shrewdly.  He was an old Alsatian, very
+plain-spoken.
+
+"You say so?" he mumbled.  "Chut!  Then you will go.  There are
+some--bull-dog, men.  They do what they please,--they never die
+unless they choose, begar!  We know them in our practice, Herr
+Holmes!"
+
+Holmes laughed.  Some acumen there, he thought, in medicine or
+mind: as for himself, it was true enough; whatever success he had
+gained in life had been by no flush of enthusiasm or hope; a
+dogged persistence of "holding on," rather.
+
+A long time; but Christmas eve came at last: bright, still,
+frosty.  "Whatever he had to do, let it be done quickly;" but not
+till the set hour came.  So he laid his watch on the table beside
+him, waiting until it should mark the time he had chosen: the
+ruling passion of self-control as strong in this turn of life's
+tide as it would be in its ebb, at the last.  The old doctor
+found him alone in the dreary room, coming in with the frosty
+breath of the eager street about him.  A grim, chilling sight
+enough, as solitary and impenetrable as the Sphinx.  He did not
+like such faces in this genial and gracious time, so hurried over
+his examination.  The eye was cool, the pulse steady, the man's
+body, battered though it was, strong in its steely composure. 
+"Ja wohl!--ja wohl!" he went on chuffily, summing up: latent
+fever,--the very lips were blue, dry as husks; "he would
+go,--oui?--then go!"--with a chuckle.  "All right, gluck Zu!" 
+And so shuffled out.  Latent fever?  Doubtless, yet hardly from
+broken bones, the doctor thought,--with no suspicion  of the
+subtile, intolerable passion smouldering in every drop of this
+man's phlegmatic blood.
+
+Evening came at last.  He stopped until the cracked bell of the
+chapel had done striking the Angelus, and then put on his
+overcoat, and went out.  Passing down the garden walk a miserable
+chicken staggered up to him, chirping a drunken recognition.  For
+a moment, he breathed again the hot smoke of the mill,
+remembering how Lois had found him in Margret's office, not
+forgetting the cage: chary of this low life, even in the peril of
+his own.  So, going out on the street, he tested his own nature
+by this trifle in his old fashion.  "The ruling passion strong in
+death," eh?  It had not been self-love; something deeper: an
+instinct rather than reason.  Was he glad to think this of
+himself?  He looked out more watchful of the face which the
+coming Christmas bore.  The air was cold and pungent.  The
+crowded city seemed wakening to some keen enjoyment; even his own
+weak, deliberate step rang on the icy pavement as if it wished to
+rejoice with the rest.  I said it was a trading city: so it was,
+but the very trade to-day had a jolly Christmas face on; the
+surly old banks and pawnbrokers' shops had grown ashamed of their
+doings, and shut their doors, and covered their windows
+
+with frosty trees, and cathedrals, and castles; the shops opened
+their inmost hearts; some child's angel had touched them, and
+they flushed out into a magic splendour of Christmas trees, and
+lights, and toys; Santa Claus might have made his head-quarters
+in any one of them.  As for children, you stumbled over them at
+every step, quite weighed down with the heaviness of their joy,
+and the money burning their pockets; the acrid old brokers and
+pettifoggers, that you met with a chill on other days, had turned
+into jolly fathers of families, and lounged laughing along with
+half a dozen little hands pulling them into candy-stores or
+toy-shops; all of the churches whose rules permitted them to show
+their deep rejoicing in a simple way, had covered their cold
+stone walls with evergreens, and wreaths of glowing fire-berries:
+the child's angel had touched them too, perhaps,--not unwisely.
+
+He passed crowds of thin-clad women looking in through open
+doors, with red cheeks and hungry eyes, at red-hot stoves within,
+and a placard, "Christmas dinners for the poor, gratis;" out of
+every window on the streets came a ruddy light, and a spicy
+smell; the very sunset sky had caught the reflection of the
+countless Christmas fires, and flamed up to the zenith, blood-red
+as cinnabar.
+
+Holmes turned down one of the back streets: he was going to see
+Lois, first of all.  I hardly know why: the child's angel may
+have touched him, too; or his heart, full of a yearning pity for
+the poor cripple, who, he believed now, had given her own life
+for his, may have plead for indulgence, as men remember their
+childish prayers, before going into battle.  He came at last, in
+the quiet lane where she lived, to her little brown frame-shanty,
+to which you mounted by a flight of wooden steps: there were two
+narrow windows at the top, hung with red curtains; he could hear
+her feeble voice singing within.  As he turned to go up the
+steps, he caught sight of something crouched underneath them in
+the dark, hiding from him: whether a man or a dog he could not
+see.  He touched it.
+
+"What d' ye want, Mas'r?" said a stifled voice.
+
+He touched it again with his stick.  The man stood upright, back
+in the shadow: it was old Yare.
+
+"Had ye any word wi' me, Mas'r?"
+
+He saw the negro's face grow gray with fear.
+
+"Come out, Yare," he said, quietly.  "Any word?  What word is
+arson, eh?"
+
+The man did not move.  Holmes touched him with the stick.
+
+"Come out," he said.
+
+He came out, looking gaunt, as with famine.
+
+"I'll not flurr myself," he said, crunching his ragged hat in his
+hands,--"I'll not."
+
+He drove the hat down upon his head, and looked up with a sullen
+fierceness.
+
+"Yoh've got me, an' I'm glad of 't.  I'm tired, fearin'.  I was
+born for hangin', they say," with a laugh.  "But I'll see my
+girl.  I've waited hyur, runnin' the resk,--not darin' to see
+her, on 'count o' yoh.  I thort I was safe on Christmas-day,--but
+what's Christmas to yoh or me?"
+
+Holmes's quiet motion drove him up the steps before him.  He
+stopped at the top, his cowardly nature getting the better of
+him, and sat down whining on the upper step.
+
+"Be marciful, Mas'r!  I wanted to see my girl,--that's all. 
+She's all I hev."
+
+Holmes passed him and went in.  Was Christmas nothing to him? 
+How did this foul wretch know that they stood alone, apart from
+the world?
+
+It was a low, cheerful little room that he came into, stooping
+his tall head: a tea-kettle humming and singing on the wood-fire,
+that lighted up the coarse carpet and the gray walls, but spent
+its warmest heat on the low settee where Lois lay sewing, and
+singing to herself.  She was wrapped up in a shawl, but the
+hands, he saw, were worn to skin and bone; the gray shadow was
+heavier on her face, and the brooding brown eyes were like a
+tired child's.  She tried to jump up when she saw him, and not
+being able, leaned on one elbow, half-crying as she laughed.
+
+"It's the best Christmas gift of all!  I can hardly b'lieve
+it!"--touching the strong hand humbly that was held out to her.
+
+Holmes had a gentle touch, I told you, for dogs and children and
+women: so, sitting quietly by her, he listened for a long time
+with untiring patience to her long story; looked at the heap of
+worthless trifles she had patched up for gifts, wondering
+secretly at the delicate sense of colour and grace betrayed in
+the bits of flannel and leather; and took, with a grave look of
+wonder, his own package, out of which a bit of woollen thread
+peeped forth.
+
+"Don't look till to-morrow mornin'," she said, anxiously, as she
+lay back trembling and exhausted.
+
+The breath of the mill!  The fires of the world's want and crime
+had finished their work on her life,--so!  She caught the meaning
+of his face quickly.
+
+"It's nothin'," she said, eagerly.  "I'll be strong by
+New-Year's; it's only a day or two rest I need.  I've no tho't o'
+givin' up."
+
+And to show how strong she was, she got up and hobbled about to
+make the tea.  He had not the heart to stop her; she did not want
+to die,--why should she? the world was a great, warm, beautiful
+nest for the little cripple,-- why need he show her the cold
+without?  He saw her at last go near the door where old Yare sat
+outside, then heard her breathless cry, and a sob.  A moment
+after the old man came into the room, carrying her, and, laying
+her down on the settee, chafed her hands, and misshapen head.
+
+"What ails her?" he said, looking up, bewildered, to Holmes. 
+"We've killed her among us."
+
+She laughed, though the great eyes were growing dim, and drew his
+coarse gray hair into her hand.
+
+"Yoh wur long comin'," she said, weakly.  "I hunted fur yoh every
+day,--every day."
+
+The old man had pushed her hair back, and was reading the sunken
+face with a wild fear.
+
+"What ails her?" he cried.  "Ther' 's somethin' gone wi' my girl. 
+Was it my fault?  Lo, was it my fault?"
+
+"Be quiet!" said Holmes, sternly.
+
+"Is it THAT?" he gasped, shrilly.  "My God! not that!  I can't
+bear it!"
+
+Lois soothed him, patting his face childishly.
+
+"Am I dyin' now?" she asked, with a frightened look at Holmes.
+
+He told her no, cheerfully.
+
+"I've no tho't o' dyin'.  I dunnot thenk o' dyin'.  Don't mind,
+dear!  Yoh'll stay with me, fur good?"
+
+The man's paroxysm of fear for her over, his spite and cowardice
+came uppermost.
+
+"It's him," he yelped, looking fiercely at Holmes.  "He's got my
+life in his hands.  He kin take it.  What does he keer fur me or
+my girl?  I'll not stay wi' yoh no longer, Lo.  Mornin' he'll
+send me t' th' lock-up, an' after"----
+
+"I care for you, child," said Holmes, stooping suddenly close to
+the girl's livid face.
+
+"To-morrow?" she muttered.  "My Christmas-day?"
+
+He wet her face while he looked over at the wretch whose life he
+held in his hands.  It was the iron rule of Holmes's nature to be
+just; but to-night dim perceptions of a deeper justice than law
+opened before him,--problems he had no time to solve: the
+sternest fortress is liable to be taken by assault,--and the dew
+of the coming morn was on his heart.
+
+"So as I've hunted fur him!" she whispered, weakly.  "I didn't
+thenk it wud come to this.  So as I loved him!  Oh, Mr. Holmes,
+he's hed a pore chance in livin',--forgive him this!  Him that'll
+come to-morrow 'd say to forgive him this."
+
+She caught the old man's head in her arms with an agony of tears,
+and held it tight.
+
+"I hev hed a pore chance," he said, looking up,--"that's God's
+truth, Lo!  I dunnot keer fur that: it's too late goin' back. 
+But Lo-- Mas'r," he mumbled, servilely, "it's on'y a little time
+t' th' end: let me stay with Lo.  She loves me,--Lo does."
+
+A look of disgust crept over Holmes's face.
+
+"Stay, then," he muttered,--"I wash my hands of you, you old
+scoundrel!"
+
+He bent over Lois with his rare, pitiful smile.
+
+"Have I his life in my hands?  I put it into yours,--so, child! 
+Now put it all out of your head, and look up here to wish me
+good-bye."
+
+She looked up cheerfully, hardly conscious how deep the danger
+had been; but the flush had gone from her face, leaving it sad
+and still.
+
+"I must go to keep Christmas, Lois," he said, playfully.
+
+"Yoh're keepin' it here, Sir."  She held her weak grip on his
+hand still, with the vague outlook in her eyes that came there
+sometimes.
+
+"Was it fur me yoh done it?"
+
+"Yes, for you."
+
+"And fur Him that's comin', Sir?" smiling.
+
+Holmes's face grew graver.
+
+"No, Lois."  She looked into his eyes bewildered.  "For the poor
+child that loved me" he said, half to himself, smoothing her
+hair.
+
+Perhaps in that day when the under-currents of the soul's life
+will be bared, this man will know the subtile instincts that drew
+him out of his self-reliance by the hand of the child that loved
+him to the Love beyond, that was man and died for him, as well as
+she.  He did not see it now.
+
+The clear evening light fell on Holmes, as he stood there looking
+down at the dying little lamiter: a powerful figure, with a face
+supreme, masterful, but tender: you will find no higher type of
+manhood.  Did God make him of the same blood as the vicious,
+cringing wretch crouching to hide his black face at the other
+side of the bed?  Some such thought came into Lois's brain, and
+vexed her, bringing the tears to her eyes: he was her father, you
+know.  She drew their hands together, as if she would have joined
+them, then stopped, closing her eyes wearily.
+
+"It's all wrong," she muttered,--"oh, it's far wrong!  Ther' 's
+One could make them 'like.  Not me."
+
+She stroked her father's hand once, and then let it go.  There
+was a long silence.  Holmes glanced out, and saw the sun was
+down.
+
+"Lois," he said, "I want you to wish me a happy Christmas, as
+people do."
+
+Holmes had a curious vein of superstition: he knew no lips so
+pure as this girl's, and he wanted them to wish him good-luck
+that night.  She did it, looking up laughing and growing red:
+riddles of life did not trouble her childish fancy long.  And so
+he left her, with a dull feeling, as I said before, that it was
+good to say a prayer before the battle came on.  For men who
+believed in prayers: for him, it was the same thing to make one
+day for Lois happier.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+It was later than Holmes thought: a gray, cold evening.  The
+streets in that suburb were lonely: he went down them, the
+new-fallen snow dulling his step.  It had covered the peaked
+roofs of the houses too, and they stood in listening rows, white
+and still.  Here and there a pale flicker from the gas-lamps
+struggled with the ashy twilight.  He met no one: people had gone
+home early on Christmas eve.  He had no home to go to: pah! there
+were plenty of hotels, he remembered, smiling grimly.  It was
+bitter cold: he buttoned up his coat tightly, as he walked slowly
+along as if waiting for some one,--wondering dully if the gray
+air were any colder or stiller than the heart hardly beating
+under the coat.  Well, men had conquered Fate, conquered life and
+love, before now.  It grew darker: he was pacing now slowly in
+the shadow of a long low wall surrounding the grounds of some
+building.  When he came near the gate, he would stop and listen:
+he could have heard a sparrow on the snow, it was so still. 
+After a while he did hear footsteps, crunching the snow heavily;
+the gate clicked as they came out: it was Knowles, and the
+clergyman whom Dr. Cox did not like; Vandyke was his name.
+
+"Don't bolt the gate," said Knowles; "Miss Howth will be out
+presently."
+
+They sat down on a pile of lumber near by, waiting, apparently. 
+Holmes went up and joined them, standing in the shadow of the
+lumber, talking to Vandyke.  He did not meet him, perhaps, once
+in six months; but he believed in the man, thoroughly.
+
+"I've just helped Knowles build a Christmas-tree in yonder,--the
+House of Refuge: you know.  He could not tell an oak from an
+arbor-vitae, I believe."
+
+Knowles was in no mood for quizzing.
+
+"There are other things I don't know," he said, gloomily,
+recurring to some subject Holmes had interrupted.  "The House is
+going to the Devil, Charley, headlong."
+
+"There's no use in saying no," said the other; "you'll call me a
+lying diviner."
+
+Knowles did not listen.
+
+"Seems as if I am to go groping and stumbling through the world
+like some forsaken Cyclops with his eye out, dragging down
+whatever I touch.  If there were anything to hold by, anything
+certain!"
+
+Vandyke looked at him gravely, but did not answer; rose and
+walked indolently up and down to keep himself warm.  A lithe,
+slow figure, a clear face with delicate lips, and careless eyes
+that saw everything: the face of a man quick to learn, and slow
+to teach.
+
+"There she comes!" said Knowles, as the lock of the gate rasped.
+
+Holmes had heard the slow step in the snow long before.  A small
+woman came out, and went down the silent street into the road
+beyond.  Holmes kept his back turned to her, lighting his cigar;
+the other men watched her eagerly.
+
+"What do you think, Vandyke?" demanded Knowles.  "How will she
+do?"
+
+"Do for what?"--resuming his lazy walk.  "You talk as if she were
+a machine.  It is the way with modern reformers.  Men are so many
+ploughs and harrows to work on `the classes.' Do for what?"
+
+Knowles flushed hotly.
+
+"The work the Lord has left for her.  Do you mean to say there is
+none to do,--you, pledged to Missionary labour?"
+
+The young man's face coloured.
+
+"I know this street needs paving terribly, Knowles; but I don't
+see a boulder in your hands.  Yet the great Task-master does not
+despise the pavers.  He did not give you the spirit and
+understanding for paving, eh, is that it?  How do you know He
+gave this Margret Howth the spirit and understanding of a
+reformer?  There may be higher work for her to do."
+
+"Higher!"  The old man stood aghast.  "I know your creed,
+then,--that the true work for a man or a woman is that which
+develops their highest nature?"
+
+Vandyke laughed.
+
+"You have a creed-mania, Knowles.  You have a confession of faith
+ready-made for everybody, but yourself.  I only meant for you to
+take care what you do.  That woman looks as the Prodigal Son
+might have done when he began to be in want, and would fain have
+fed himself with the husks that the swine did eat."
+
+Knowles got up moodily.
+
+"Whose work is it, then?" he muttered, following the men down the
+street; for they walked on.  "The world has waited six thousand
+years for help.  It comes slowly,--slowly, Vandyke; even through
+your religion."
+
+The young man did not answer: looked up, with quiet, rapt eyes,
+through the silent city, and the clear gray beyond.  They passed
+a little church lighted up for evening service: as if to give a
+meaning to the old man's words, they were chanting the one anthem
+of the world, the Gloria in Excelsis.  Hearing the deep
+organ-roll, the men stopped outside to listen: it heaved and
+sobbed through the night, as if bearing up to God the wrong of
+countless aching hearts, then was silent, and a single voice
+swept over the moors in a long, lamentable cry:--"Thou that
+takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us!"
+
+The men stood silent, until the hush was broken by a low
+murmur:--"For Thou only art holy."  Holmes had taken off his hat,
+unconscious that he did it; he put it on slowly, and walked on. 
+What was it that Knowles had said to him once about mean and
+selfish taints on his divine soul?  "For Thou only art holy:" if
+there were truth in that!
+
+"How quiet it is!" he said, as they stopped to leave him.  It
+was,--a breathless quiet; the great streets of the town behind
+them were shrouded in snow; the hills, the moors, the prairie
+swept off into the skyless dark, a gray and motionless sea lit by
+a low watery moon.  "The very earth listens," he said.
+
+"Listens for what?" said the literal old Doctor.
+
+"I think it listens always," said Vandyke, his eye on fire.  "For
+its King--that shall be.  Not as He came before.  It has not long
+to wait now: the New Year is not far off."
+
+"I've no faith in holding your hands, waiting for it; nor have
+you either, Charley," growled Knowles.  "There's an infernal lot
+of work to be done before it comes, I fancy.  Here, let me light
+my cigar."
+
+Holmes bade them good-night, laughing, and struck into the
+by-road through the hills.  He shook hands with Vandyke before he
+went,--a thing he scarce ever did with anybody.  Knowles noticed
+it, and, after he was out of hearing, mumbled out some sarcasm at
+"a minister of the gospel consorting with a cold, silent
+scoundrel like that!"  Vandyke listened to his scolding in his
+usual lazy way, and they went back into town.
+
+The road Holmes took was rutted deep with wagon-wheels, not
+easily travelled; he walked slowly therefore, being weak,
+stopping now and then to gather strength.  He had not counted the
+hours until this day, to be balked now by a little loss of blood. 
+The moon was nearly down before he reached the Cloughton hills:
+he turned there into a narrow path which he remembered well.  Now
+and then he saw the mark of a little shoe in the snow,--looking
+down at it with a hot panting in his veins, and a strange flash
+in his eye, as he walked on steadily.
+
+There was a turn in the path at the top of the hill, a sunken
+wall, with a broad stone from which the wind had blown the snow. 
+This was the place.  He sat down on the stone, resting.  Just
+there she had stood, clutching her little fingers behind her,
+when he came up and threw back her hood to look in her face: how
+pale and worn it was, even then!  He had not looked at her
+to-night: he would not, if he had been dying, with those men
+standing there.  He stood alone in the world with this little
+Margret.  How those men had carped, and criticised her, chattered
+of the duties of her soul!  Why, it was his, it was his own,
+softer and fresher.  There was not a glance with which they
+followed the weak little body in its poor dress that he had not
+seen, and savagely resented.  They measured her strength? counted
+how long the bones and blood would last in their House of Refuge? 
+There was not a morsel of her flesh that was not pure and holy in
+his eyes.  His Margret?  He chafed with an intolerable fever to
+make her his, but for one instant, as she had been once.  Now,
+when it was too late.  For he went back over every word he had
+spoken that night, forcing himself to go through with it,--every
+cold, poisoned word.  It was a fitting penance.  "There is no
+such thing as love in real life:" he had told her that!  How he
+had stood, with all the power of his "divine soul" in his will,
+and told her,--he,--a man,--that he put away her love from him
+then, forever!  He spared himself nothing,--slurred over nothing;
+spurned himself, as it were, for the meanness, in which he had
+wallowed that night.  How firm he had been! how kind! how
+masterful!--pluming himself on his man's strength, while he held
+her in his power as one might hold an insect, played with her
+shrinking woman's nature, and trampled it under his feet, coldly
+and quietly!  She was in his way, and he had put her aside.  How
+the fine subtile spirit had risen up out of its agony of shame,
+and scorned him!  How it had flashed from the puny frame standing
+there in the muddy road despised and jeered at, and calmly judged
+him!  He might go from her as he would, toss her off like a
+worn-out plaything, but he could not blind her: let him put on
+what face he would to the world, whether they called him a master
+among men, or a miser, or, as Knowles did to-night after he
+turned away, a scoundrel, this girl laid her little hand on his
+soul with an utter recognition: she alone.  "She knew him for a
+better man than he knew himself that night:" he remembered the
+words.
+
+The night was growing murky and bitingly cold: there was no
+prospect on the  snow-covered hills, or the rough road at his
+feet with its pools of ice-water, to bring content into his face,
+or the dewy light into his eyes; but they came there, slowly,
+while he sat thinking.  Some old thought was stealing into his
+brain, perhaps, fresh and warm, like a soft spring air,--some
+hope of the future, in which this child-woman came close to him,
+and near.  It was an idle dream, only would taunt him when it was
+over, but he opened his arms to it: it was an old friend; it had
+made him once a purer and better man than he could ever be again. 
+A warm, happy dream, whatever it may have been: the rugged,
+sinister face grew calm and sad, as the faces of the dead change
+when loving tears fall on them.
+
+He sighed wearily: the homely little hope was fanning into life
+stagnant depths of desire and purpose, stirring his resolute
+ambition.  Too late?  Was it too late?  Living or dead she was
+his, though he should never see her face, by some subtile power
+that had made them one, he knew not when nor how.  He did not
+reason now,--abandoned himself, as morbid men only do, to this
+delirious hope of a home, and cheerful warmth, and this woman's
+love fresh and eternal: a pleasant dream at first, to be put away
+at pleasure.  But it grew bolder, touched under-deeps in his
+nature of longing and intense passion; all that he knew or felt
+of power or will, of craving effort, of success in the world,
+drifted into this dream, and became one with it.  He stood up,
+his vigorous frame starting into a nobler manhood, with the
+consciousness of right,--with a willed assurance, that, the first
+victory gained, the others should follow.
+
+It was late; he must go on; he had not meant to sit idling by the
+road-side.  He went through the fields, his heavy step crushing
+the snow, a dry heat in his blood, his eye intent, still, until
+he came within sight of the farm-house; then he went on, cool and
+grave, in his ordinary port.
+
+The house was quite dark; only a light in one of the lower
+windows,--the library, he thought.  The broad field he was
+crossing sloped down to the house, so that, as he came nearer, he
+saw the little room quite plainly in the red glow of the fire
+within, the curtains being undrawn.  He had a keen eye; did not
+fail to see the marks of poverty about the place, the gateless
+fences, even the bare room with its worn and patched carpet:
+noted it all with a triumphant gleam of satisfaction.  There was
+a black shadow passing and repassing the windows: he waited a
+moment looking at it, then came more slowly towards them,
+intenser heats smouldering in his face.  He would not surprise
+her; she should be as ready as he was for the meeting.  If she
+ever put her pure hand in his again, it should be freely done,
+and of her own good-will.
+
+She saw him as he came up on the porch, and stopped, looking out,
+as if bewildered,--then resumed her walk, mechanically.  What it
+cost her to see him again he could not tell: her face did not
+alter.  It was lifeless and schooled, the eyes looking straight
+forward always, indifferently.  Was this his work?  If he had
+killed her outright, it would have been better than this.
+
+The windows were low: it had been his old habit to go in through
+them, and he now went up to one unconsciously.  As he opened it,
+he saw her turn away for an instant; then she waited for him,
+entirely tranquil, the clear fire shedding a still glow over the
+room, no cry or shiver of pain to show how his coming broke open
+the old wound.  She smiled even, when he leaned against the
+window, with a careless welcome.
+
+Holmes stopped, confounded.  It did not suit him,--this.  If you
+know a man's nature, you comprehend why.  The bitterest reproach,
+or a proud contempt would have been less galling than this gentle
+indifference.  His hold had slipped from off the woman, he
+believed.  A moment before he had remembered how he had held her
+in his arms, touched her cold lips, and then flung her off,--he
+had remembered it, every nerve shrinking with remorse and
+unutterable tenderness: now----!  The utter quiet of her face
+told more than words could do.  She did not love him; he was
+nothing to her.  Then love was a lie.  A moment before he could
+have humbled himself in her eyes as low as he lay in his own, and
+accepted her pardon as a necessity of her enduring, faithful
+nature: now, the whole strength of the man sprang into rage, and
+mad desire of conquest.
+
+He came gravely across the room, holding out his hand with his
+old quiet control.  She might be cold and grave as he, but
+underneath he knew there was a thwarted, hungry spirit,--a
+strong, fine spirit as dainty Ariel.  He would sting it to life,
+and tame it: it was his.
+
+"I thought you would come, Stephen," she said, simply, motioning
+him to a chair.
+
+Could this automaton be Margret?  He leaned on the mantel-shelf,
+looking down with a cynical sneer.
+
+"Is that the welcome?  Why, there are a thousand greetings for
+this time of love and good words you might have chosen.  Besides,
+I have come back ill and poor,--a beggar perhaps.  How do women
+receive such,--generous women?  Is there no etiquette? no
+hand-shaking? nothing more? remembering that I was once--not
+indifferent to you."
+
+He laughed.  She stood still and grave as before.
+
+"Why, Margret, I have been down near death since that night."
+
+He thought her lips grew gray, but she looked up clear and
+steady.
+
+"I am glad you did not die.  Yes, I can say that.  As for
+hand-shaking, my ideas may be peculiar as your own."
+
+"She measures her words," he said, as to himself; "her very
+eye-light is ruled by decorum; she is a machine, for work.  She
+has swept her child's heart clean of anger and revenge, even
+scorn for the wretch that sold himself for money.  There was
+nothing else to sweep out, was there?"--bitterly,--"no
+friendships, such as weak women nurse and coddle into being,--or
+love, that they live in, and die for sometimes, in a silly way?"
+
+"Unmanly!"
+
+"No, not unmanly.  Margret, let us be serious and calm.  It is no
+time to trifle or wear masks.  That has passed between us which
+leaves no room for sham courtesies."
+
+"There needs none,"--meeting his eye unflinchingly.  "I am ready
+to meet you and hear your good-bye.  Dr. Knowles told me your
+marriage was near at hand.  I knew you would come, Stephen.  You
+did before."
+
+He winced,--the more that her voice was so clear of pain.
+
+"Why should I come?  To show you what sort of a heart I have sold
+for money?  Why, you think you know, little Margret.  You can
+reckon up its deformity, its worthlessness, on your cool fingers. 
+You could tell the serene and gracious lady who is chaffering for
+it what a bargain she has made,--that there is not in it one
+spark of manly honour or true love.  Don't venture too near it in
+your coldness and prudence.  It has tiger passions I will not
+answer for.  Give me your hand, and feel how it pants like a
+hungry fiend.  It will have food, Margret."
+
+She drew away the hand he grasped, and stood back in the shadow.
+
+"What is it to me?"--in the same measured voice.
+
+Holmes wiped the cold drops from his forehead, a sort of shudder
+in his powerful frame.  He stood a moment looking into the fire,
+his head dropped on his arm.
+
+"Let it be so," he said at last, quietly.  "The worn old heart
+can gnaw on itself a little longer.  I have no mind to whimper
+over pain."
+
+Something that she saw on the dark sardonic face, as the red
+gleams lighted it, made her start convulsively, as if she would
+go to him; then controlling herself, she stood silent.  He had
+not seen the movement,--or, if he saw, did not heed it.  He did
+not care to tame her now.  The firelight flashed and darkened,
+the crackling wood breaking the dead silence of the room.
+
+"It does not matter," he said, raising his head, laying his arm
+over his strong chest unconsciously, as if to shut in all
+complaint.  "I had an idle fancy that it would be good on this
+Christmas night to bare the secrets hidden in here to you,--to
+suffer your pure eyes to probe the sorest depths: I thought
+perhaps they would have a blessing power.  It was an idle fancy. 
+What is my want or crime to you?"
+
+The answer came slowly, but it did come.
+
+"Nothing to me."
+
+She tried to meet the gaunt face looking down on her with its
+proud sadness,--did meet it at last with her meek eyes.
+
+"No, nothing to you.  There is no need that I should stay longer,
+is there?  You made ready to meet me, and have gone through your
+part well."
+
+"It is no part.  I speak God's truth to you as I can."
+
+"I know.  There is nothing more for us to say to each other in
+this world, then, except good-night.  Words--polite words--are
+bitterer than death, sometimes.  If ever we happen to meet, that
+courteous smile on your face will be enough to speak--God's truth
+for you.  Shall we say good-night now?"
+
+"If you will."
+
+She drew farther into the shadow, leaning on a chair.
+
+He stopped, some sudden thought striking him.
+
+"I have a whim," he said, dreamily, "that I would like to
+satisfy.  It would be a trifle to you: will you grant it?--for
+the sake of some old happy day, long ago?"
+
+She put her hand up to her throat; then it fell again.
+
+"Anything you wish, Stephen," she said, gravely.
+
+"Yes.  Come nearer, then, and let me see what I have lost.  A
+heart so cold and strong as yours need not fear inspection.  I
+have a fancy to look into it, for the last time."
+
+She stood motionless and silent.
+
+"Come,"--softly,--"there is no hurt in your heart that fears
+detection?"
+
+She came out into the full light, and stood before him, pushing
+back the hair from her forehead, that he might see every wrinkle,
+and the faded, lifeless eyes.  It was a true woman's motion,
+remembering even then to scorn deception.  The light glowed
+brightly in her face, as the slow minutes ebbed without a sound:
+she only saw his face in shadow, with the fitful gleam of
+intolerable meaning in his eyes.  Her own quailed and fell.
+
+"Does it hurt you that I should even look at you?" he said,
+drawing back.  "Why, even the sainted dead suffer us to come near
+them after they have died to us,--to touch their hands, to kiss
+their lips, to find what look they left in their faces for us. 
+Be patient, for the sake of the old time.  My whim is not
+satisfied yet."
+
+"I am patient."
+
+"Tell me something of yourself, to take with me when I go, for
+the last time.  Shall I think of you as happy in these days?"
+
+"I am contented,"--the words oozing from her white lips in the
+bitterness of truth.  "I asked God, that night, to show me my
+work; and I think He has shown it to me.  I do not complain.  It
+is a great work."
+
+"Is that all?" he demanded, fiercely.
+
+"No, not all.  It pleases me to feel I have a warm home, and to
+help keep it cheerful.  When my father kisses me at night, or my
+mother says, `God bless you, child,' I know that is enough, that
+I ought to be happy."
+
+The old clock in the corner hummed and ticked through the deep
+silence, like the humble voice of the home she toiled to keep
+warm, thanking her, comforting her.
+
+"Once more," as the light grew stronger on her face,--"will you
+look down into your heart that you have given to this great work,
+and tell me what you see there?  Dare you do it, Margret?"
+
+"I dare do it,"--but her whisper was husky.
+
+"Go on."
+
+He watched her more as a judge would a criminal, as she sat
+before him: she struggled weakly under the power of his eye, not
+meeting it.  He waited relentless, seeing her face slowly whiten,
+her limbs shiver, her bosom heave.
+
+"Let me speak for you," he said at last.  "I know who once filled
+your heart to the exclusion of all others: it is no time for mock
+shame.  I know it was my hand that held the very secret of your
+being.  Whatever I may have been, you loved me, Margret.  Will
+you say that now?"
+
+"I loved you,--once."
+
+Whether it were truth that nerved her, or self-delusion, she was
+strong now to utter it all.
+
+"You love me no longer, then?"
+
+"I love you no longer."
+
+She did not look at him; she was conscious only of the hot fire
+wearing her eyes, and the vexing click of the clock.  After a
+while he bent over her silently,--a manly, tender presence.
+
+"When love goes once," he said, "it never returns.  Did you say
+it was gone, Margret?"
+
+One effort more, and Duty would be satisfied.
+
+"It is gone."
+
+In the slow darkness that came to her she covered her face,
+knowing and hearing nothing.  When she looked up, Holmes was
+standing by the window, with his face toward the gray fields.  It
+was a long time before he turned and came to her.
+
+"You have spoken honestly: it is an old fashion of yours.  You
+believed what you said.  Let me also tell you what you call God's
+truth, for a moment, Margret.  It will not do you harm."--He
+spoke gravely, solemnly.--"When you loved me long ago, selfish,
+erring as I was, you fulfilled the law of your nature; when you
+put that love out of your heart, you make your duty a tawdry
+sham, and your life a lie.  Listen to me.  I am calm."
+
+It was calmness that made her tremble as she had not done before,
+with a strange suspicion of the truth flashing on her.  That she,
+casing herself in her pride, her conscious righteousness, hugging
+her new-found philanthropy close, had sunk to a depth of
+niggardly selfishness, of which this man knew nothing.  Nobler
+than she; half angry as she felt that, sitting at his feet,
+looking up.  He knew it, too; the grave judging voice told it; he
+had taken his rightful place.  Just, as only a man can be, in his
+judgment of himself and her: her love that she had prided herself
+with, seemed weak and drifting, brought into contact with this
+cool integrity of meaning.  I think she was glad to be humbled
+before him.  Women have strange fancies, sometimes.
+
+"You have deceived yourself," he said: "when you try to fill your
+heart with this work, you serve neither your God nor your
+fellow-man.  You tell me," stooping close to her, "that I am
+nothing to you: you believe it, poor child! There is not a line
+on your face that does not prove it false.  I have keen eyes,
+Margret!"-- He laughed.--"You have wrung this love out of your
+heart?  If it were easy to do, did it need to wring with it every
+sparkle of pleasure and grace out of your life!  Your very hair
+is gathered out of your sight: you feared to remember how my hand
+had touched it?  Your dress is stingy and hard; your step, your
+eyes, your mouth under rule.  So hard it was to force yourself
+into an old worn-out woman!  Oh, Margret!  Margret!"
+
+She moaned under her breath.
+
+"I notice trifles, child!  Yonder, in that corner, used to stand
+the desk where I helped you with your Latin.  How you hated it! 
+Do you remember?"
+
+"I remember."
+
+"It always stood there: it is gone now.  Outside of the gate
+there was that elm I planted, and you promised to water while I
+was gone.  It is cut down now by the roots."
+
+"I had it done, Stephen."
+
+"I know.  Do you know why?  Because you love me: because you do
+not dare to think of me, you dare not trust yourself to look at
+the tree that I had planted."
+
+She started up with a cry, and stood there in the old way, her
+fingers catching at each other.
+
+"It is cruel,--let me go!"
+
+"It is not cruel."--He came up closer to her.--"You think you do
+not love me, and see what I have made you!  Look at the torpor of
+this face,--the dead, frozen eyes!  It is a `nightmare death in
+life.'  Good God, to think that I have done this!  To think of
+the countless days of agony, the nights, the years of solitude
+that have brought her to this,--little Margret!"
+
+He paced the floor, slowly.  She sat down on a low stool, leaning
+her head on her hands.  The little figure, the bent head, the
+quivering chin brought up her childhood to him.  She used to sit
+so when he had tormented her, waiting to be coaxed back to love
+and smiles again.  The hard man's eyes filled with tears, as he
+thought of it.  He watched the deep, tearless sobs that shook her
+breast: he had wounded her to death,--his bonny Margret!  She was
+like a dead thing now: what need to torture her longer?  Let him
+be manly and go out to his solitary life, taking the remembrance
+of what he had done with him for company.  He rose
+uncertainly,--then came to her: was that the way to leave her?
+
+"I am going, Margret," he whispered, "but let me tell you a story
+before I go,--a Christmas story, say.  It will not touch you,--it
+is too late to hope for that,--but it is right that you should
+hear it."
+
+She looked up wearily.
+
+"As you will, Stephen."
+
+Whatever impulse drove the man to speak words that he knew were
+useless, made him stand back from her, as though she were
+something he was unfit to touch: the words dragged from him
+slowly.
+
+"I had a curious dream to-night, Margret,--a waking dream: only a
+clear vision of what had been once.  Do you remember--the old
+time?"
+
+What disconnected rambling was this?  Yet the girl understood it,
+looked into the low fire with sad, listening eyes.
+
+"Long ago.  That was a free, strong life that opened before us
+then, little one,--before you and me?  Do you remember the
+Christmas before I went away?  I had a strong arm and a hungry
+brain to go out into the world with, then.  Something better,
+too, I had.  A purer self than was born with me came late in
+life, and nestled in my heart.  Margret, there was no fresh
+loving thought in my brain for God or man that did not grow from
+my love of you; there was nothing noble or kindly in my nature
+that did not flow into that love, and deepen there.  I was your
+master, too.  I held my own soul by no diviner right than I held
+your love and owed you mine.  I understand it, now, when it is
+too late."--He wiped the cold drops from his face.--"Now do you
+know whether it is remorse I feel, when I think how I put this
+purer self away,--how I went out triumphant in my inhuman, greedy
+brain,--how I resolved to know, to be, to trample under foot all
+weak love or homely pleasures? I have been punished.  Let those
+years go.  I think, sometimes, I came near to the nature of the
+damned who dare not love: I would not.  It was then I hurt you,
+Margret,--to the death: your true life lay in me, as mine in
+you."
+
+He had gone on drearily, as though holding colloquy with himself,
+as though great years of meaning surged up and filled the broken
+words.  It may have been thus with the girl, for her face
+deepened as she listened.  For the first time for many long days
+tears welled up into her eyes, and rolled between her fingers
+unheeded.
+
+"I came through the streets to-night baffled in life,--a mean man
+that might have been noble,--all the years wasted that had gone
+before,--disappointed,--with nothing to hope for but time to work
+humbly and atone for the wrongs I had done.  When I lay yonder,
+my soul on the coast of eternity, I resolved to atone for every
+selfish deed.  I had no thought of happiness; God knows I had no
+hope of it.  I had wronged you most: I could not die with that
+wrong unforgiven."
+
+"Unforgiven, Stephen?" she sobbed; "I forgave it long ago."
+
+He looked at her a moment, then by some effort choked down the
+word he would have spoken, and went on with his bitter
+confession.
+
+"I came through the crowded town, a homeless, solitary man, on
+the Christmas eve when love comes to every man.  If ever I had
+grown sick for a word or touch from the one soul to whom alone
+mine was open, I thirsted for it then.  The better part of my
+nature was crushed out, and flung away with you, Margret.  I
+cried for it,--I wanted help to be a better, purer man.  I need
+it now.  And so," he said, with a smile that hurt her more than
+tears, "I came to my good angel, to tell her I had sinned and
+repented, that I had made humble plans for the future, and ask
+her---- God knows what I would have asked her then!  She had
+forgotten me,--she had another work to do!"
+
+She wrung her hands with a helpless cry.  Holmes went to the
+window: the dull waste of snow looked to him as hopeless and
+vague as his own life.
+
+"I have deserved it," he muttered to himself. "It is too late to
+amend."
+
+Some light touch thrilled his arm.
+
+"Is it too late, Stephen?" whispered a childish voice.
+
+The strong man trembled, looking at the little dark figure
+standing near him.
+
+"We were both wrong: I have been untrue, selfish.  More than you. 
+Stephen, help me to be a better girl; let us be friends again."
+
+She went back unconsciously to the old words of their quarrels
+long ago.  He drew back.
+
+"Do not mock me," he gasped.  "I suffer, Margret.  Do not mock me
+with more courtesy."
+
+"I do not; let us be friends again."
+
+She was crying like a penitent child; her face was turned away;
+love, pure and deep, was in her eyes.
+
+The red fire-light grew stronger; the clock hushed its noisy
+ticking to hear the story.  Holmes's pale lip worked: what was
+this coming to him?  His breast heaved, a dry heat panted in his
+veins, his deep eyes flashed fire.
+
+"If my little friend comes to me," he said, in a smothered voice,
+"there is but one place for her,--her soul with my soul, her
+heart on my heart."--He opened his arms.--"She must rest her head
+here.  My little friend must be--my wife."
+
+She looked into the strong, haggard face,-- a smile crept out on
+her own, arch and debonair like that of old time.
+
+"I am tired, Stephen," she whispered, and softly laid her head
+down on his breast.
+
+The red fire-light flashed into a glory of crimson through the
+room, about the two figures standing motionless there,--shimmered
+down into awe-struck shadow: who heeded it?  The old clock ticked
+away furiously, as if rejoicing that weary days were over for the
+pet and darling of the house: nothing else broke the silence. 
+Without, the deep night paused, gray, impenetrable.  Did it hope
+that far angel-voices would break its breathless hush, as once on
+the fields of Judea, to usher in Christmas morn?  A hush, in air,
+and earth, and sky, of waiting hope, of a promised joy.  Down
+there in the farm-window two human hearts had given the joy a
+name; the hope throbbed into being; the hearts touching each
+other beat in a slow, full chord of love as pure in God's eyes as
+the song the angels sang, and as sure a promise of the Christ
+that is to come.  Forever,--not even death would part them; he
+knew that, holding her closer, looking down into her face.
+
+What a pale little face it was!  Through the intensest heat of
+his passion the sting touched him.  Some instinct made her glance
+up at him, with a keen insight, seeing the morbid gloom that was
+the man's sin, in his face.  She lifted her head from his breast,
+and when he stooped to touch her lips, shook herself free,
+laughing carelessly.  Alas, Stephen Holmes! you will have little
+time for morbid questionings in those years to come: her cheerful
+work has begun: no more self-devouring reveries: your very pauses
+of silent content and love will be rare and well-earned.  No more
+tranced raptures for to-night,--let to-morrow bring what it
+would.
+
+"You do not seem to find your purer self altogether perfect?" she
+demanded.  "I think the pale skin hurts your artistic eye, or the
+frozen eyes,--which is it?"
+
+"They have thawed into brilliant fire,-- something looks at me
+half-yielding and half-defiant,--you know that, you vain child!
+But, Margret, nothing can atone"----
+
+He stopped.
+
+"Yes, stop.  That is right, Stephen.  Remorse grows maudlin when
+it goes into words," laughing again at his astounded look.
+
+He took her hand,--a dewy, healthy hand,-- the very touch of it
+meant action and life.
+
+"What if I say, then," he said, earnestly, "that I do not find my
+angel perfect, be the fault mine or hers?  The child Margret,
+with her sudden tears, and laughter, and angry heats, is gone,--I
+killed her, I think,--gone long ago.  I will not take in place of
+her this worn, pale ghost, who wears clothes as chilly as if she
+came from the dead, and stands alone, as ghosts do."
+
+She stood a little way off, her great brown eyes flashing with
+tears.  It was so strange a joy to find herself cared for, when
+she had believed she was old and hard: the very idle jesting made
+her youth and happiness real to her.  Holmes saw that with his
+quick tact.  He flung playfully a crimson shawl that lay there
+about her white neck.
+
+"My wife must suffer her life to flush out in gleams of colour
+and light: her cheeks must hint at a glow within, as yours do
+now.  I will have no hard angles, no pallor, no uncertain memory
+of pain in her life: it shall be perpetual summer."
+
+He loosened her hair, and it rolled down about the bright,
+tearful face, shining in the red fire-light like a mist of tawny
+gold.
+
+"I need warmth and freshness and light: my wife shall bring them
+to me.  She shall be no strong-willed reformer, standing alone: a
+sovereign lady with kind words for the world, who gives her hand
+only to that man whom she trusts, and keeps her heart and its
+secrets for me alone."
+
+She paid no heed to him other than by a deepening colour; the
+clock, however, grew tired of the long soliloquy, and broke in
+with an asthmatic warning as to the time of night.
+
+"There is midnight," she said.  "You shall go, now, Stephen
+Holmes,--quick! before your sovereign lady fades, like
+Cinderella, into grayness and frozen eyes!"
+
+When he was gone, she knelt down by her window, remembering that
+night long ago,-- free to sob and weep out her joy,--very sure
+that her Master had not forgotten to hear even a woman's prayer,
+and to give her her true work,--very sure,--never to doubt again. 
+There was a dark, sturdy figure pacing up and down the road, that
+she did not see.  It was there when the night was over, and
+morning began to dawn.  Christmas morning! he remembered,--it was
+something to him now!  Never again a homeless, solitary man!  You
+would think the man weak, if I were to tell yon how this word
+"home" had taken possession of him,--how he had planned out work
+through the long night: success to come, but with his wife
+nearest his heart, and the homely farm-house, and the old
+school-master in the centre of the picture.  Such an humble
+castle in the air! Christmas morning was surely something to him. 
+Yet, as the night passed, he went back to the years that had been
+wasted, with an unavailing bitterness.  He would not turn from
+the truth, that, with his strength of body and brain to command
+happiness and growth, his life had been a failure.  I think it
+was first on that night that the story of the despised Nazarene
+came to him with a new meaning,--One who came to gather up these
+broken fragments of lives and save them with His own.  But
+vaguely, though: Christmas-day as yet was to him the day when
+love came into the world.  He knew the meaning of that.  So he
+watched with an eagerness new to him the day-breaking.  He could
+see Margret's window, and a dim light in it: she would be awake,
+praying for him, no doubt.  He pondered on that.  Would you think
+Holmes weak, if he forsook the faith of Fichte, sometime, led by
+a woman's hand?  Think of the apostle of the positive
+philosophers, and say no more.  He could see a flickering light
+at dawn crossing the hall: he remembered the old school-master's
+habit well,--calling "Happy Christmas" at every door: he meant to
+go down there for breakfast, as he used to do, imagining how the
+old man would wring his hands, with a "Holloa! you're welcome
+home, Stephen, boy!" and Mrs. Howth would bring out the jars of
+pine-apple preserve which her sister sent her every year from the
+West Indies.  And then---- Never mind what then.  Stephen Holmes
+was very much in love, and this Christmas-day had much to bring
+him.  Yet it was with a solemn shadow on his face that he watched
+the dawn, showing that he grasped the awful meaning of this day
+that "brought love into the world."  Through the clear, frosty
+night he could hear a low chime of distant bells shiver the air,
+hurrying faint and far to tell the glad tidings.  He fancied that
+the dawn flushed warm to hear the story,--that the very earth
+should rejoice in its frozen depths, if it were true.  If it were
+true!--if this passion in his heart were but a part of an
+all-embracing power, in whose clear depths the world struggled
+vainly!-- if it were true that this Christ did come to make that
+love clear to us!  There would be some meaning then in the old
+school-master's joy, in the bells wakening the city yonder, in
+even poor Lois's thorough content in this day,--for it would be,
+he knew, a thrice happy day to her.  A strange story that of the
+Child coming into the world,--simple!  He thought of it,
+watching, through his cold, gray eyes, how all the fresh morning
+told it,--it was in the very air; thinking how its echo stole
+through the whole world,--how innumerable children's voices told
+it in eager laughter,--how even the lowest slave half-smiled, on
+waking, to think it was Christmas-day, the day that Christ was
+born.  He could hear from the church on the hill that they were
+singing again the old song of the angels.  Did this matter to
+him?  Did not he care, with the new throb in his heart, who was
+born this day?  There is no smile on his face as he listens to
+the words, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,
+good-will toward men;" it bends lower,--lower only.  But in his
+soul-lit eyes there are warm tears, and on his worn face a sad
+and solemn joy.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+I AM going to end my story now.  There are phases more vivid in
+the commonplace lives of these men and women, I do not doubt:
+love, as poignant as pain in its joy; crime, weak and foul and
+foolish, like all crime; silent self- sacrifices: but I leave
+them for you to paint; you will find colours enough in your own
+house and heart.
+
+As for Christmas-day, neither you nor I need try to do justice to
+that theme: how the old school-master went about, bustling, his
+thin face quite hot with enthusiasm, and muttering, "God bless my
+soul!"--hardly recovered from the sudden delight of finding his
+old pupil waiting for him when he went down in the morning; how
+he insisted on being led by him, and nobody else, all day, and
+before half an hour had confided, under solemn pledges of
+secrecy, the great project of the book about Bertrand de Born;
+how even easy Mrs. Howth found her hospitable Virginian blood in
+a glow at the unexpected breakfast-guest,--settling into more
+confident pleasure as dinner came on, for which success was
+surer; how cold it was, outside; how Joel piled on great fires,
+and went off on some mysterious errand, having "other chores to
+do than idling and duddering;" how the day rose into a climax of
+perfection at dinner-time, to Mrs. Howth's mind,--the turkey
+being done to a delicious brown, the plum-pudding quivering like
+luscious jelly (a Christian dinner to-day, if we starve the rest
+of the year!).  Even Dr. Knowles, who brought a great bouquet out
+for the school-master, was in an unwonted good-humour; and Mr.
+Holmes, of whom she stood a little in dread, enjoyed it all with
+such zest, and was so attentive to them all, but Margret.  They
+hardly spoke to each other all day; it quite fretted the old
+lady; indeed, she gave the girl a good scolding about it out in
+the pantry, until she was ready to cry.  She had looked that way
+all day, however.
+
+Knowles was hurt deep enough when he saw Holmes, and suspected
+the worst, under all his good-humour.  It was a bitter
+disappointment to give up the girl; for, beside the great work,
+he loved her in an uncouth fashion, and hated Holmes.  He met her
+alone in the morning; but when he saw how pale she grew,
+expecting his outbreak, and how she glanced timidly in at the
+room where Stephen was, he relented.  Something in the wet brown
+eye perhaps recalled a forgotten dream of his boyhood; for he
+sighed sharply, and did not swear as he meant to.  All he said
+was, that "women will be women, and that she had a worse job on
+her hands than the House of Refuge,"--which she put down to the
+account of his ill-temper, and only laughed, and made him shake
+hands.
+
+Lois and her father came out in the old cart in high state across
+the bleak, snowy hills, quite aglow with all they had seen at the
+farm-houses on the road.  Margret had arranged a settle for the
+sick girl by the kitchen-fire, but they all came out to speak to
+her.
+
+As for the dinner, it was the essence of all Christmas dinners:
+Dickens himself, the priest of the genial day, would have been
+contented.  The old school-master and his wife had hearts big and
+warm enough to do the perpetual honours of a baronial castle; so
+you may know how the little room and the faces about the homely
+table glowed and brightened.  Even Knowles began to think that
+Holmes might not be so bad, after all, recalling the chicken in
+the mill, and,--"Well, it was better to think well of all men,
+poor devils!"
+
+I am sorry to say there was a short thunderstorm in the very
+midst of the dinner.  Knowles and Mr. Howth, in their anxiety to
+keep off from ancient subjects of dispute, came, for a wonder, on
+modern politics, and of course there was a terrible collision,
+which made Mrs. Howth quite breathless: it was over in a minute,
+however, and it was hard to tell which was the most repentant. 
+Knowles, as you know, was a disciple of Garrison, and the old
+school-master was a States'-rights man, as you might suppose from
+his antecedents,--suspected, indeed, of being a contributor to
+"DeBow's Review."  I may as well come out with the whole truth,
+and acknowledge that at the present writing the old gentleman is
+the very hottest Secessionist I know.  If it hurts the type,
+write it down a vice of blood, O printers of New England!
+
+The dinner, perhaps, was fresher and heartier after that.  Then
+Knowles went back to town; and in the middle of the afternoon, as
+it grew dusk, Lois started, knowing how many would come into her
+little shanty in the evening to wish her Happy Christmas,
+although it was over.  They piled up comforts and blankets in the
+cart, and she lay on them quite snugly, her scarred child's-face
+looking out from a great woollen hood Mrs. Howth gave her.  Old
+Yare held Barney, with his hat in his hand, looking as if he
+deserved hanging, but very proud of the kindness they all showed
+his girl.  Holmes gave him some money for a Christmas gift, and
+he took it, eagerly enough.  For some unexpressed reason, they
+stood a long time in the snow bidding Lois good-bye; and for the
+same reason, it may be, she was loath to go, looking at each one
+earnestly as she laughed and grew red and pale answering them,
+kissing Mrs. Howth's hand when she gave it to her.  When the cart
+did drive away, she watched them standing there until she was out
+of sight, and waved her scrap of a handkerchief; and when the
+road turned down the hill, lay down and softly cried to herself.
+
+Now that they were alone they gathered close about the fire,
+while the day without grew gray and colder,--Margret in her old
+place by her father's knee.  Some dim instinct had troubled the
+old man all day; it did now: whenever Margret spoke, he listened
+eagerly, and forgot to answer sometimes, he was so lost in
+thought.  At last he put his hand on her head, and whispered,
+"What ails my little girl?"  And then his little girl sobbed and
+cried, as she had been ready to do all day, and kissed his
+trembling hand, and went and hid on her mother's neck, and left
+Stephen to say everything for her.  And I think you and I had
+better come away.
+
+It was quite dark before they had done talking,--quite dark; the
+wood-fire had charred down into a great bed of crimson; the tea
+stood till it grew cold, and no one drank it.
+
+The old man got up at last, and Holmes led him to the library,
+where he smoked every evening.  He held Maggie, as he called her,
+in his arms a long time, and wrung Holmes's hand.  "God bless
+you, Stephen!" he said,-- "this is a very happy Christmas-day to
+me."  And yet, sitting alone, the tears ran over his wrinkled
+face as he smoked; and when his pipe went out, he did not know
+it, but sat motionless.  Mrs. Howth, fairly confounded by the
+shock, went up-stairs, and stayed there a long time.  When she
+came down, the old lady's blue eyes were tenderer, if that were
+possible, and her face very pale.  She went into the library and
+asked her husband if she didn't prophesy this two years ago, and
+he said she did, and after a while asked her if she remembered
+the barbecue-night at Judge Clapp's thirty years ago.  She
+blushed at that, and then went up and kissed him.  She had heard
+Joel's horse clattering up to the kitchen-door, so concluded she
+would go out and scold him.  Under the circumstances it would be
+a relief.
+
+If Mrs. Howth's nerves had been weak, she might have supposed
+that free-born serving- man seized with sudden insanity, from the
+sight that met her, going into the kitchen.  His dinner, set on
+the dresser, was flung contemptuously on the ashes; a horrible
+cloud of burning grease rushed from a dirty pint-pot on the
+table, and before this Joel was capering and snorting like some
+red-headed Hottentot before his fetich, occasionally sticking his
+fingers into the nauseous stuff, and snuffing it up as if it were
+roses.  He was a church-member: he could NOT be drunk?  At the
+sight of her, he tried to regain the austere dignity usual to him
+when women were concerned, but lapsed into an occasional giggle,
+which spoiled the effect.
+
+"Where have you been," she inquired, severely, "scouring the
+country like a heathen on this blessed day?  And what is that you
+have burning?  You're disgracing the house, and strangers in it."
+
+Joel's good-humour was proof against even this.
+
+"I've scoured to some purpose, then.  Dun't tell the mester:
+it'll muddle his brains t'-night.  Wait till mornin'.  Squire
+More'll be down his-self t' 'xplain."
+
+He rubbed the greasy fingers into his hair, while Mrs.  Howth's
+eyes were fixed in dumb perplexity.
+
+"Ye see,"--slowly, determined to make it clear to her now and
+forever,--"it's water: no, t' a'n't water: it's troubled me an'
+Mester Howth some time in Poke Run, atop o' 't.  I hed my
+suspicions,--so'd he; lay low, though, frum all women-folks.  So
+'s I tuk a bottle down, unbeknown, to Squire More, an' it's
+oil!"--jumping like a wild Indian,--"thank the Lord fur his
+marcies, it's oil!"
+
+"Well, Joel," she said, calmly, "very disagreeably smelling oil
+it is, I must say."
+
+"Good save the woman!" he broke out, sotto voce, "she's a born
+natural!  Did ye never hear of a shaft? or millions o' gallons a
+day? It's better nor a California ranch, I tell ye.  Mebbe,"
+charitably, "ye didn't know Poke Run's the mester's?"
+
+"I certainly do.  But I do not see what this green ditch-water is
+to me.  And I think, Joel,"----
+
+"It's more to ye nor all yer States'-rights as I'm sick o'
+hearin' of.  It's carpets, an' bunnets, an' slithers of
+railroad-stock, an' some colour on Margot's cheeks,--ye 'ed best
+think o' that!  That's what it is to ye!  I'm goin' to take stock
+myself.  I'm glad that gell 'll git rest frum her mills an' her
+Houses o' Deviltry,--she's got gumption fur a dozen women."
+
+He went on muttering, as he gathered up his pint-pot and
+bottle,--
+
+"I'm goin' to send my Tim to college soon's the thing's in
+runnin' order.  Lord! what a lawyer that boy'll make!"
+
+Mrs. Howth's brain was still muddled.
+
+
+"You are better pleased than you were at Lincoln's election," she
+observed, placidly.
+
+"Lincoln be darned!" he broke out, forgetting the teachings of
+Mr. Clinche.  "Now, Mem, dun't ye muddle the mester's brain
+t'-night wi' 't, I say.  I'm goin' t' 'xperiment myself a bit."
+
+Which he did, accordingly,--shutting himself up in the
+smoke-house and burning the compound in divers sconces and
+Wide-Awake torches, giving up the entire night to his diabolical
+orgies.
+
+Mrs. Howth did not tell the master; for one reason: it took a
+long time for so stupendous an idea to penetrate the good lady's
+brain; and for another: her motherly heart was touched by another
+story than this Aladdin's lamp of Joel's wherein burned
+petroleum.  She watched from her window until she saw Holmes
+crossing the icy road: there was a little bitterness, I confess,
+in the thought that he had taken her child from her; but the
+prayer that rose for them both took her whole woman's heart with
+it.
+
+The road was rough over the hills; the wind that struck Holmes's
+face bitingly keen: perhaps the life coming for him would be as
+cold a struggle, having not only poverty to conquer, but himself. 
+But he is a strong man,--no stronger puts his foot down with
+cool, resolute tread; and to-night there is a thrill on his lips
+that never rested there before,--a kiss, dewy and warm. 
+Something, some new belief, too, stirs in his heart, like a
+subtile atom of pure fire, that he hugs closely,--his for all
+time.  No poverty or death shall ever drive it away.  Perhaps he
+entertains an angel unaware.
+
+After that night Lois never left her little shanty.  The days
+that followed were like one long Christmas; for her poor
+neighbors, black and white, had some plot among themselves, and
+worked zealously to make them seem so to her.  It was easy to
+make these last days happy for the simple little soul who had
+always gathered up every fragment of pleasure in her featureless
+life, and made much of it, and rejoiced over it.  She grew
+bewildered, sometimes, lying on her wooden settle by the fire;
+people lead always been friendly, taken care of her, but now they
+were eager in their kindness, as though the time were short.  She
+did not understand the reason, at first; she did not want to die:
+yet if it hurt her, when it grew clear at last, no one knew it;
+it was not her way to speak of pain.  Only, as she grew weaker,
+day by day, she began to set her house in order, as one might
+say, in a quaint, almost comical fashion, giving away everything
+she owned, down to her treasures of colored bottles and
+needle-books, mending her father's clothes, and laying them out
+in her drawers; lastly, she had Barney brought in from the
+country, and every day would creep to the window to see him fed
+and chirrup to him, whereat the poor old beast would look up with
+his dim eye, and try to neigh a feeble answer.  Kitts used to
+come every day to see her, though he never said much when he was
+there: he lugged his great copy of the Venus del Pardo along with
+him one day, and left it, thinking she would like to look at it;
+Knowles called it trash, when he came.  The Doctor came always in
+the morning; he told her he would read to her one day, and did it
+always afterwards, putting on his horn spectacles, and holding
+her old Bible close up to his rugged, anxious face.  He used to
+read most from the Gospel of St. John.  She liked better to hear
+him than any of the others, even than Margret, whose voice was so
+low and tender: something in the man's half-savage nature was
+akin to the child's.
+
+As the day drew near when she was to go, every pleasant trifle
+seemed to gather a deeper, solemn meaning.  Jenny Balls came in
+one night, and old Mrs. Polston.
+
+"We thought you'd like to see her weddin'-dress, Lois," said the
+old woman, taking off Jenny's cloak, "seein' as the weddin' was
+to hev been to-morrow, and was put off on 'count of you."
+
+Lois did like to see it; sat up, her face quite flushed to see
+how nicely it fitted, and stroked back Jenny's soft hair under
+the veil.  And Jenny, being a warm-hearted little thing, broke
+into a sobbing fit, saying that it spoiled it all to have Lois
+gone.
+
+"Don't muss your veil, child," said Mrs. Polston.
+
+But Jenny cried on, hiding her face in Lois's skinny hand, until
+Sam Polston came in, when she grew quiet and shy.  The poor
+deformed girl lay watching them, as they talked.  Very pretty
+Jenny looked, with her blue eyes and damp pink cheeks; and it was
+a manly, grave love in Sam's face, when it turned to her.  A
+different love from any she had known: better, she thought.  It
+could not be helped; but it WAS better.
+
+After they were gone, she lay a long time quiet, with her hand
+over her eyes.  Forgive her! she, too, was a woman.  Ah, it may
+be there are more wrongs that shall be righted yonder in the
+To-Morrow than are set down in your theology!
+
+And so it was, that, as she drew nearer to this To-Morrow, the
+brain of the girl grew clearer,--struggling, one would think, to
+shake off whatever weight had been put on it by blood or vice or
+poverty, and become itself again.  Perhaps, even in her cheerful,
+patient life, there had been hours when she had known the wrongs
+that had been done her, known how cruelly the world had thwarted
+her; her very keen insight into whatever was beautiful or helpful
+may have made her see her own mischance, the blank she had drawn
+in life, more bitterly.  She did not see it bitterly now.  Death
+is honest; all things grew clear to her, going down into the
+valley of the shadow; so, wakening to the consciousness of
+stifled powers and ungiven happiness, she saw that the fault was
+not hers, nor His who had appointed her lot; He had helped her to
+bear it,--bearing worse himself.  She did not say once, "I might
+have been," but day by day, more surely, "I shall be."  There was
+not a tear on the homely faces turning from her bed, not a tint
+of colour in the flowers they brought her, not a shiver of light
+in the ashy sky, that did not make her more sure of that which
+was to come.  More loving she grew, as she went away from them,
+the touch of her hand more pitiful, her voice more tender, if
+such a thing could be,--with a look in her eyes never seen there
+before.  Old Yare pointed it out to Mrs. Polston one day.
+
+"My girl's far off frum us," he said, sobbing in the
+kitchen,--"my girl's far off now."
+
+It was the last night of the year that she died.  She was so much
+better that they all were quite cheerful.  Kitts went away as it
+grew dark, and she bade him wrap up his throat with such a
+motherly dogmatism that they all laughed at her; she, too, with
+the rest.
+
+"I'll make you a New-Year's call," he said, going out; and she
+called out that she should be sure to expect him.
+
+She seemed so strong that Holmes and Mrs. Polston and Margret,
+who were there, were going home; besides, old Yare said, "I'd
+like to take care o' my girl alone to-night, ef yoh'd let
+me,"--for they had not trusted him before.  But Lois asked them
+not to go until the Old Year was over; so they waited
+down-stairs.
+
+The old man fell asleep, and it was near midnight when he wakened
+with a cold touch on his hand.
+
+"It's come, father!"
+
+He started up with a cry, looking at the new smile in her eyes,
+grown strangely still.
+
+"Call them all, quick, father!"
+
+Whatever was the mystery of death that met her now, her heart
+clung to the old love that had been true to her so long.
+
+He did not move.
+
+"Let me hev yoh to myself, Lo, 't th' last; yoh're all I hev; let
+me hev yoh 't th' last."
+
+It was a bitter disappointment, but she roused herself even then
+to smile, and tell him yes, cheerfully.  You call it a trifle,
+nothing? It may be; yet I think the angels looking down had tears
+in their eyes, when they saw the last trial of the unselfish,
+solitary heart, and kept for her a different crown from his who
+conquers a city.
+
+The fire-light grew warmer and redder; her eyes followed it, as
+if all that had been bright and kindly in her life were coming
+back in it.  She put her hand on her father, trying vainly to
+smooth his gray hair.  The old man's heart smote him for
+something, for his sobs grew louder, and he left her a moment;
+then she saw them all, faces very dear to her even then.  She
+laughed and nodded to them all in the old childish way; then her
+lips moved.  "It's come right!" she tried to say; but the weak
+voice would never speak again on earth.
+
+"It's the turn o' the night," said Mrs.  Polston, solemnly; "lift
+her head; the Old Year's 'goin' out."
+
+Margret lifted her head, and held it on her breast.  She could
+hear cries and sobs; the faces, white now, and wet, pressed
+nearer, yet fading slowly: it was the Old Year going out, the
+worn-out year of her life.  Holmes opened the window: the cold
+night-wind rushed in, bearing with it snatches of broken harmony:
+some idle musician down in the city, playing fragments of some
+old, sweet air, heavy with love and regret.  It may have been
+chance: yet, let us think it was not chance; let us believe that
+He, who had made the world warm and happy for her, chose that
+this best voice of all should bid her good-bye at the last.
+
+So the Old Year went out in that music.  The dull eyes, loving to
+the end, wandered vaguely as the sounds died away, as if losing
+something,--losing all, suddenly.  She sighed as the clock
+struck, and then a strange calm, unknown before, stole over her
+face; her eyes flashed open with a living joy.  Margret stooped
+to close them, kissing the cold lids; and Tiger, who had climbed
+upon the bed, whined and crept down.
+
+"It is the New Year," said Holmes, bending his head.
+
+The cripple was dead; but LOIS, free, loving, and beloved,
+trembled from her prison to her Master's side in the To-Morrow.
+
+I can show you her grave out there in the hills,--a short,
+stunted grave, like a child's.  No one goes there, although there
+are many firesides where they speak of "Lois" softly,  as of
+something holy and dear: but they think of her always as not
+there; as gone home; even old Yare looks up, when he talks of "my
+girl."  Yet, knowing that nothing in God's just universe is lost,
+or fails to meet the late fulfilment of its hope, I like to think
+of her poor body lying there: I like to believe that the great
+mother was glad to receive the form that want and crime of men
+had thwarted,--took her uncouth child home again, that had been
+so cruelly wronged,--folded it in her warm bosom with tender,
+palpitating love.
+
+It pleased me in the winter months to think that the worn-out
+limbs, the old scarred face of Lois rested, slept: crumbled into
+fresh atoms, woke at last with a strange sentience, and, when God
+smiled permission through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild
+ecstasy of the true beauty that she loved so well.  In no
+questioning, sad pallor of sombre leaves or gray lichens:
+throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in lilies, white,
+exultant in a chordant life!
+
+Yet, more than this: I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense,
+at her freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to
+hunger or to hope, and learn to be.  And so thinking, the
+certainty of her aim and work and love yonder comes with a new,
+vital reality, beside which the story  of the yet living men and
+women of whom I have told you grows vague and incomplete, like
+unguessed riddles.  I have no key to solve them with,--no right
+to solve them.
+
+My story is but a mere groping hint?  It lacks determined truth,
+a certain yea and nay? It has no conduit of God's justice running
+through it, awarding apparent good and ill?  I know: it is a
+story of To-Day.  The Old Year is on us yet.  Poor old Knowles
+will tell you it is a dark day; bewildered at the inexplicable
+failure of the cause for which his old blood ran like water that
+dull morning at Ball's Bluff.  He doubts everything in the
+bitterness of wasted effort; doubts sometimes, even, if the very
+flag he fights for, be not the symbol of a gigantic selfishness:
+if the Wrong he calls his enemy, have not caught a certain truth
+to give it strength.  A dark day, he tells you: that the air is
+filled with the cry of the slave, and of nations going down into
+darkness, their message untold, their work undone: that now, as
+eighteen centuries ago, the Helper stands unwelcome in the world;
+that your own heart, as well as the great humanity, asks an
+unrendered justice.  Does he utter all the problems of To-Day? 
+Vandyke, standing higher, perhaps, or, at any rate, born with
+hopefuller brain, would show you how, by the very instant peril
+of the hour, is lifted clearer into view the eternal prophecy of
+coming content: could tell you that the unquiet earth, and the
+unanswering heaven are instinct with it: that the ungranted
+prayer of your own life should teach it to you: that in that Book
+wherein God has not scorned to write the history of America, he
+finds the quiet surety that the rescue of the world is near at
+hand.
+
+Holmes, like most men who make destiny, does not pause in his
+cool, slow work for their prophecy or lamentation.  "Such men
+will mould the age," old Knowles says, drearily, for he does not
+like Holmes: follows him unwillingly, even knowing him nearer the
+truth than he.  "Born for mastership, as I told you long ago:
+they strike the blow, while----.  I'm tired of theorists,
+exponents of the abstract right: your Hamlets, and your Sewards,
+that let occasion slip until circumstance or--mobs drift them as
+they will."
+
+But Knowles's growls are unheeded, as usual.
+
+What is this To-Day to Margret?  She has no prophetic insight,
+cares for none, I am afraid: the common things of every-day wear
+their old faces to her, dear and real.  Her haste is too eager to
+allay the pain about her, her husband's touch too strong and
+tender, the Master beside her too actual a presence, for her to
+waste her life in visions.  Something of Lois's live, universal
+sympathy has come into her narrow, intenser nature; through its
+one love, it may be.  What is To-Morrow until it comes?  This
+moment the evening air thrills with a purple of which no painter
+as yet has caught the tint, no poet the meaning; no silent face
+passes her on the street on which a human voice might not have
+charm to call out love and power: the Helper yet waits near her. 
+Here is work, life: the Old Year you despise holds beauty, pain,
+content yet unmastered: let us leave Margret to master them.
+
+It does not satisfy you?  Child-souls, you tell me, like that of
+Lois, may find it enough to hold no past and no future, to accept
+the work of each moment, and think it no wrong to drink every
+drop of its beauty and joy: we, who are wiser, laugh at them.  It
+may be: yet I say unto you, their angels only do always behold
+the face of our Father in the New Year.
+
+
+
+
+End of A Project Gutenberg Etext of A Story of To-day
+
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