he was looking at; then he carried it up once or twice as a gun-lover will. Perhaps it was pointed at the offending image of Herc'less. "I guess I'll go to bed. Good-night," he said sulkily, putting the gun over his shoulder. "Sleep sound and hearty," said Jerry amiably. When Frank had gone, he shook his head for some minutes. "Man!" he said to himself, "he 's wer-ry hasty." He looked at the door with a forlorn smile. He did not feel disposed to hasten to awaiting retribution. Half an hour's cool thought had, however, brought Mrs. Hand to the conclusion that her husband's mutiny was rather well-timed. She construed Frank's gloom as a favorable sign. Jerry was therefore permitted to sleep without the expected reading of the domestic riot act. The sleepless eyes under this rustic roof were younger eyes; now fully opened to a delicious, perplexing, pathetic state of affairs. To the girl, who had simply drifted on a sunny sea, her own feeling at the reminder to herself and disclosure to Frank of her true position—which had without art on her part been allowed to remain in the background — was a revelation. Doubt, shame, sudden angry pride, irrational joy, a tender remorse towards the man whom her pity had permitted to claim her, all these sang no lullabies in Sarah's soul.

And Frank? His tossing thoughts were not occupied with Herc'less at all. For this figure, which he found abject, his young contempt was profound. The prominent fact brought out by his instinctive and involuntary resentment of Jerry's words was that he, Frank Mallard, was in love. (The good old-fashioned, indestructible phrase! What an idea of entering a new medium it conveys!)

But alas! a shadow fell athwart this bright fact, quenching the sparkle of the small foolish memories and hopes that danced through Frank's brain like glorified motes in a sunbeam. It was the shadow that had stretched across all his otherwise easy life since the death of the mother who had petted and spoiled him, the cold, tall shadow of his father.

It fell between the son and the girl whom he loved, loved as in him lay. It never occurred to Frank to doubt that he could marry Sarah Hand if he chose; her promise to Herc'less he regarded no more than a bond of straw. But afterward? The question came to his bed side and stood looking at him and through him with his father's eyes. So potent was the influence of the stronger soul that the young man almost saw that well-known face beside him — the thin, frosty-whiskered face, the sharp glance through the clear spectacles. Frank feared his father's anger all the more that it

was certain to be an icy kind of anger, with an edge of ridicule. He was morbidly sensitive to sarcasm; his slow wits quickened to meet with understanding the jest or the slur, yet were unable by prompt retort to relieve the frenzy into which they goaded him. Ah, he knew quite well the gist of what his father would say of this matter, though he could not foresee exactly what superfine torturing twist that malevolent, incalculable cleverness of his would give the words!

A misalliance?—it would be none. Frank felt this truth; though he, of course, based his self-complacent reasoning on the natural desert of Sarah's beauty, considering that "the proudest place would fit her face," and not on his own unfitness for any finer mate. But his father would consider it a misalliance, and would act accordingly his father, whose money and influence had helped him in business to that modest height where, to do him justice, he now stood gallantly. Suppose this force all at once opposed - these props all at once withdrawn? There was a weak spot at the core of Frank's confidence superficially so great as to be almost laughable - in his own unassisted business faculty.

In any critical moment his manliness was unreliable, as his associates in amusement well knew. He was not, they said, a "stayer." He had once been known, though in perfect physical condition, to "weaken" in a boatrace from sheer doubt of his own powers, causing his crew to be defeated by inferior men. Perhaps some of the coarsest of his rough-and-ready comrades connected his lack of "sand" with a certain clean good-boyishness which made them smile. The same mediocrity that kept him from doing active right often kept him too from doing positive wrong; he was just common clay for a potter's hand, and fate had provided the potter.

Now, as before, Frank weakened.

He passed under Jerry's roof another day, rendered sufficiently miserable by the pale but now self-possessed Sarah's complete avoidance of him, to impress upon him the need for immediate action of some sort. Retreat seemed best, as the least decisive and irretrievable step. He had some reason for starting nervously at the footfall of Mrs. Hand as she went about her work; she kept him in the corner of her eye; something was expected of him.

Late in the afternoon, Jerry brought him up from the station a city letter, which set forth certain matters requiring his personal attention. He had made up his mind to return the next day; yet, on learning that he must do so, found himself ill-used. He crumpled the letter up in his hand, scowling.

"I've got to go," said Frank, with a sullen change of tone.

"We-ell, Mr. Mal-lard—business is business," said Jerry sympathetically, as though himself overwhelmed with affairs. "But, Man!"

The next morning was, as he had prophesied, beautifully clear; an intensely still winter day, the pines making moveless bluish shadows on the snow. Perhaps the thought that he had had no sport intensified Frank's irritation; sport certainly had a high seat among his in

terests.

Mrs. Hand bade him good-by very coolly; she felt instinctively her failure: the due punishment of Jerry's insubordination was doled out to him daily for months. As for Sarah, Frank indeed saw her alone for a minute; but she was engaged in feeding chickens, and he felt severely injured by the small proportion of attention which she allotted to him. As he got into Jerry's low, rough board sleigh, his heart was swelling with strong selfpity. I am afraid he had kicked away the too affectionate Fan, who ran off howling and was comforted by Sarah. Flash was of a less fawning disposition, and the happier dog.

66

Man, I wisht you could stay; and failin' that, I wisht you could say when we'd see ye ag'in," said Jerry cordially as the old sorrel sped along at a very respectable pace. "I'd like," he said in a lower, meditative tone, "to see ye to the weddin': Man, we 'll have great times to the weddin'. But now I consider, you hain't no heart in that; you was a-sayin' that our Sarer was too young and too pretty for Herc'less."

This was the last straw. "Oh, hang it, Jerry, let me alone! Can't you let me alone?" said Frank volcanically; but the imprecation he actually used was much more forcible.

Jerry rubbed his nose with his forefinger. His perceptions were not keen; but the fiery handwriting on the wall was doubtless visible, though not intelligible, to the most obtuse individual at the feast of Belshazzar. As fiery was the writing of the moment on the young man's face. Jeremiah Hand was no subtle interpreter: the idea of Frank's true state of mind was as far from occurring to him as if he had been an emperor, ready to dower his daughter with a dukedom. His magnanimity leaped the gulf of all other possible constructions straight to a conclusion that seemed to him very natural: Frank loved Sarah, and would himself have been her suitor; but on learning of her engagement to Herc'less he VOL. XXXV.-92.

had decided to sacrifice his feelings to his sense of honor, in the latter's behalf. Jerry would have been capable of doing that himself; and he warmed towards the poor fellow at his side, who now sat dull-eyed and sullen, inwardly sore at his own foolish outburst.

"I'll send for the pups by and by; they 're better here than in a stable in the city," said Frank hurriedly as the train came in. Jerry nodded, and made his farewell hand-grasp a painfully full expression of sympathy. The locomotive moved off, hoarsely wheezing; he looked after it with an awed feeling of the stern justice of the event.

"It would n't be hardly fair to Herc'less, would it now?" he said to himself with his head on one side; "not after all the sorrers he's had- and only jest beginning to git cheered. up!"

HERC'LESS, since his quiet wooing of Sarah, had never been demonstrative; had spoken little of their future; had not frequented her society with the customary regularity of an accepted suitor. These peculiarities seemed to increase upon him rather than to diminish as the spring approached; but an evident uneasiness took the place of his former impassive behavior. The girl noticed this, and shrank within herself; she was conscious of an increasing hardness towards him, the rapid growth of which was quite beyond her control.

One day in April, Jerry had a long, lowtoned conversation with Herc'less. He was puzzled and disturbed. Some unconsidered word of his had been followed by an astonishing outbreak from his daughter. "And I says, 'Don't it seem jest like a dream? There's where he set and smoked his cig-gay-ret.' And with that she up and bursted into tears. Now, Herc'less, I leave it out to you if the po-sition of things hain't altered some?"

"I felt this a-coming," said Herc'less. "He's a dum scoundrel, if his gun kin beat mine." But he said this with more melancholy than anger. It was as if he felt it all, Frank's condemned scoundrelism included, to be foreordained.

"Now I say 'No' to that, Herc'less Jimpson!" said Jerry warmly. "So far forth as I kin see, Mr. Mal-lard is a square man; a square man, sir!" He went on to describe the last scenes of Frank's stay, unconsciously coloring the story somewhat with his own interpretation.

Herc'less listened sadly. "Well," he commented with a queer smile, "I guess I'm a square man too."

It was late the next afternoon, and Sarah, who had gone to the nearest village on an errand, was returning along a wood-path,

when she heard footsteps behind her. A glance showed her that Herc'less was following her. She was as frightened at the approach of her affianced lover as if he had been some evil-eyed stranger, and dropped the bunch of white and purple lilacs her village friend had given her.

"Sarer," he said as he came up, "I want to have a talk with you." He stooped, and picked up the flowers.

"This ain't the time," she said with a touch of her mother's sharpness; "I've got to be getting home now."

"I'll go your way," he said gently and reproachfully, and began to walk by her side. "Sarer," he began confidentially, "I've been thinking things over."

It flashed across her that the things he had been thinking over were matters to be arranged for their simple housekeeping. The cold look that swept over her face, like a cloud over a hill, hurt Herc'less so that when he spoke next the tremor of his voice was noticeable.

I'm a good deal older 'n you, Sarer," he said; "a good deal."

She thought this was the tone of advice, and resented it. Could it be that he was about to speak to her of Frank ?

"'N' I been through so much more," he went on. "I rec'lect so much that you hain't got no part in. I have spells when it all comes over me. Of a starry night, f'r instance, I'll look up and I'll feel old-like. And these laylocks the smell of 'em carries me away back to other times. I s'pose it ain't no more to you than any other sweet smell."

He paused. Her relief as he passed from dangerous ground had been succeeded by a chill. Why did he bring these memories to her? It was like a rush of damp air from a tomb, the grotesqueness of this broken bridegroom, with his "spells" when the ghosts of dead happiness and dead sorrow alike talked with him! Could she endure an indefinite prolongation of this? But he had not yet reached his climax.

"Sarer," he said in a deep, hushed voice that hardly seemed his own, "I'd like to show you something." He plunged far down into a breast-pocket of his old coat, and brought up something wrapped in pink paper. He unfolded it very reverently with his hairy-backed hands. "That 's Mirandy!" he said as he held it before her. The thin, mild face of the photograph, with the little dab of faded carmine disfiguring its cheeks, was to him sacredthe face of the Blessed Damozel who leaned and looked in his retrospective moments "from the gold bar of heaven."

Sarah recoiled from him from them.

"I ain't never spoke to you like this before, Sarer," he said solemnly. "It's because I want you should see what I see myself, now we've got right down to it. It can't ever be!" She started at the echo of her own thought. "There 's this between us!"

Having said this, he folded up the picture carefully in its absurdly incongruous rosecolored wrapping, and laid it softly away in his pocket again.

"O Herc'less," she stammered, with the tears running down her face, "you 're so alone!"

"No, Sarer," he said kindly," I ain't. And anyway, I'm too broke down a man for you. Not but what I'd 'a' done my dooty by ye. But that ain't all you want. I could make a guess, now, at the kind of a man you want." He looked at her markedly; she was sobbing hard now. He drew her head against his shoulder as if she had been a child; she did not resist; all her repugnance was gone.

"Don't ye cry, Sarer," he said soothingly. "You only jest make me feel bad."

It was all over. He had "done his dooty" by her. All that he had said was in a sense true. She could never know that he had persuaded himself so to bring an infrequent mood into the foreground as to dwarf in her sight the mild love for her which had long been his daily companion. She could never know that this meek flower of his later life was as dear to his impoverished soul as the last blue gentian to the fading year.

Summer dragged by, and still the little country household had but one new sign of Frank's existence,— a few scrawled lines in an envelope containing money. Frank himself had had time for recovery, and was, he thought, quite healed; though he yet delayed the severing of the last unromantic tie that bound him to the Hand family. His first sensation was one of amusement rather than of jealousy, when on a certain November afternoon an unlooked-for visitor appeared at his office. It was Herc'less.

He was clad in a new collection of garments which he had bought at a large ready-made clothing "emporium" that morning. The salesman had improved his peculiar opportunities. The coat was of a mulberry color, and much too small for him; the trousers, cut with a floating generosity of pattern, were of a material which the same salesman had assured him was "a fine genuine Scotch mixture": it

had somewhat the effect of Scotch cake, appearing sprinkled with small sugar-plums of several hues. Herc'less wore also a bright-blue cravat, flamboyantly tied. The feeling which had prompted him to assume this extraordinary attire was as admirable as that of a certain brave military leader who used to don his best uniform on the eve of a battle, honoring the awful hour with due pomp. But the result was a most lamentable comedy; and Herc'less's speech this day was like his garbit was very tragical mirth.

"It appears, Mr. Mallard, that you intend to make Jerry a free gift of them dogs," he began facetiously.

"Why, no, Herc'less," said Frank, laughing with great heartiness, though hardly at the thin joke. "I've been expecting to send for 'em. I'll send next week."

A quickly quenched alarm gleamed in Herc'less's eye. "Send, hey? Why n't ye go down? Lord, there 's shootin' this season!" He detailed some remarkable statistics. "Jerry 'd be mighty glad to see ye; in fact, they all would." He said this in a hesitating and wistful way.

"Well, I'll see," said Frank. Herc'less's appearance so absorbed him that he had no room for sentiment yet. "How 's luck with you, Herc'less? You 're looking so remarkably well!" He turned aside hastily to arrange some papers on his desk.

"Never was better in my life!" said Herc'less, slapping his knee loudly. He proceeded more slowly, looking at the smitten trousersleg as though he regretted having treated it disrespectfully. "I been a-bringing my plans, as I may say, to a head."

And now the unreasonable Frank actually felt a pang. He knew long ago that it had taken place; of course it had. But he could not help turning a dark look on Herc'less. "You have!" he said shortly.

"The fact is,"- Herc'less dashed off gallantly again," I 've sold that little farm of mine. I'm a-going West!" He leaned back, smiling agreeably. Frank stared.

"I'm a-going," said Herc'less, "to Californi-er. To Californi-er."

"How's that?" asked Frank.

"Well, ye see," said Herc'less, seeming a little abashed by the abrupt question, and sinking his obstreperously cheerful voice to as elaborately serious a tone, "I hain't been well; that is, I'm very well now — never better. But I've had a kin' of a cough; and ye know, I've got a bullet"- here he entered with the expansiveness of the untutored into his physical peculiarities. "Now they say Californier," he uttered the word unctuously-"will make a new man of ye." He apparently ex

pected the air of the Pacific slope to extract his bullet.

"Yes, I know," said Frank dryly. "The prospect seems to have braced you up already." The papers on his desk began to require a great deal of attention. "Sarah 's going with you, of course?"

"Lord, no!" said Herc'less with intense surprise. "I forgot - you hain't heard that it's all over between me 'n' Sarer?" "All over!" repeated Frank.

"Yes siree, I'm a free man," said the joyous Herc'less. He looked into the crown of his shop-worn hat, a recent purchase. There was a small diamond-shaped bit of blue glass in it, probably designed to affect the wearer's brain in a wholesome manner.

"Ye see," he continued, "it struck us both, come to git right down to it, as in a manner unsootable. I'm considerable older than Sarer; and there's a lot of fine young fellers hangin' round—”

Frank flushed. Was it true? He had never seen any of these suspended suitors.

"And Sarer might take her pick," said Herc'less, taught by a touch of pride for her sake to lie fluently. "But," he resumed, startled by the thought that he might defeat his own purpose, "there's nothin' serious up yit. Not as yit. No. Well, I thought 't was sorter unsootable. And moreover, when you're goin' to Californi-er, to git made a new man of, you don't want no impedderments. Now, the best of wives is an impedderment.”

There was a short silence; the office clock ticked. "Not but wot I'd marry," said Herc'less thoughtfully, "if I was a settled business man like you, f'r instance." He raised his head and looked steadily at Frank with his honest one eye.

"I'd go down after them dogs myself, if I was you," he said, "seein' the season 's so good. I jest come in to speak to you about 'em, being in town." He rose.

"Thank you, Herc'less, thank you," said Frank hastily. He held out his hand. His conscience was reminding him that in his past struggle he had never once considered this man, who, he now vaguely felt, was generous.

"I take it kind of you," he said warmly, alluding, a third person would have supposed, to Herc'less's unexpected call.

"Oh, no," said Herc'less shyly, dropping Frank's hand and edging towards the door. "Think you'll go down?" he asked with a sudden glance, and the same wistfulness he had shown in first urging this visit upon Frank.

"I guess I will," said Frank. He really at