Paul Blecker: Part I

A THOROUGH American, who comprehends what America has to do, and means to help on with it, ought to choose to be born in New England, for the vitalized brain, finely-chorded nerves, steely self-control, — then to go West, for more live, muscular passion, succulent manhood, naked-handed grip of his work. But when he wants to die, by all means let him hunt out a town in the valley of Pennsylvania or Virginia: Nature and man there are so ineffably self-contained, content with that which is, shut in from the outer surge, putting forth their little peculiarities, as tranquil and glad to be alive as if they were pulseless sea-anemones, and after a while going back to the Being whence they came, just as tranquil and glad to be dead.

Paul Bleckcr had some such fancy as this, that last evening before the regiment of which he was surgeon started for Harper’s Ferry, while he and the Captain were coming from camp by the hill-road into the village (or burgh : there are no villages in Pennsylvania). Nothing was lost on Blecker; his wide, nervous eyes took all in: the age and complacent quiet of this nook of the world, the fullblooded Nature asleep in the yellow June sunset; why ! she had been asleep there since the beginning, he knew. The very Indians in these hills must have been a fishing, drowsy crew ; their names and graves yet dreamily haunted the farms and creek-shores. The Covenanters who came after them never had roused themselves enough to shake them off. Covenanters: the Doctor began joking to himself, as he walked along, humming some tune, about how the spirit of every sect came out, always alike, in the temperament, the very cut of the face, or whim of accent. These descendants of the Covenanters, now, — Presbyterian elders and their wives, —going down to camp to bid their boys good-bye, devoted them to death with just as stern integrity, as partial a view of the right, as their ancestors did theirs at Naseby or Drumclog : their religion loved its friends and hated its enemies just as bitterly as when it scowled at Monmouth; the “ boys,” no doubt, would call themselves Roundheads, as they had done in the three months’ service. Paul Blecker, who had seen a good many sides of the world, laughed to himself: the very Captain here, good, anxious, innocent as a baby, as he was, looked at the world exactly through Balfour of Burley’s dead eyes, was going to cure the disease of it by the old pill of intolerance and bigotry. No wonder Paul laughed.

The sobered Quaker evening was making ready for night: the yellow warmth overhead thinning into tintless space ; the low hills drawing farther off in the melancholy light; the sky sinking nearer; clouds, unsteady all day, softened at last into a thoughtful purple, and couching themselves slowly in the hollows of the horizon ; the sweep of cornfields and woods and distant farms growing dim, — daguerreotype-like ; the tinkle of the sheep-bells on the meadows, the shouts of the boys in camp yonder, the bass drone of the frogs in the swamp dulling down into the remoteness of sleep. The Doctor slackened his sharp, jerking stride, and fell into the monotonous gait of his companion, glancing up to him. McKinstry, he thought, was going out to battle to-morrow with just as cool phlegm and childlike content as he would set out to buy his merino ewes; but he would receive no pay,—meant to transfer it to his men. And he would be in the thickest of the fight, — you might bet on that. Umph ! his quick eyes darting over the big, leisurely frame, the neat yellow hair, and the blue eyes mildly peering through spectacles. Then, having satisfactorily anatomized McKinstry, he turned to the evening again with open senses, the sensitive pulsing of his wide nostrils telling that even the milky scent of the full-uddored cows gave him keen enjoyment. The cows were going home from pasture, up shady barn-lanes, into the grayer shadows about the houses on either side of the road, in whose windows lights were beginning to glimmer. Solid old homesteads they were, stone or brick, never wood. Out in these Western settlements, a hundred years ago, they built durable homes, curiously enough, more than in the Northern States; planted oaks about them, that bore the strength of the earth up to heaven in sturdy arms, shaming the graceful. uncertain elm of shallower soils. Just such old farm-houses as those, Blecker thought, would turn out such old-time moulded men as McKinstry : houses whose orchards still held on to the Waldower and Smoke-house apples; their gardens gay with hollyhocks and crimson prince’s-feather; on the book-shelves the “Spectator” and “Gentleman’s Magazine.” The women of them kept up the old-fashioned knitting-parties, and a donation-visit to the pastor once a year; and the men were all gone to the war, to keep the Union as it was in their fathers’ time, and would doubtless vote the conservative ticket next election because their fathers did, which would make the war a horrible farce. The town, Blecker thought, had rooted itself in between the hills with as solid a persistence as the prejudices of its builders. Obstinately steep streets, shaded by gnarled locusttrees ; houses drawn back from the sidewalks, in surly dread of all new-comers ; the very smoke, vaporing through the sky, had defiance in it of the outer barbarous world and its vulgar newness. Yet the town had an honest country heart in it, if it was a hit gray and crusty with ag. Blecker, knowing it as he did, did not wonder the boys who left it named a village for it out in Kansas, trying to fancy themselves at home,—or that one old beggar in it asked to be buried in the middle of the street, “ So's I kin hear the stages a-comin’ in, an’ know if the old place is a-gittin’ on.”

There seemed to be a migration from it to-night: they met, every minute, buggies, old-fashioned carriages, horsemen.

“ Going out to camp,” McKinstry said; “ the boys all have some one to bid them good-bye.”

What a lonely, reserved voice the man had ! Blecker had the curiosity of all sensitive men to know the soul-history of people ; he glanced again keenly in MeKinstry’s face. Pshaw! one might as well ask their story from the deaf and dumb. But that they were dumb, — there was hint of a tragedy in that!

Everybody stopped to speak to the Doctor. He had been but a few months in the place; but the old church-goers had found him out as a passionate, freeand-easy, honorable fellow, full of joke and anecdote, — shrewd, too. They “ fellowshipped” with him heartily, and were glad when he got the post of surgeon with their sons. If there were anything more astringent below this, any more real self in the man, held back, belonging to a world outside of theirs, they did not see it. They knew him better, they thought, than they did Daniel McKinstry, who had grown up among them, just as mild and silent when he was a tow-haired boy as now, a man of forty-five. He touched his hat to them now, and went on, while Blecker leaned on the carriage - doors, his brown face aglow with fun, his uneasy fingers drumming boyishly on the panel. Not knowing that through the changeful face, and fierce, pitiful eyes of the boy, the man Paul Blecker looked coolly out, testing, labelling them. The boy in him, that they saw, Nature had made ; but years of a hand-to-hand fight with starvation came after, crime, and society, whose work is later than Nature’s, and sometimes better done.

“ Fine girl! ” said the Doctor, touching his hat to Miss Mallard, as she cantered past. “ Got a head of her own, too. Made a deused good speech, when she presented the flag to-day.”

Miss Mallard overheard him, as he intended she should, and blushed a visible acknowledgment. All of her character was visible, well-developed as her body : her timidity showed itself in the unceasing dropping of her eyelid; her arch simplicity in the pouting lips; a coy reserve — well, that everywhere, to the very rosette on her retreating slipper; and her patriotism was quite palpable in the color of her Balmoral. She rode Squire Mallard’s gray.

“ And very well they turn out,” sneered Blecker.

“ She is a woman,” said the Captain, blushing, — differently from the lady, however.

“ And if she is ? ” turning suddenly. “ She has the nature of a Bowery rough. Pah, McKinstry ! Sexes stand alike with me. If a woman’s flesh is weaker-grained a bit, what of that ? Whoever would earn esteem must work for it.”

The Captain said nothing, stammered a little, then, hoisting his foot on a stump, tied his shoe nervously.

Blecker smiled, a queer, sorrowful smile, as if, oddly enough, he felt sorry for himself.

“ I 'd like to think of women as you do, Mac,” he said. “ You never knew many ? ”

“ Only two, until now, — my mother and little Sarah. They ’re gone now.”

Sarah ? The Doctor was silent a moment, thinking. He had heard of a sister of MeKinstry’s, siek for years with some terrible disease, whom he had nursed until the end. She was Sarah, most likely. Well, that was what his life had been given up for, was it ? There was a twitching about McKinstry’s wide mouth : Paul looked away from him a moment, and then, glancing furtively back, began again.

“ No, I never knew my mother or sister, Mac. The great discovery of this age is woman, old fellow! I 've been knocked about too much not to have lost all delusions about them. It did well enough for the crusading times to hold them as angels in theory, and in practice as idiots ; but in these rough-and-tumble days we 'd better give ’em their places as flesh and blood, with exactly such wants and passions as men.”

The Captain never argued.

“ I don’t know,” he said, dryly.

After that he jogged on in silence, glancing askance at the masculine, selfassertant figure of his companion, — at the face, acrid, unyielding, beneath its surface-heat: ruminating mildly to himself on what a good thing it was for him never to have known any but old-fashioned women. This Blecker, now, had been made by intercourse with such women as those he talked of: he came from the North. The Captain looked at him with a vague, moony compassion : the usual Western vision of a Yankee female in his head,— Bloomer-clad, hatchetfaced, capable of anything, from courting a husband to commanding a ship. ( It is all your fault, genuine women of New England! Why don’t you come among us, and know your country, and let your country know you ? Better learn the meaning of Chicago than of Venice, for your own sakes, believe me.)

They were near the town now, the road crossing a railroad-track, where the hill, chopped apart for the grade, left bare the black stratum of coal, tinged here and there with a bloody brown and whitish shale.

“ Hillo ! this means iron,” said the Doctor, climbing up the bank, cat-like, to break off a bit; " and here’s an odd formation, Mac. Take it in to old Gurney.”

The Captain cleaned his spectacles with a piece of chamois-leather, put them on, folded the leather and replaced it in its especial place in his pocket, before he took the bit of rock.

“ All that finical ceremony he would go through in the face of the enemy,” thought Blecker, jumping down on the track.

“ Give it to old Gurney, Mac. It will insure you a welcome.”

“ It is curious, Doctor Blecker. But you ”-

“ I never care to gratify anybody. Besides, the old gentleman and I interdespised. Our instincts cried out, ‘ ’Ware dog!’ the first day You are a friend of his, eh, Mac ? ”

The Captain’s face grew red, like a bashful woman’s. He thought Blecker had divined his secret, would haul it out roughly in another moment. If this slangtalking Yankee should take little Lizzy’s name into his mouth ! But the Doctor was silent, even looked away until the heat on the poor old bachelor’s face had died out. He knew MeKinstry’s thought of that little girl well enough, but he held the child-hearted man’s secret tenderly and charily in his hand. Paul Blecker did talk slang and assert himself ; but every impulse in him was clean, delicate, liberal. So, Paul remaining silent, the Captain took heart of grace, going down the street, and ventured back to the Gurney question.

“I thought I would accompany you there, Doctor Blecker. They might only think it seemly in me to bid farewell. I " —

Blecker nodded. The man had not been able to hide an harassed frown that day under Bis usual vigor of speech and look. It became more palpable after this ; his voice, when he did speak, was fretful, irritable,—his lips compressed; he stopped at a village-well to drink, as though his mouth were parched.

“ How old is that house, — the Gurneys’ ? ” he asked, affecting carelessness, to baflle the curious inspection of McKinstry.

“ The Fort ? We call it the Fort because it was used for one in Indian times,” McKinstry began, chafing his lean whiskers delightedly.

Old houses were his hobby, especially this which they approached, — a narrow, long building of unhewn stone, facing on the street, the lintels and doors worm-eaten, and green with moss.

“ Built by Bradford, the new part,— Bradford, of the Whiskey Insurrection, you know ? Carvings on the walls brought, over the mountains, when to bring them by panels was a two-months’ journey. There 's queer stories hang about these old Pennsylvania homesteads.”

“Bradford? The Gurneys are a new family here, then ? ”

“ Came here but a few years back, from a country farther up the mountains. They ’re different from us.”

“ How, different ? ” with a keen, surprised glance. “ I see they are a newer people than the others; but I thought the village accepted them with shut eyes.”

The Captain stammered again.

“ Old Father Gurney, as we call him, taught school when they first came, but he gave that up. This section is a good geological field, and he wished to devote himself to that,” he went on, evading the question. “ They live off of those acres at the back of the house since that. You see? Corn, potatoes, buckwheat,—good yield.”

“ Who oversees the planting ? ” sharply.

McKinstry wondered vaguely at the little Doctor’s curious interest in the Gurneys, but went on with his torpid, slow answers.

“ That eldest girl, I believe, Grey. Cow there, you see, and ducks. He 's popular, old Father Gurney. People have a liking for his queer ways, help him collect specimens for his cabinet; the boys bring him birds to stuff, and snakes. If it had n’t been for the troubles breaking out, he was on the eve of a most im-por-tant discovery,—the crater of an exhausted volcano in Virginia.” McKinstry lowered his voice cautiously. “ Fact, Sir. In Mercer County. But the guerrillas interfered with his researches.”

“ I think it probable. So he stuffs birds, does he ? ” Blecker’s lips closing tighter.

“ And keeps the snakes in alcohol. There are shelves in Miss Lizzy’s room quite full of them. That lower room it was, but Joseph has taken it for a study. She has the upper one for her flowers and her father’s birds.”

“ And Grey, and the twins, and the four boys bedaubed with molasses, and the dog, and the cooking ? ”

“ Stowed away somewhere,” the Captain mildly responded.

Dr. Blecker was testy.

“ You know Joseph, her brother ? I mean our candidate for Congress next term ? ”

“Yes. Democratic. J. Schuyler Gurney,— give him his name, Mac. Republican last winter. Joseph trims to wind and tide well. I heard him crow like a barn - yard fowl on the Capitol - steps at Washington when Lincoln called for the seventy-five thousand: now, he hashes up Breckinridge’s conservative speech for your hickory-backed farmers. Does he support the family, Mac ? ”

“ His election-expenses are heavy.”

“ Brandy-slings. I know his proclivities.”

McKinstry colored. Dr, Blecker was coarse, an ill-bred man, he suspected, — noting, too, the angry repression in his eyes, as he stood leaning on the gate, looking in at the Fort, for they had reached it by this time. The Captain looked in, too, through the dusky clumps of altheas and plum-trees, at the old stone house, dyed tawny-gray in the evening light, and talked on, the words falling unconscious and simple as a stream of milk. The old plodder was no longer dumb. Blecker had hit on the one valve of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of circumstance. This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its bloody script of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and sunflowers, — this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare swamped stretch of the man’s years, their solitary bit of enchantment. They were bare years,—the forty he had known : Fate had drained them tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in ; — the duty was done now. McKinstry, a mild, common-faced man, had gone through it for nearly half a century, pleasantly, — never called it heroism. It was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with a great sigh of relief, — to see that Duty was, after all, a lean, meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be nearest and best. Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. So McKinstry stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him. A man, with an adult’s blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and patient habit; —he claimed work and happiness, his right. Of course it came, and tangibly. Into every life God sends an actual messenger to widen and lift it above itself: puerile or selfish the messenger often is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it, and all that it touches. We call that love, you remember. A secular affair, according to McKinstry’s education, as much as marketing. So when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in there with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear, were gaining an undue weight in his life, held, to be plain, all the fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty, aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never known, he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege : how could he talk of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he worshipped ? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard, he used to watch the flutter of the little girl’s white dress, as she passed by to “ meeting.” He could not help it that, his great limbs trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast and hold her there forever. But he felt guilty and ashamed that it was so; not knowing that Christ, seeing the pure thrill in his heart, smiled just as he did long ago when Mary brought the beloved disciple to him.

He never had told little Lizzy that, he loved her, — hardly told himself. Why, he was forty-five, — and a year or two ago she was sledding down the street with her brothers, a mere yellow-haired baby. He remembered the first time he had noticed her, — one Christmas eve ; his mother and Sarah were alive then. There was an Italian woman came to the village with a broken hand-organ, a filthy, starving wretch, and Gurney’s little girl went with her from house to house in the snow, singing Christmas carols, and handing the tambourine. Everybody said, “ Why, you little tot! ” and gave her handfuls of silver. Such a wonderful voice she had even then, and looked so chubby and pretty in her little blue cloak and hood ; and going about with the woman was such a pure-hearted thing to do. She danced once or twice that day, striking the tambourine, he remembered; the sound of it seemed to put her in a sort of ecstasy, laughing till her eyes were full of tears, and her tangled hair fell all about her red cheeks. She could not help but do it, he believed, for at other times she was shy, terrified, if one spoke to her; but he wished he had not seen her dance then, though she was only a child : dancing, he thought, was as foul and effective a snare as ever came from hell. After that day she used often to come to the farm to see his mother and Sarah. They tried to teach her to sew, but she was a lazy little thing, he remembered, with an indulgent smile. And he was “ Uncle Dan.” So now she was grown up, quite a woman : in those years, when she had been with her kinsfolk in New York, she had been taught to sing. Well, well! McKinstry reckoned music as about as useful as the crackling of thorns under a pot; so he never cared to know, what was the fact, that this youngest daughter of Gurney’s had one of the purest contralto voices in the States. She came home, grown, but just as shy; only tired, needing care: no one could look in Lizzy Gurney’s face without wishing to comfort and help the child. The Gurneys were so wretchedly poor, that might be the cause of her look. She was a woman now. Well, and then ? Why, nothing then, He was Uncle Dan still, of whom she was less afraid than of any other living creature: that was all. Thinking, as he stood with Paul 15 Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly - made havelock that morning. “You ’re always so kind to me,” she said. “ So I am kind to her,” he thought, his quiet blue eyes growing duller behind their spectacles; “so I will be.”

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

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

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

A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort of salutation. To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some passion we know nothing of, he looked like a bloated spider coming out of the cell where his victims were. “ Gorging himself, while they and the country suffer the loss,” he muttered. But Paul was a hot-brained young man. We should only have seen a vulgar, commonplace trickster in politics, such as the people make pets of. “ Such men as Schuyler Gurney get the fattest offices. God send us a monarchy soon ! ” he hissed under his breath, as the gate closed after the politician. By which you will perceive that Dr. Blecker, like most men fighting their way up, was too near-sighted for any abstract theories. Liberty, he thought, was a very poetic, Millenniumlike idea for stump-speeches and collegecubs, but he grappled with the time the States were too chaotic, untaught a mass for selfgovernment; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny ; he would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome discipline. The Doctor was born in one of the Border States ; men there, it is said, have a sort of hand-to-mouth politics ; their daily bread of rights is all they care for; so Paul seldom looked into to-morrow for anything. In other ways, too, his birth had curdled his blood into a sensuous languor. To-night, after McKinstry had entered the house, and he was left alone, the quaint old garden quiet, the air about him clean, pure, unperfumed, the stars distant and lonely, his limbs bedded in the clinging moss, he was rested for the moment, happy like a child, with no subtile-sensed questionings why. The sounds of the village could not penetrate there ; the content, the listless hush of the night was with him; the delicious shimmer of the trees in the starlight, the low call of the pigeon to its mate, even the fall of the catalpablossoms upon his hand, thrilled him with unreasoning pleasure : a dull consciousness that the earth was alive and well, and he was glad to live with the rest.

Something in Blocker's nature came into close rapport with the higher animal life. If he had been born with money, and lived here in those stagnating hills, or down yonder on some lazy cotton-plantation, he would have settled down before this into a genial, child-loving, arbitrary husband and master, fond of pictures and horses, his house in decent taste, his land pleasure-giving, his wines good. By this time he would have been Judge Blecker, with a portly voice, flushed face, and thick eyelids. But he had scuffled and edged his way in the thin air of Connecticut as errand-boy, daguerreotypist, teacher, doctor ; — so he came into the Gurney garden that night, shrewd, defiant, priding himself on detecting shams. His waistcoat and trousers were of coarser stuff than suited his temperament ; a taint of vulgarity in his talk, his whiskers untrimmed, the meaning of his face compacted, sharpened. It was many a year since a tear had come into his black eyes; yet tears belonged there, as much as to a woman’s.

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

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

“ I ’m sure, Pen, I don’t know what to do with you,” —half ready to cry.

“ ‘ Dixie,’ now, Sis.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ Fresh air,” she said to Grey, jerking her head emphatically toward the open door.

“ I will, Looey.”

“ Looey ! Pish ! ”

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

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

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

“ It is hard to devote the mind pure to a search for truth here, my daughter,” looking over Grey’s head as usual, with pensive, benevolent eyes. “ But I do what I can, — I do what I can.”

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

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

“ I do what I can,” said he, earnestly, looking at the catalogue, with his head to one side.

It was Oth’s time, — now or never.

“ Debbil de bit yer do ! Ef yer did what yer could, Mars’ Si, dar ’ud be more ’n one side o’ sparerib in de cellar fur ten hungry mouths. We ’ve gone done eat dat pig o’ Miss Grey’s from head ter tail. An’ pigs in June's a disgrace ter Christians, let alone Presbyterians like us uns.”

The old man glanced at him. Oth’s spine gave his tongue free license.

“I ’ll discharge him,” faintly.

“ ’Scharge yerself,” growled Oth, under his breath.

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

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

The night was singularly clear, in its quiet: only a few dreamy trails of gray mist, asleep about the moon: far off on the crest of the closing hills, she fancied she could see the wind-stir in the trees that made a feathered shadow about the horizon. She leaned on the stile, looking over the sweep of silent meadows and hills, and slow - creeping watercourses. The whole earth waited, she fancied, with newer life and beauty than by day : going back, it might be, in the pure moonlight, to remember that dawn when God said, “ Let there be light.” The girl comprehended the meaning of the night better, perhaps, because of the house she had left. Every night she came out there. She left the clothes and spareribs behind her, and a Something, a Grey Gurney that might have been, came back to her in the coolness and rest, the nearer she drew to the pure old earth. She never went down into those mossy hollows, or among the shivering pines, with a soiled, tawdry dress; she wore always the clear, primitive colors, or white, — Grey: it was the girl’s only bit of self-development. This night she could see McKinstry’s figure, as he went down the path through the rye-field. He was stooping, leading Lizzy by the hand, as a nurse might an infant. Grey thrust the currant-bushes aside eagerly ; she could catch a glimpse of the girl’s face in the colorless light. It always had a livid tinge, but she fancied it was red now with healthy blushes; her eyes were on the ground : in the house they looked out from under their heavy brows on their daily life with a tired coldness that made silly Grey ashamed of her own light-heartedness. The man’s common face was ennobled with such infinite tenderness and pain, Grey thought the help that lay therein would content her sister. It was time for the girl’s rest to come ; she was sick of herself and of life. So the tears came to Grey's eyes, though to the very bottom of her heart she was thankful and glad.

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

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

“ I'm glad it is McKinstry she loves, and not I,” he said.

He turned, and forgot her, watching Grey coming nearer to him. The garden sloped down to the borders of the creek, and she stood on its edge now, looking at the uneasy crusting of the black water and the pearly glint of moonlight. Thinking of Lizzy, and the strong love that held her; feeling a little lonely, maybe, and quiet, she did not know why; trying to wrench her thoughts back to the house, and the clothes, and the spareribs. Why ! he could read her thoughts on her face as if it were a baby’s ! A homely, silly girl they called her, He thanked God nobody had found her out before him. Look at the dewy freshness of her skin ! how pure she was ! how the world would knock her about, if he did not keep his hold on her! But he would do that; tonight he meant to lay his hand upon her life, and never take it off, absorb it in his own. She moved forward into the clear light: that was right. There was a broken boll of a beech - tree covered with lichen : she should sit on that, presently, her face in open light, he in the shadow, while he told her. Watching her with hot breath where she stood, then going down to her: —

“Is Grey waiting to bid her friend good-bye ? ”

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

“ I thought you would come to me, Doctor Bleeker.”

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

She looked up proudly.

“ You know it matters nothing. I am not vulgar.”

“No, Grey. But — it is curious, but no one ever called me Paul, as boy or man. It is a sign of equality; and I’ve always had, in the mêlée, the underneath taint about me. You are not vulgar enough to care for it. Yours is the highest and purest nature I ever knew. Yet I know it is right for you to call me Paul. Your soul and mine stand on a plane before God.”

The childish flush left her face ; the timid womanlook was in it now. He bent nearer,

“ They stand there alone, Grey.”

She drew back from him, her hands nervously catching in the thick curls.

“ You do not believe that ? ” his breath clogged and hot. “ It is a fancy of mine ? not true?”

“It is true.”

He caught the whisper, his face growing pale, his eyes flashing.

“ Then you are mine, child ! What is the meaning of these paltry contradictions ? Why do you evade me from day to day ? ”

“ You promised me not to speak of this again,”—weakly.

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

He scated her upon the beech-trunk. One could tell by the very touch and glance of the man how the image of this woman stood solitary in his coarser thoughts, delicate, pure : a disciple would have laid just such reverential fingers on the robe of the Madonna. Then he stood off from her, looking straight into her hazel eyes. Grey, with all her innocent timidity, was the cooler, stronger, maybe, of the two: the poor Doctor’s passionate nature, buffeted from one anger and cheat to another in the -world, brought very little quiet or tact or aptitude in language for this one hour. Yet, standing there, his man’s sturdy heart throbbing slow as an hysteric woman’s, his eyeballs burning, it seemed to him that all his life had been but the weak preface to these words he was going to speak.

“ It angers me,” he muttered, abruptly, “that, when I come to you with the thought that a man’s or a woman’s soul can hold but once in life, you put me aside with the silly whims of a schoolgirl. It is not worthy of you, Grey. You are not as other women.”

What was this that he had touched ? She looked up at him steadily, her hands clasped about her knees, the childlike rose - glow and light banished from her face.

“I am not like other women. You speak truer than you know. You call me a silly, happy child. Maybe I am; but, Paul, once in my life God punished me. I don’t know for what,”—getting up, and stretching out her groping arms, blindly.

There was a sudden silence. This was not the cheery, healthful Grey Gurney of a moment before, this woman with the cold terror creeping out in her face. He caught her hands and held them.

“ I don’t know for what,” she moaned. “ He did it. He is good.”

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

“ What has been done to you, child ? ”

She shook herself free, speaking in a fast, husky whisper.

“ Do not touch me, Dr. Blecker. It was no school-girl's whim that kept me from you. I am not like other women.

I am not worthy of any man’s love.”

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

She had gone still farther from him, holding by the trunk of a dead tree, her face turned towards the water. The black sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man’s brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face. For the every-day, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to God. He knew that. It was this woman that stood before him now : looking back, out of the inbred force and purify within her, the indignant man’s sense of honor that she had, on the lie they had made her live : daring to face the truth, that God had suffered this thing, yet clinging, like a simple child, to her old faith in Him. That childish faith, that worked itself out in her common life, Paul Blecker set aside, in loving her. She was ignorant: he knew the world, and, he thought, very plainly saw that the Power who had charge of it suffered unneeded ills, was a traitor to the Good his own common sense and kindly feelingfcould conceive; which is the honest belief of most of the half-thinkers in America.

“ You were but a child,” he said again. “ It matters nothing to me, Grey. It left no taint upon you.”

“ It did,” she cried, passionately. “ I carry the marks of it to my grave. I never shall be pure again.”

“ Why did your God let you go down into such foulness, then ?” — the words broke from his lips irrepressibly. “ It was He*who put you in the hands of a selfish woman ; it was He who gave you a weak will. It is He who suffers marriages as false as yours. Why, child ! you call it crime, the vow that bound you for that year to a man you loathed ; yet the world celebrates such vows daily in every church in Christendom.”

“ I know that” ; — her voice had gone down into its quiet sob, like a little child’s.

She sat down on the ground, now, the long shore-grass swelling up around her, thrusting her fingers into the pools of eddying water, with a far-off sense of quiet and justice and cold beneath there.

“ I don’t understand,” she said. “ The world’s wrong somehow. I don’t think God does it. There’s thousands of young girls married as I was. Maybe, if I’d told Him about it, it would n’t have ended as it did. I did not think He cared for such things.”

Blecker was silent. What did he care for questions like this now ? He sat by her on the broken trunk, his elbows on his knees, his sultry eyes devouring her face and body. What did it matter, if once she had been sold to another man ? She was free now : he was dead. He only knew that here was the only creature in earth or heaven that he loved: there was not a breath in her lungs, a tint of her flesh, that was not dear to him, allied by some fierce passion to his Own sense : there was that in her soul which he needed, starved for:h his life balked blank here, demanding it, — her, — he knew not what: but that gained, a broader freedom opened behind, unknown possibilities of honor and truth and deed. He would take no other step, live no farther, until he gained her. Holding, too, the sense of her youth, her rare beauty, as it seemed to him; loving it with keener passion because he alone developed it, drawing her soul to the light! how like a baby she was: how dainty the dimpling white flesh of her arms, the soft limbs crouching there ! So pure, the man never came near her •without a dull loathing of himself, a sudden remembrance of places where he had been tainted, made unfit to touch her,— rows in Bowery dance - houses, waltzes with musk-scented fine ladies: when this girl put her cool little hand in his sometimes, he felt tears coming to his eyes, as if the far-off God or the dead mother had blessed him. She sat there, now, going back to that blot in her life, her eyes turned every moment up to the Power beyond in whom she trusted, to know why it had been. He had seen little children, struck by their mother’s hand, turn on them a look just so grieved and so appealing.

“ It was no one’s fault altogether, Paul,” she said. “My mother was not selfish, more than other women. There were very many mouths to feed: it is so in most families like ours.”

“ I know.”

“I am very dull about books, — stupid, they say. I could not teach; and they would not let me sew for money, because of the disgrace. These are the only ways a woman has. If I had been a boy ”-

“ I understand.”

“ No man can understand,”—her voice growing shrill with pain. “ It’s not easy to eat the bread needed for other mouths day after day, with your hands tied, idle and helpless. A boy can go out and work, in a hundred ways: a girl must marry; it’s her only chance for a livelihood, or a home, or anything to fill her heart with. Don’t blame my mother, Paul. She had ten of us to work for. From the time I could comprehend, I knew her only hope was, to live long enough to see her boys educated, and her daughters in homes of their own. It was the old story, Doctor Blecker,” —with a shivering laugh more pitiful than a cry. “ I ve noticed it since in a thousand other houses. Young girls like me in these poor-genteel families, — there are none of God's creatures more helpless or goaded, starving at their souls. I could n’t teach. I had no talent; but if I had, a woman’s a woman : she wants something else in her life than dog-eared schoolbooks and her wages year after year.”

Blecker could hardly repress a smile.

“ You are coming to political economy by a woman’s road, Grey.”

“ I don’t know what that is. I know what my life was then. I was only a child; but when that man came and held out his hand to take me, I was willing when they gave me to him,—when they sold me, Doctor Blecker. It was like leaving some choking pit, where air was given to me from other lungs, to go out and find it for my own. What marriage was or ought to be I did not know; but I wanted, as every human being does want, a place for my own feet to stand on, not to look forward to the life of an old maid, living on sufferance, always the one too many in the house.”

“ That is weak and vulgar argument, child. It should not touch a true woman, Grey. Any young girl can find work and honorable place for herself in the world, without the defilement of a false marriage.”

“ I know that now. But young girls are not taught that. I was only a child, not strong-willed. And now, when I’m free,” — a curious clearness coming to her eye, — “ I’m glad to think of it all. I never blame other women. Because, you see,”—looking up with the flickering smile,—“ a woman’s so hungry for something of her own to love, for some one to be kind to her, for a little house and parlor and kitchen of her own ; and if she marries the first man who says he loves her, out of that first instinct of escape from dependence, and hunger for love, she does not know she is selling herself, until it’s too late. The world’s all wrong, somehow.”

She stopped, her troubled face still upturned to his.

“ But you, — you are free now ? ”

“ He is dead.”

She slowly rose as she spoke, her voice hardening.

“ He was my cousin, you know, — the same name as mine. Only a year he was with me. Then he went to Cuba, where he died. He is dead. But I am not free,” — lifting her hands fiercely, as she spoke. “Nothing can wipe the stain of that year off of me.”

“You know what man he was,” said the Doctor, with a natural thrill of pleasure that he could say it honestly. “ I know, poor child ! A vapid, cruel tyrant, weak, foul. You hated him, Grey? There’s a strength of hatred in your blood. Answer me. You dare speak truth to me.”

“ He ’s dead now,” — with a long, choking breath. “ We will not speak of him.”

She stood a moment, looking down the stretch of curdling black water, — then, turning with a sudden gesture, as though she flung something from her, looked at him with a pitiful effort to smile.

“I don’t often think of that time. I cannot bear pain very well. I like to be happy. When I’m busy now, or playing with little Pen, I hardly believe I am the woman who was John Gurney’s wife. I was so old then ! I was like a hard, tigerish soul, tried and tempted day by day. He made me that.”

She could not bear pain, he saw : remembrance of it, alone, made the flesh about her lips blue, unsteadied her brain; the well-accented face grew vacant, dreary; neither nerves nor will of this woman were tough. Her family were not the stuff out of which voluntary heroes are made. He saw, too, she was thrusting it back, — out of thought: it was her temperament to do that.

“ So, now, Grey,” he said, cheerfully, “ the story’s told. Shall we lay that ghost of the old life, and see what these healthful new years have for us ? ”

Paul Blecker’s voice was never so strong or pure: whatever of coarseness had clung to him fell off then, as he came nearer to the weak woman whom God had given to him to care for; whatever of latent manhood, of chivalry, slept beneath, some day to make him an earnest husband and father, and helpful servant of the True Man, came out in his eager face and eye, now. He took her two hands in his: how strong his muscles were! how the man’s full pulse throbbed healthfully against her own ! She looked up with a sudden blush and smile. A minute ago she thought herself so strong to renounce ! She meant, this weak, incomplete woman, to keep to the shame of that foul old lie of hers, accepting that as her portion for life. There is a chance comes to some few women, once in their lives, to escape into the full development of their natures by contact with the one soul made in the same mould as their own. It came to this woman to-night. Grey was no theorist about it: all that she knew was, that, when Paul Blecker stood near her, for the first time in her life she was not alone, —that, when he spoke, his words were but more forcible utterances of her own thought, — that, when she thought of leaving him, it was like drawing thesoul from her living body, to leave it pulseless, dead. Yet she would do it. “ I am not fit to be any man’s wife. If you had come to me when I was a child, it might have been, — it ought to have been,”—with an effort to draw her hands from him.

Blecker only smiled, and seated her gently on the mossy boll of the beechtree.

“ Stay. Listen to me,” he whispered. And Grey, being a woman and no philosopher, sat motionless, her hands folded, nerveless, where he had let them fall, her face upturned, like that of the dead maiden waiting the touch of infinite love to tremble and glow back into beautiful life. He did not speak, did not touch her, only bent nearer. It seemed to him, as the pure moonlight then held them close in its silent bound, the great world hushed without, the light air scarce daring to touch her fair, waiting face, the slow-heaving breast, the kindling glow in her dark hair, that all the dead and impure years fell from them, and in a fresh new-born life they stood alone, with the great Power of strength and love for company. What need was there of words ? She knew it all: in the promise and question of his face waited for her the hope and vigor the time gone had never known: her woman’s nature drooped and leaned on his, content: the languid hazel eye followed his with such intent, one would have fancied that her soul in that silence had found its rest and home forever.

He took her hand, and drew from it the old ring that yet bound one of her fingers, the sign of a lie long dead, and without a word dropped it in the current below them. The girl looked up suddenly, as it fell: her eyes were wet: the woman whom Christ loosed from her infirmity of eighteen years might have thanked him with such a look as Grey’s that night. Then she looked back to her earthly master.

“ It is dead now, child, the past,—never to live again. Grey holds a new life in her hands to-night.” He stopped: the words came weak, paltry, for his meanng. "Is there nothing with which she cares to fill it ? no touch that will make it dear, holy for her ? ”

There was a heavy silence. Nature ose impatient in the crimson blood that yed her lips and cheek, in the brilliance of her eye ; but she forced back the words that would have come, and sat timid and trembling.

“None, Grey? You are strong and cool. I know. The lie dead and gone* from your life, you can control the years alone, with your religion and cheery strength. Is that what you would say ? ” — bitterly.

She did not answer. The color began to fade, the eyes to dim.

“ You have told me your story; let me tell you mine,”—throwing himself on the grass beside her. “ Look at me, Grey. Other women have despised me, as rough, callous, uncouth: you never have. I’ve had no hot-house usage in the world; the sun and rain hardly fell on me unpaid, I’ve earned every inch of this flesh and muscle, worked for it as it grew; the knowledge that I have, scanty enough, but whatever thought I do have of God or life, I’ve had to grapple and struggle for. Other men grow, inhale their being, like yonder tree God planted and watered. I think sometimes He forgot me,” — with a curious woman’s tremor in his voice, gone in an instant. “ I scrambled up like that scraggy parasite, without a root. Do you know now why I am sharp, wary, suspicious, doubt if there be a God ? Grey,” turning fiercely, “ I am tired of this. God did make me. I want rest. I want love, peace, religion, in my life.”

She said nothing. She forgot herself, her timid shyness now, and looked into his eyes, a noble, helpful woman, sounding the depths of the turbid soul laid bare for her.

He laid his big, ill-jointed hand on her knee.

“I thought,” he said, — great drops of sweat coming out on his sallow lips,— “ God meant you to help me. There is my life, little girl. You may do what you will with it. It does not value much to me.”

And Grey, woman-like, gathered up the despised hand and life, and sobbed a little as she pressed them to her heart. An hour after, they went together up the old porch-steps, halting a moment where the grape-vines clustered thickest about the shingled wall. The house was silent; even the village slept in the moonlight: no sound of life in the great sweep of dusky hill and valley, save the wreaths of mist over the watercourses, foaming and drifting together silently: before morning they would stretch from base to base of the hills like a Dead Sea, ashy and motionless. They stood silent a moment, until the chirp of some robin, frightened by their steps in its nest overhead, had hummed drowsily down into sleep.

“It is not good-night, but good-bye, that I must bid you, Grey,” he said, stooping to see her face.

“I know. But you will come again. God tells me that.”

“I will come. Remember, Grey, I am going to save life, not to take it. Corrupt as I am, my hands are clean of this butchery for the sake of interest.”

Grey’s eyes wandered. She knows nothing about the war, to be candid: only that it is like a cold pain at her heart, day and night, — sorry that the slaves are slaves, wondering if they could be worse off than the free negroes swarming in the back-alleys yonder, — as sorry, being unpatriotic, tor the homeless women in Virginia as for the stolen horses of Chambersburg. Grey’s principles, though mixed, are sound, as far as they go, you see. Just then thinking only of herself.

“ You will come back to me ? ” clinging to his arm.

“ Why, I must come back,” cheerfully, choking back whatever stopped his breath, pushing back the curling hair from her forehead with a half-reverential touch. “ I have so much to do, little girl! There is a farm over yonder I mean to earn enough to buy, where you and I shall rest and study and grow, — stronger and healthier, more helpful every day. We ’ll find our work and place in the world yet, poor child! You shall show me what a pure, earnest life is, Grey, and above us — what there is there,” lowering his voice. " And I, — how much I have to do with this bit of humanity here on my hands ! ” — playfully, “ An unhewn stone, with the beautiful statue lying perdu within. Did you know you were that, Grey ? and I the sculptor ? ”

She looked up bewildered.

“ It is true,” passing his fingers over the low, broad, curiously moulded forehead. “ My girl does not know what powers and subtile forces lie asleep beneath this white skin ? I know. I know lights and words and dramas of meaning these childish eyes hold latent: that I will set free. I will teach your very silent lips a new language. You never guessed how like a prison your life has been, how unfinished you are ; but I thank God for it, Grey. You would not have loved me, if it had been different; I can grow with you now, grow to your height, if— He helps me.”

He took off his hat, and stood, looking silently into the deep blue above, — for the first time in his life coming to his Friend with a manly, humble look. His eyes were not clear when he spoke again, his voice very quiet.

“ Good bye, Grey ! I’m going to try to be a better man than I’ve ever been. You are my wife now in His eyes. I need you so: for life and for eternity, I think. You will remember that ? ”

And so, holding her to his heart a moment or two, and kissing her lips passionately once or twice, he left her, trying to smile as he went down the path, but with a strange clogging weight in his breast, as if his heart would not beat.

Going in, Grey found the old negro asleep over his knitting, the caudle with a flaring black crust beside him.

“ He waited for me,” she said ; and as she stroked the skinny old hand, the tears came at the thought of it. Everybody was so kind to her! The world was so full of love ! God was so good to her tonight !

Oth, waking fully as she helped him to his room-door, looked anxiously in her face.

“Er' ye well to-night, chile ? ” he said. “Yer look as yer did when yer wor a little baby. Peart an’ purty yer wor, dat’s true. Der good Lord loved yer, I think.”

“ He loves me now,” she said, softly, to herself, as in her own room she knelt ’down and thanked Him, and then, undressed, crept into the white trundle-bed beside little Pen ; and when he woke, and, putting his little arms about her neck, drew her head close to his to kiss her good-night, she cried quietly to herself, and fell asleep with the tears upon her cheek.

Her sister, in the next room to hers, with the same new dream in her heart, did not creep into any baby’s arms for sympathy. Lizzy Gurney never had a pet, dog or child. She sat by the window waiting, her shawl about her head in the very folds McKinstry had wrapped it, motionless, as was her wont. But for the convulsive movement of her lips now and then, no gutta-percha doll could be more utterly still. As the night wore down into the intenser sleep of the hours after midnight, her watch grew more breathless. The moon sank far enough in the west to throw the beams directly across her into the dark chamber behind. She was a small - moulded woman, you could see now : her limbs, like those of a cat, -or animals of that tribe, from their power of trance-like quiet, gave you the idea of an intense vitality: a gentle face, — pretty, the villagers called it, from its waxy tint and faint coloring,—you wished to do something for her, seeing it. Paul Blecker never did: the woman never spoke to him ; but he noted often the sudden relaxed droop of the eyelids, when she sat alone, as if some nerve had grown weary : he had seen that peculiarity in some women before, and knew all it meant. He had nothing for her ; her hunger lay out of his ken.

It grew later : the moon hung now so low that deep shadows lay heavy over the whole valley; not a breath broke the sleep of the night; even the long melancholy howl of the dog down in camp was hushed long since. When the clock struck two, she got up and went noiselessly out into the open air. There was no droop in her eyelids now; they were straight, nerved, the eyes glowing with a light never seen by day beneath them. Down the long path into the cornfield, slowly, pausing at some places, while her lips moved as though she repeated words once heard there. What folly was this ? Was tins woman’s life so bare, so empty of its true food, that she must needs go back and drag again into life a few poor, happy moments ? distil them slowly, to drink them again drop by drop ? I have seen children so live over in their play the one great holiday of their lives. Down through the field to the creek-ford, where the stones lay for crossing, slippery with moss: she could feel the strong grasp of the hand that had led her over there that night; and so, with slow and yet slower step, where the path had been rocky, and she had needed cautious help. Into the thicket of lilacs, with the old scent of the spring blossoms yet hanging on their boughs; along the bank, where her foot had sunk deep into plushy moss, where he had gathered a cluster of fern and put it into her hand. Its pale feathery green was not more quaint or pure than the delicate love in the uncouth man beside her, — not nearer kin to Nature. Did she know that ? Had it been like the breath of God coming into her nostrils to be so loved, appreciated, called home, as she had been to-night ? Was she going back to feel that breath again ? Neither pain nor pleasure was on her face : her breath came heavy and short, her eyes shone, that was all. Out now into the open road, stopping and glancing around with every broken twig, being a cowardly creature, yet never leaving the track of the footsteps in the dust, where she had gone before. Coming at last to the old-fashioned gabled house, where she had gone when she was a child, set in among stiff rows of evergreens. A breathless quiet always hung about the place : a pure, wholesome atmosphere, because pure and earnest people had acted out their souls there, and gone home to God. He had led her through the gate here, given her to drink of the well at the side of the house. “ My mother never would taste any water but this, do you remember, Lizzy ? ” They had gone through the rooms, whispering, if they spoke, as though it were a church. Here was the pure dead sister’s face looking down from the wall; there his mother’s worn wicker workstand. Her work was in it still. “ The needle just where she placed it, Lizzy.” The strong man was weak as a little child with the memory of the old mother who had nursed and loved him as no other could love. He stood beside her chair irresolute ; forty years ago he had stood there, a little child bringing all his troubles to be healed”: since she died no hand had touched it. “ Will you sit there, Lizzy ? You are dearer to me than she. When I come back, will you take their place here ? Only you are pure as they, and dearer, Lizzy. We will go home to them hand in hand.” She sat in the dead woman’s chair. She. Looking in at her own heart as she did it. Yet her love for him would make her fit to sit there: she believed that. He had not kissed her, — she was too sacred to the simple-hearted man for that,—had only taken her little hand in both his, saying, “ God bless you, little Lizzy! ” in an unsteady voice.

“ He may never say it again,” the girl said, when she crept home from her midnight pilgrimage. “ I ’ll come here every day and live it all over again. It will keep me quiet until he comes. Maybe he ’ll never come,” — catching her breast, and tearing it until it grew black. She was so tired of herself, this child ! She would have torn that nerve in her heart out that sometimes made her sick, if she could. Her life was so cramped, and selfish, too, and she knew it. Passing by the door of Grey’s room, she saw her asleep with Pen in her arms, — some other little nightcapped heads in the larger beds. She slept alone. “ They tire me so! ” she said ; “ yet I think,” her eye growing fiercer, “ if I had anything all my own, if I had a little baby to make pure and good, I 'd be a better girl. Maybe — he will make me better.”

Paul Blecker, heart-anatomist, laughed when this woman, with the aching brain and the gnawing hunger at heart, seized on the single, Christ-like love of McKinstry, a common, bigoted man, and made it her master and helper. Her instinct was wiser than he, being drifted by God’s under-currents of eternal order. That One who knows when the sparrow is ready for death knows well what things are needed for a tired girl’s soul.