An Innocent Life

IT was a warm October afternoon. The rich light rested caressingly on the earth, and the village street and the fields and woodlands behind the houses added their own beauty to that of the sweet radiance from the heavens.

Mary Gardner stood at her gateway. She was an elderly woman. She wore a gray woolen gown and had a Quaker kerchief pinned across her breast. Her muslin cap was tied with narrow white ribbons under her chin. That chin was firm and round as a girl’s. Her features were straight and delicate, and her brow had a calm and gentle expression. There was just now a wistful look in her gray heavy-lidded eyes.

A young girl came out of the small brown house in the yard and walked to the gate. “ It’s half an hour since the train whistled,” said she.

Mary Gardner sighed. “ I’m afraid he has n’t come. I don’t know whatever we shall do, Rebecca.”

“ I suppose,” said Rebecca, “ I ‘d better milk the cow and feed Jack myself.”

“ Yes,” replied the mother.

The two women went toward the barn, an old unpainted structure. They passed a wagon-shop on the way. The door stood open, and revealed the bench, the tools, an anvil, and a half-finished wagon within. Rebecca shut the door and locked it.

“How lonesome it seems! ” observed Mary.

Rebecca was like her mother, but was taller, and her cheeks were pink and her eyes dark. She looked serene and unworldly.

The cow stood in her stall. Rebecca had driven her up from the meadow an hour before. Mary fed the horse while the girl milked. The light meanwhile grew yellower and more mysterious. By the time the two women entered the house heavy shadows had crept into the corners of the rooms.

Rebecca poured the milk into shallow pans.

“I ’ll make thee a good cup of tea, mother.”

Mary Gardner sat down by a little table close to the window that gave a view of the street. Rebecca came and turned up her mother’s face, and saw tears upon her cheeks.

“Now,” she said, “don’t thee cry. Father’s all right. They won’t keep him in the court room all night. Luke Robbins told me this afternoon that when a jury was kept all night they took ’em to a hotel. Think of father’s going to a hotel ! I dare say he ’ll like it.”

“ No, he won’t,” sobbed Mary Gardner simply. “ Father’s such a home body. He was born in the room he sleeps in now. He ’s never slept out of this house in all his life. He never wanted to go from home. I ‘ve often heard his mother tell how, when he was about fifteen, he drove his sister Sally and Martha Lowe, a visiting Friend from England, over to his uncle Jonathan’s, in the Mowry neighborhood, to Quarterly Meeting, and they all calculated to stay two or three days. But toward night his mother heard the gate open, and she run to the window, and there was Roger comin’ up the yard. He’d left the horse and carryall with them, and he’d walked home by the Loasquissett road, crossing the river in a rowboat. He pretended he ’d come because he thought mother Gardner ’d be lonesome ; but she knew it was just because he was such a home body. And it tickled her lots. She used to say she never felt more desirous to please Friends at Quarterly Meeting times than she did that night to make something real tasty for that boy’s supper. He never even wanted to go to Yearly Meeting. At first I was afraid he had n’t the concerns of the Society at heart, but I’ve got through thinking that. It’s the way he’s made. I ’ve left him once or twice, but I never see night come on in this house without his bein’ somewheres within call.”

Her voice died away in a little quaver. Rebecca felt depressed. Both women, indeed, were really suffering from the strangeness of their situation, alone in Roger Gardner’s home without Roger Gardner there.

They sat thus forlorn in the kitchen when a rap sounded at the door.

“It’s Luke Robbins, mother,” said Rebecca a few moments later, when she returned from ushering the visitor into the sitting-room and lighting the lamp therein.

“ Thee go in,” said Mary. “ I don’t feel like seeing any one.”

But Rebecca faced her mother, with a laugh in her girlish eyes.

“ If thee does n’t come in,” she declared, “I shall stay here with thee.”

Mary sighed, and went into the other room with her daughter. Luke Robbins, a swarthy, middle-aged Quaker with a smoothly shaven face, greeted her awkwardly. Rebecca seated herself and folded her hands. The talk languished a little till a neighbor came in, whom Mary took out to the pantry to see her new-made jellies, and Luke was left alone with Rebecca, who dared not flee again.

He stared at the floor and his mouth worked ; then he moved his chair toward the girl.

“ Rebecca.”

She started nervously. This man was almost the only influence which had yet entered her young life which could disturb its serenity. Her susceptibility to irritation from his presence revealed in her a more sensitive and less poised nature than her calm appearance usually implied.

“ Rebecca,” he said again.

“ Now don’t speak in that way,” she answered. “ I don’t like it.”

“It’s the only way I can speak,” he retorted boldly, “ when I tell thee what is borne in on my mind. I want to marry thee. And I believe the Lord means I shall marry thee, soon or late.”

She sprang to her feet, and pushed her chair before her like a barricade between them.

“Well, I don’t mean to marry thee, no matter what thee believes, Luke Robbins,” she cried impetuously, “ and I know I should hate it worse than anything else in the world ! ”

He came toward her, but she ran out to the kitchen. He could not follow her and meet the older women there, but he said in low tones which pursued her, “ I shall wait, Rebecca.”

When Mary and her friend came back, he was so decorous and composed in manner that they thought the girl’s sudden rush, which they had noticed, must have been caused solely because she had heard her kitten mew at the back door and wished to let it into the house. Luke took his leave speedily, so they had no time to wonder why she did not return with the kitten in her arms.

Roger Gardner had been obliged that day to go to the county town of Preston to serve on the jury. It was a murder case, but as there was no capital punishment in that State Roger’s Quaker principles did not prevent his serving. Still, he found everything connected with the service extremely repugnant, — the crowded court room, the odors, the jokes, the brutalized faces.

One of his companions on the jury, a wiry, town-bred man, nudged him occasionally and tried to impart worldly information to him ; but Roger shook his head at last, and said, “ Thy speech does not seem to me of a gravity befitting the occasion;" and so silenced him.

Roger’s face during most of the day was a subject from which to make a study of bewildered simplicity. Innocent as a child or a woman may be yet no human countenance is so capable of expressing a pathetic, and in one sense beautiful, lack of intelligence in the presence of the larger and worse life of the world as is the face of an old man whose instincts and experience have kept him unsullied and ignorant and childlike. Men are so much less analytic than women that they have to know more of evil than women do in order to comprehend its significance.

For a long time Roger felt stupefied ; but finally a sort of intellectual concentration came into his look. His halfopened mouth shut tightly. The lines about his eyes sharpened. His very nostrils seemed more clearly cut. The flesh upon his cheeks acquired a firmer modeling.

The prisoner had drawn a deep sigh, and the sadness of the sound had roused the old man to a tardy recognition of the fact that it was his duty to listen to the evidence. The prisoner was a dullfaced negro who, when drunk, had murdered a woman. There was no doubt about the deed, — only a question as to the man’s responsibility in doing it. Roger began to feel how pitiful it all was. He grew absorbed, and scarcely noted the waning of the afternoon light.

The jury were unable to agree at once, and so it came about that in due time Roger was led to the hotel to pass the night. Ignorant of city customs, uneasy with his fellow-jurors, afraid of gas, alarmed by the table-waiter, the sob in his throat prevented his eating any supper.

The next day dawned in clear, bright beauty. Mary Gardner went about her tasks with an expectant feeling. Toward noon she heard the click of the gate-latch. She was ironing, but she set her flat-iron down on the towel she was smoothing and ran to the door. Roger came up the path, his blue eyes shining mildly. He had a brown, refined face. He held out his hand to his wife.

“ Oh,” she cried, “ thee does n’t know how I have missed thee ! ”

He kissed her rather sedately. “Well,” he said, “ it looks real natural here. I don’t never want to go away again.”

“ Thee ’s such a home body,” replied Mary admiringly.

Then he told his story, — how lonesome he had felt, how he had got up from bed twice to make sure he had turned off the gas, how his room-mate had snored.

Rebecca hung over him fondly.

“ I declare,” he said, “ thy mother and I lived together without a child nigh twenty year, but I think almost as much of thee as of her, now thee’s here, Rebecca.”

“We cried last night,” observed she, in a tone that showed she thought those tears quite creditable to the family. “ And see,” she added, “ how mother put down the iron and scorched the towel, when she heard thee coming.”

Roger examined the burnt spot; then he turned to his laughing daughter. “ If mother don’t look out,” he remarked, smiling, “she’ll grow to be as shiftless as her aunt Asenath Mowry.”

“ Oh, I know! ” cried Rebecca gleefully. “ She was the silly one that cut up a new shirt to mend two old ones, and said it made them ‘most as good as new.”

“Yes,” said Roger, “and it was she that cut up a sheet to make a night-cap.”

“ Now do be still. Ain’t you ashamed ? ” said Mary Gardner ; but as she spoke she smiled contentedly, and folded the burnt towel and put it away with the whole ones.

The neighbors came in to see Roger. Everybody liked him, and the men had always thought Mary beautiful, though the women said of her “they didn’t know which surprised them most, — the sense she showed when you did n’t expect it, or her foolishness when you thought she’d be sensible.”

Nearly all the men had been to war or had traveled on peaceful errands. They had been wont to consider themselves superior to Roger because of their wider experience, and had regarded his home-keeping habits with kindly laughter and rough but friendly contempt. Now it suddenly seemed that there must be something very wonderful in the thoughts of this man who had just passed a night away from home for the first time in a life of more than sixty years. They were eager to know what those thoughts might be.

“ What do you think of our courts ? ” they asked.

“ It’s all a confusion,” he said, “ with the idle men an’ boys a-sittin’ round. They ’re learning nothing but evil ways. They hear how the prisoner got caught robbing and murdering, and they get ideas how to do such things themselves and not get found out. They look like hungry animals waitin’ their turn to be fed.” ‘

Mary Gardner got up, and, as she crossed the room, touched Roger softly on the sleeve of his coat. She had an indefinite feeling that his experiences had removed him from her, and she wanted the vague comfort of his touch to assure herself that he still belonged to her.

“ You convicted the prisoner, did n’t you ? ” asked some one.

The old man’s face clouded. “ He’s behind the bars,” he said. “It’s all a muddle to me. The ways of men are as hard to understand as the ways of God sometimes. I don’t see as a man’s more likely to grow good in a jail than in a good home. He never had the home,— the testimony showed that,— so now they ’re tryin’ the jail on him.”

The sunshine streamed in through the western windows of the sitting-room. There were no pictures on the walls, but the ceiling was low and the room did not look bare. Mary and Rebecca had made the bright-colored rugs strewn over the carpeted floor. They called them “mats.” A fire burned in a small open stove. Rebecca shuddered trying to think what a cell in a jail was like.

After supper Roger and Mary strolled out into the field beyond their garden. Roger had purchased this land some years before. It had been a part of the farm which his ancestors had held, but it had fallen to other heirs, and he had bought it from a distant relative.

Near the line between this field and his house lot Roger had set out a row of apple-trees. One of these trees was laden with apples. Some had fallen on the grass. The old husband and wife picked them up and munched them, and chattered together like a pair of barn swallows.

“ Luke Robbins was here last evenin’,” observed she.

“ I don’t know about Luke,” said he. “ He ’d want to take her to his place. I hope Rebecca ’ll marry somebody so she can live with us, and we ’ll keep another cow.”

That night Roger was taken ill. It was the old story,— a short, hard fight, and then an apparent improvement.

“ Come to bed,” he called, the third night. “ Don’t set up, Mary. I ’ll rest easier to know thee’s restin’.”

She lay down beside him, and listened to his breathing for an hour; then she fell asleep, woke with a start, put out her hand, touched him, sat up, and gave a wild cry.

Rebecca came running into the room. Roger lay perfectly still. She bent over him, picked up his heavy hands and rubbed them. Mary Gardner got out of bed, and leaned against the bedpost.

“ Oh, mother,” cried the girl, her young voice shrill with entreaty, “ why don’t thee do something for father ? ”

Then Mary spoke in a low tone : “ I never can do anything for him again so long’s I live.”

The day of the funeral came. People assembled, and talked in hushed whispers.

“ I wonder if he’s left ’em comfortably off,” they said. “ Rebecca’s a pretty smart girl, anyhow. I guess they ’ll get along.”

The harmless gossip was soon ended. It was a Quaker funeral. Two or three of the women wore Quaker bonnets. The men were mostly villagers and farmers. Their necks and wrists looked very brown beside their white linen. They had rough beards hanging from their chins. They had gentle, honest eyes. The undertaker, with his black kid gloves, did not seem in harmony with the homely nature of the scene.

When all were seated, a solemn stillness pervaded the house. It was just like a meeting in the meeting-house.

The minutes crawled. The rooms grew warm and close. Rebecca heard her own heart beat. The clock on the shelf struck twelve, and as it finished one in the kitchen began, like an echo ; and after that, faint, far-off pealings came to Rebecca’s ears. The bells in distant factories were ringing. The world, in its noonday hurry, repeated the sounds within that house of death. Into Rebecca’s mind came the memory of her father’s description of the court room, the confusion and the wrong in the city; and still the far-off bells rang, and did not suggest sweet, homelike ceremonies as did the clocks that had ceased their striking. The girl felt vaguely that there was some mysterious relation between her soul and this strange outer world, and she grew afraid of the thought. Death seemed easier than life to her slowly awakening nature. “ Father, father!” she cried in her heart.

Luke Robbins sat by the window. His heavy black brows were drawn over his half-closed eyes, and his mouth worked continually.

At last he stood up. “ I am reminded,” he began, “of the flight of Time.” His voice rose into a wild chant. “We are passing,” he sang, “ with the hours into eternity. They call our spirits onward where the dear departed one has gone before us. Prepare, prepare ye your hearts, for the bridegroom cometh, and whither he will carry us no man knoweth, nor the hour thereof.”

His head drooped forward as he preached. His eyes were but a black gleam between his long eyelashes. He held the corners of his mouth together, but opened it wide in the centre, and hurled his words forth from the orifice with increasing energy. Once he paused, shut his lips and smacked them as if the spiritual flavor of his words were good. As he became more excited he shut his eyes entirely, and then he lifted his head, like one unabashed, and his whole gaunt frame rocked with the force with which his voice rushed from him.

“ And for the loved ones left behind,” he chanted, “we pray thee, O God. We commend them to thy tender mercy, O Lord, — the dear wife and the dear daughter.”

Rebecca moved in her seat. His tones had, on her disturbed spirit, the terrifying effect of a stormy wind. It was a solace to her when silence fell again upon the assembly.

Then a Quaker-clad woman began to preach. She had a sweet, caressing voice, full of such tender intonations that even when she spoke of “ the enemy that goeth about like a lion seeking whom he may devour ” it sounded as if she were musically uttering a lullaby. Tears came gently to Rebecca’s eyes. " Father, father,” she said yet again in her heart, but with a quiet confidence now that, wherever he had gone, he had not forgotten his child.

But Mary Gardner was not content, for the preacher whom she most longed to hear sat silent through all the services.

“ I thought,” she said quite piteously, that evening, “that the Spirit would surely move Joseph Wayland to-day.”

Her lips trembled, but she said no’ more, since she knew she must not blame the Spirit for not moving, and it was useless to complain of Friend Wayland himself in such a matter.

She was very quiet. Rebecca slept with her. The next day she took part in all the work necessary to put the house back in its accustomed order. Toward evening, however, she sat down, and did not speak for a full hour. Then when Rebecca brought in the lamp she fell to weeping violently.

“ I ‘m just as unreconciled as I can be,” she sobbed. “ I want to see him so much.”

The winter passed slowly. Rebecca had one interest, — a friendship, growing constantly closer, with Miss Esther Williams, the middle-aged daughter of a minister. Miss Williams was highly educated, and she gave the girl books to read, and helped to develop her mind and character.

The March winds blew at last over an earth that, tremulous with the expectation of spring, seemed surprised by their rude violence.

Mary Gardner and Rebecca sat peacefully sewing by the windows of their sitting-room. They were turning sheets, and heaps of snowy cloth lay around them.

A buggy stopped at the gate, and two men alighted. One was short, red-faced, and elderly. The other was tall, fairhaired, young, and comely. The short man carried a small leather bag.

“ I do believe,” said Rebecca, “ that’s Lawyer Stimpson from Preston. What does thee suppose he’s come here for ? ”

The Quaker widow raised her calm eyes. “ Oh,” replied she, “ it’s something about land. I had a letter last week. Go let them in.”

She did not put away her sewing as Rebecca ushered in the strangers, but when the men were seated the girl piled the sheets up compactly.

Mr. Stimpson introduced himself, and then presented his companion as “Mr. Arnold, Mr. Hugh Arnold, who has come with me in the interests of his father.”

Mr. Hugh blushed slightly and looked at his boots, while the lawyer stated their business.

Rebecca listened intently. She knew, as all the village knew, that the land lying south of their field had come into the possession of one Frederick Arnold, of Boston, and that he proposed to build on it a great country house. Indeed, work on the estate was already begun. Now she heard that this Mr. Arnold put forth a claim to the strip which her father had purchased years before, on the ground that some woman’s right of dower in it had never been signed away, and so the title of the man who sold it to her father had been defective. She did not understand clearly all the details about minor heirs and feminine rights, and she looked at her mother, who sewed steadily all the time Mr. Stimpson talked.

Hugh raised his eyes once or twice and let their glances rest on the girl. He thought he had never seen a human face so like that of the Venus of Milo.

“ My client does not wish,” said Mr. Stimpson, “to take any advantage of you, Mrs. Gardner; but he feels it best for all parties concerned that this affair should be definitely arranged now, and he also very much desires to incorporate this field in his estate, to make his lawn square. I am therefore instructed to lay the matter before you, and ask you what lawyer I shall consult on your behalf.”

Mary Gardner handed her needle to Rebecca. “ Please thread it for me, daughter,” she said ; then she turned her mild face toward the lawyer. Her white hair shone under the edge of her cap.

“ I don’t see,” she continued, “ that there is any need to talk with a lawyer.

I think Rebecca and I can fix everything. I suppose, of course, thee is speaking the exact truth ?”

“ Indeed ” — began Mr. Stimpson ; but Hugh broke in : —

“ You may rely on our having told you the absolute truth, Mrs. Gardner.”

“ I am empowered,” said Mr. Stimpson, “ to offer you a certain sum of money, if you will cede your claim to the land ; but I should prefer to negotiate this part of the business with your lawyer.”

“ I don’t want any lawyer,” replied Mary. “ Thee and this young man have both assured me thee has told me the facts, and what more could any other man do ? My husband,” she added, “ bought the land of Timothy Brayton, and I understand that he had no right to sell it.

“ Yes,” said Mr. Stimpson, amazed into brevity.

“ And this money,” continued the widow, “ which Frederick Arnold offers me does not come from Timothy Brayton, to whom my husband paid money ? ” “ Oh, no,” replied the lawyer, with the little chuckle which he held to be the due of successful knavery. “Not a bit of it. You ought to get it out of Timothy, but Mr. Arnold knows that would be hard work, and he wishes to make you some recompense.”

“ It’s only fair ! ” cried Hugh hotly.

“Indeed, I think we ought to buy the land of you, just as if you were the real owners.”

The lawyer threw the young fellow a quick, disapproving glance.

“ Well,” said Mary Gardner, « I don’t know what thee and thy father ought to do, but I know that my daughter and I cannot possibly sell what we don ‘t own. That would he doing what Timothy Brayton did. So we can ;t take any money from thy father. I suppose there will be papers to sign saying we give up the land. Are they ready ? ”

Mr. Stimpson exclaimed. Hugh protested. Rebecca said nothing, but sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking as if the word “ money ’’ meant nothing to her. The unworldliness of the two women baffled the men. Mary was immovable in her decision.

Hugh flatly refused to conclude the business that day, and he and Mr. Stimpson took their leave.

“ I never felt so much like a thief in my life,” he said, when lie and the lawyer were driving back to Preston. “ Good heavens, what does give anybody a title to possess some of God ’s earth, if goodness and simplicity and all the qualities God’s children ought to have don’t do it ? ”

Mr. Stimpson looked at the lad carelessly. “She’s a mighty pretty girl,” he remarked; but Hugh took no notice of the insinuation, and went on vehemently : —

“If there’s one thing I ‘m thankful for, it is that I ‘m not a lawyer like you. I would n’t spend my life poking about among musty old papers till I got muddled into thinking there was nothing sacred in the world but property. Property! — I believe it’s the biggest sham that was ever invented to fool mankind with.”

“ Look here, young man,”said Mr. Stimpson good-naturedly. “ The trouble with you is, you ‘ve got such a lot of money you don’t in the least know what it would be to try to scrape along in this world without it, and so you don’t value it.”

“ It ’s just because I ‘ve seen so much of real poverty.” continued Hugh, “ that I think in our notions of property there’s something wrong which has caused all the misery in the world.” For Mr. Hugh had for some time past employed his leisure hours among the poor of large cities, and his curly head buzzed with ideas on the subject of their relief.

Mr. Stimpson laughed. “ Oh, you ve seen poverty,” he said ; “ that ain’t the same as feeling it. I’ve felt it. And I tell you, it would let more daylight into your brain in twenty-four hours than you ’re likely to get in a lifetime of ease, if you could be where I ‘ve been, and not know — really not know at all — where your next meal was coming from, and know very well all the time that not a human being, except your mother, may be, cared one straw whether you ever had a next meal. That gives you a sense of the lonesomeness of life ; and if ever you were in such a scrape and got out of it, as I did, and got hold of some property, and felt how solid it was, I don ‘t believe you’d ever talk any more about its being a sham. You’d know how good it is to have some.”

Hugh looked at the older man curiously. “ But what about the people,” he suggested, " who never get out of such a scrape as you describe, and who never get out of it as long as you and I bold on to our notions that property is sacred ? ”

I don ‘t know that there are any such people,”replied the lawyer, raising his voice a little and growing a trifle redder. “ I got out of it. I guess they could it they tried hard enough.”

All sorts of ideas rushed through the lad’s mind, but he decided it would do no good to talk to this man about the influence of heredity, environment, and economic institutions in keeping some people in hopeless poverty. Besides, he was not yet quite certain what he did think about the rights of wealth and the laws of economy, so he refrained from throwing out any more rash remarks, but inwardly reiterated the resolve, which was daily growing stronger within, that he would never cease trying to see what was real and what was artificial in the laws and customs that made up the social fabric of his day. And after a little silent thought upon this subject, the face of Rebecca Gardner rose again upon his mental vision, while he drove over the stony country road, lined with bare bushes, whose boughs were beginning to redden with the promise of the springtime.

Meanwhile Mary and Rebecca sat idle at home, and watched a golden glory come into the western sky. They did not feel like sewing any more. Mary picked some stray threads off her gown and rolled them up in little balls. As the sun sank below the horizon, she said, a sob breaking through her sweet, trembling voice : —

Rebecca, it seems so lonesome to do things without thy father. I wish I could go wherever he is.”

A year and more rolled away. It was May in New England, and the odorous earth offered itself to the inspection of the sky without fear lest any blemish should he found on its beauty.

Rebecca was in the garden cutting dandelions and delicate shepherd’s grass for greens. She gathered some young leaves from the currant bushes to increase her store. A yellow - breasted bird bobbed his little black head on a shrub near her. Soft, sweet noises filled the aii1.

Rebecca wore a faded blue gingham dress. Her eyes glowed. Mary Gardner came slowly along the path.

“ How finely the rhubarb grows ! ” she said.

No woman ever loved her garden and all the green things growing in it more than Mary Gardner did. She looked across to the fields which men were busy transforming into a park for Mr. Arnold.

“ They say,” said she, “ that Frederick Arnold means to have the grass cut every week. It’s a dreadful waste of hay to do that.”

“ I suppose,” replied Rebecca, “ that he thinks it’s prettier, but I like the tall waving grass.”

“ Yes, that’s beautiful,” observed her mother, “and it’s sinful to spoil good hay land like that.

She walked on to the boundary line, where a low stone fence had been placed.

“ I ’m very thankful,” she thought, “ that Frederick Arnold has n’t cut down these apple-trees.”

She reached out her hand and softly touched a bough of the tree whose fruit she and Roger had eaten together.

Meanwhile Hugh Arnold entered the garden and went to a little bench where Rebecca had seated herself to pick over her dandelions. The young girl greeted him shyly. She had not seen him often. She had heard strange stories of his work among the destitute dwellers in the city, the queerly rendered village gossip about the half-comprehended interests and pursuits of different modes of life.

He began to help her select the dandelions that were fit to use.

“ Thee ‘ll stain thy fingers.”

He laughed. Such staining in such company seemed a pleasant diversion on a bright spring morning. She felt pleased and happy, but when she next spoke there was something abrupt and bashful in her manner.

“ I ‘ve heard,” she said, “ that thee is interested in very poor people. Is it true ? ”

“ Yes, I guess so,” he answered.

“ Does thee ever go to the jail in Preston ? ”

“ No, I have never been there.”

“ Oh, I thought may be thee had.”

She shook the refuse leaves from her lap, and appeared about to fall into an obstinate silence.

“ Why did you ask ? ” said he. “ I can go there. Can I do anything for you ? ”

“ There ’s a negro there,”she replied. “My father was on the jury. I hey had to convict him, but I know it troubled father, — and then father died.

I ‘ve always wanted to do something for that negro, but I didn’t know how. I want to send him a book.”

Hugh’s heart beat a little more quickly than usual. Rebecca was very beautiful at that moment.

“ I ‘ll find out about the man, and take him anything you want to send,”he said.

“ It is very good in thee, ” she answered, and their young eyes met.

It was three or four weeks later when Rebecca next saw Hugh. She and her mother stood in the yard beside a rosebush whose vinelike branches clambered over a small pear-tree. Rebecca’s hands were full of pink roses. Hugh came into the yard bringing a bunch of large white field daisies.

“ You cannot take my daisies ? ” asked he, looking at her laden hands.

“ Mother will take them,” answered Rebecca, but Mary Gardner smiled.

“ No,” she said. “ Give me thy roses. I don’t like the white weed.”

“ Why ? ” exclaimed Hugh. “ See how beautiful it is ! ”

The old Quaker woman’s face was in its way as fair as the daisies, and her hair was as white as their petals. “ I can’t see any prettiness in it,”she persisted. “ It’s a great torment to farmers, — a very troublesome weed. These roses are pretty,” and she took them from Rebecca and carried them into the house.

Hugh handed his flowers rather awkwardly to the girl, who, turning toward his father’s lawn, began hurriedly to talk about that.

I never saw such a fine place,” she remarked, “ except once when I went to Yearly Meeting and saw the houses at Newport.”

“Yearly Meeting?” he repeated, in a puzzled tone. “What’s that? Oh, I remember ! It. ’s something about the Quakers, is n’t it ? ”

She did not answer. She felt suddenly that his life and hers were very far apart. He scarcely knew what YearlyMeeting was. Her heart sank, but his voice roused her attention. He told her that he had carried her book to the jail, and that he had had a long talk with the negro. He explained to her some plans he had begun to make about the man ’s future, although all the possibilities of that future were restricted within the compass of prison walls. He had a deep, sweet voice. She listened with a growing sense of large and liberal elements in life.

Mary Gardner came to the door and called : —

“Rebecca, I see Luke Robbins coming up the road. I. want to, send some preserve to his mother. Will thee come and get it ? ”

Hugh saw Rebecca give a sort of shuddering start. He put out his hand impulsively and held her as she moved away.

“ Wait a minute,” he said, — “ just a minute. I want to tell you something.

I am going to Europe for a few weeks. Don’t forget me while I’m gone.”

She looked at him with parted lips, on which the very breath was hushed, and for one silent moment he returned her gaze ; then her mother’s voice sounded with a more impatient note in it than usual: —

“ Rebecca, is thee coming ? ”

Without a word more the young creatures drifted apart, as if Mary Gardner’s call were endowed with the force to move them in opposite directions.

As Hugh left the yard he met the Quaker preacher coming in, his sombre black eyes bent upon the ground.

“ I must cut a pretty figure in her eyes, thought Hugh, striding off rapidly? " helping my father gouge her out of her land first, and then bringing her daisies by way of recompense, and philanthropic moonshine for entertainment.”

The summer glided by. A pathetic expression came into Rebecca’s eyes which modified the Greek calmness of her beauty.

The stone walls of the Arnold house were rising. Members of the Arnold family came to hoard in the village and watch the building. The ladies wore white gowns in the morning, and marvelously tinted ones in the evening. The village folk wondered at their ways, at their maid and men servants, their horses and odd carriages. Mary Gardner disapproved of everything in connection with the family.

“ I don’t think Hugh is quite in unity with the way his family lives,” Rebecca ventured timidly to say, one day when the young man had been included in her mother s condemnation of the luxurious, idle life which his mother and sisters seemed to the Quaker woman to live.

“ How does thee know what he is in unity with ? ” retorted Mary, with that unexpected shrewdness she sometimes showed, and Rebecca was dumb.

Luke Robbins came constantly to the cottage now. For along time after Rebecca had refused to marry him he had stayed away, and she thought he had given her up; but it was quite evident that he had only been biding his time, and with a sinking heart the girl recognized the fact that he thought his time had now come. She was afraid of his persistency. She feared lest she should yield to it in some hour of weakness. His fanatical fancy that the Lord intended her to marry him had the terrifying effect upon her nerves of a half-credited ghost story.

Mary Gardner looked at the matter more rationally.

4" If thee can make her like thee, Luke,” she said to him, “ that will be enough leading for her. I would in ‘t talk to her about the Lord’s will. Girls sometimes get set against the Lord ’s will; they like their own better.”

But Mary was more able to advise Luke how to act his part wisely than to act her own with discretion. She praised Luke to Rebecca as constantly as she criticised the Arnolds. Luke had a farm. He led a simple, godly life, such as she could appreciate. She liked his pursuits. His grass fulfilled its destiny and grew into hay. His barns were odorous with its scent. He rooted up his daisies. She saw the good results of his labor, and she valued them, not because of the money they brought him, but because she believed that the raising of crops and cattle was an acceptable service to God and very useful to man.

One September afternoon Rebecca was walking in the country, a mile behind the village. Oak and chestnut trees and clumps of walnuts were scattered about the fields which she crossed. The wind was rising. Clouds hurried over the sky. There was a strange light and a stranger darkness on the earth. Rebecca’s skirts impeded her movements. The branches over her head swayed. She heard the crash of a falling tree. Thoroughly alarmed, she sped on toward a clear space in the field. The wind now carried her forward, but so violently that when she reached open ground she dropped, and lay at full length on the earth, letting the gale blow over her.

Crash after crash resounded in the thickets and from different parts of the adjacent hillocks and hollows. She grew afraid she had not gone far enough from the nearest trees when she dropped. She tried to drag herself forward without rising. She dared not rise. Suddenly she became conscious that she was in the centre of some catastrophe. The air was full of noise; then she knew not whether she had heard or felt anything, till she found herself still on the ground, unhurt, but surrounded and covered by the branches and leaves of a fallen tree.

By and by the wind died into silence. She raised herself on her elbow and peered up through the gaps in her leafy prison. There were clouds in the upper sky, but yellow shining sunbeams shot straight down beneath the dark masses toward the western horizon.

Rebecca could move a little, but she could not get out. She felt weak, and lay still for a long while, and what she thought in that hour she never fully told. By and by her ears caught the sound of the wild, sweet cries of some birds whose refuges had been destroyed by the storm. She began to wonder what would become of her as night drew on.

She struggled and called. No one answered, and the sun went rapidly on its way toward the mystic boundary of night. At last she heard the sound of footsteps, of some one breaking through branches and climbing over barriers. A shout answered her own.

She recognized Luke’s voice, and for an instant she did not call again. She knew that she was on his land, and concluded that he had come out to see what damage the storm had done.

After a moment’s hesitation, she decided that she would much rather be rescued by him than not be rescued at all, and she boldly cried, “ Luke, Luke, come here! ”

He had an axe, and he soon cut an opening in the branches; but when she saw his gloomy black eyes looking down through the foliage at her she almost wished she had not let him find her.

He helped her with a hand that trembled.

“ What an escape thee has had I ” he said.

They walked along together. She furtively arranged her disordered gown. She felt faint, and could hardly stagger. Once he tried to take her in his arms and carry her over a very rough pile of branches and stones, but she would not let him, and stumbled on.

“ Thee is not kind, Rebecca,” he said, and his voice choked.

She had never felt any tenderness in his love before, and this exhibition unnerved her.

“ Yes, I am, I am,” she cried, " but I can’t bear everything ! ”

Her softened mood only roused him, and when they reached her mother’s gate he seized her hands and stooped to kiss her. She sprang backward, but his lips grazed her cheek.

” No, no ! ” she exclaimed, and, wrenching her hands free, she pushed him violently away.

“ Luke Robbins is a good man,” said Mary Gardner that night, after she had got the girl to bed. “I’m very thankful it was he that found thee.”

Rebecca made no answer, but when her mother had gone she arose, and walked up and down the room for an hour.

The next day she went again to walk, and this time she met Hugh Arnold face to face. He had arrived only that morning. He was clad in a white flannel tennis suit. His little cap was pushed back on his shapely head. His eyes sparkled when he saw Rebecca. His yellow hair was damp, and it lay on his forehead just long enough to curl there. Certainly he was a goodly vision to appear before a young girl’s eyes, as he came along the narrow country road, with leafy boughs above his head and goldenrod growing where his feet were treading, while a flock of quails rustled away in the nearest wooded field.

In after days Rebecca remembered that her mother began about this time to manifest a slight mental wavering. She was not exactly abstracted, or nervous, or wandering, but there was a greater uncertainty than ever before in the operations of her simple mind.

There came a moonlighted evening in October. Rebecca went to see her friend, the minister’s daughter. Mary sat by the window. The moon rose in the heavens, and clouds followed and sought to conceal her. The earth shone like silver and faded dully with the variations of light, till at last all was radiance and peace above and below. Mary’s face, close to the window pane, showed a sprit-like but aged beauty. She looked at the row of apple-trees, and remembered the sunset hour when she and her husband had walked together beneath them. Her lips lost their fine curves in a pitiful tremulous movement.

”I want to go out there,— I want to go out there,” she whispered faintly, and with the habitual feminine feeling that to go out-of-doors alone at night would be to attempt a revolt against nature.

The leaves of the trees shimmered.

The boughs swayed as if with a soft, sensuous consciousness of the atmosphere.

“ I guess Roger ‘d think I was pretty foolish,” she said at last; but she rose, put on her shawl and overshoes, went out into the shining, unearthly-looking garden, and walked straight on past her currant bushes to the dividing wall. Some chrysanthemums blossomed by the fence. Their crisp petals scintillated before her eyes. The young apple-trees held up their branches vigorously.

She leaned on the wall and looked over into the field. An unwonted feeling of pain and bitterness crept into her heart. For the first time she felt that she had been defrauded. But it was not the property she regretted ; it was the right to walk under those trees as she and Roger had walked.

Some apples lay on the sere grass. They looked just like those that she and he had eaten together that last evening. She climbed over the fence, gathered up the fruit in her apron, and then, climbing back, fled to her own house.

She laid the apples side by side on the window sill, and, panting a little, sat down and gazed at them.

“ I guess I ‘11 eat one, she murmured. “ ’T would seem like old times. No, ’t would n’t neither! He ain’t here to eat ’em with me. Oh, dear, I wish t I knew what he’s a-doing of now. It seems as if he ’d find an apple like these real tasty, wherever he is.’

She took one up and bit a little piece , then quickly put it down.

“ Oh my,” she said, “ what be I doing of? That ain’t my apple nor Roger’s. It’s Frederick Arnold s.

She stood up, old and daft and trembling. “I’ve stole ’em!” she cried.

“ Oh, dear, I did n’t s’pose I d turn into a thief at my time of life.’

She took the bitten apple and turned it in her fingers. Some accustomed religious phrases came to her bewildered mind.

“ I’ve tasted the fruits of unrighteousness,” she murmured.

She hastily put on her shawl again, but forgot her overshoes. She gathered the apples into her apron as into a nest, putting each one in softly except the bitten one, which she carried in one hand, while she grasped the folds of her apron with the other.

She crossed the garden once more, but she felt too weak to climb the fence again, and she leaned over and very gently dropped the apples on the grassy ground. Last, of all she let the bitten one fall beside the others.

Then suddenly she began to feel as if there had been something silly in her conduct, hut she smiled resolutely in the moonlight.

“ I ‘m kinder glad, she said, “ I had the grit to bring ’em back.

She retraced her steps, with head erect, but as she neared the house she heard voices. She went around the corner, and, standing on the damp turf behind a big syringa bush, she saw Rebecca and Hugh Arnold come up the path. They stopped so near her that she could distinguish the words they spoke.

“ No, no,” Rebecca was saying ; “ mother would be worried all the time if I promised to marry thee. She can t understand any way of life being good that is n’t just like what she and father led. She does n ‘t see what else any - body can want to make him happy.”

He took her face between his hands and turned, it up to his. Mary could see both their countenances in profile.

“ Oh, but, my darling,” said he, “ it is n’t just for happiness I want you.

It’s for sorrow too, — to help me, and show me how to help other people. ’

Perhaps I could n’t do it, after all,” replied Rebecca earnestly. " I ve lived just such a life as mother has. If I tried to go out. of it, I might he troubled too, and not sure of — anything. Quakers don’t change easily. I feel as if I was made of wood or stone, and perhaps T could n’t change enough.”

“ You don’t love me ! ” he exclaimed, cutting in with the masculine propensity to find swift and simple solution for emotional perplexities. “ You ‘ll many Luke Robbins yet.

He dung himself away. She let him go till he reached the garden gate ; then she sprang after him.

“ Hugh, Hugh 1 ” she cried.

He turned, of course, and took her in his arms.

“ You must love me,’ he said.

She did not try to escape from him, but still she repeated the words, “ It would worry mother.

Mary Gardner crept away from the low sound of their impassioned voices, and dragged herself, like one sorely stricken, into the house.

I don’t see, she said to herself, “ how I could stand it to have her kitin round like those Arnold girls.

The next day the old woman tried in vain to rise. She smiled feebly at her daughter. I ‘m tired,” she whispered. “I guess I won ‘t get up again.”

She never did, but she lived a week or two longer. Rebecca’s heart was full and her face very white during these days.

Luke Robbins came as others did to inquire and proffer service. Rebecca let him go to the door and look in upon the peaceful, beautiful woman lying still as an infant on her bed.

“Rebecca, he said, as he stood on the doorstep, about to go away, “ I feel like a son to her.”

“ Thee is kind, Luke,”said the girl gravely, but in her heart the old protest spoke, and she thought, “ but thee shall never be her son.”

He pushed his lips forward and knitted his brows. Before he could speak again Rebecca glided back into the house and left him alone.

One morning Mary Gardner lay for a long time, occasionally uttering words that indicated prayer. At last she beckoned to Rebecca, who bent over her.

“Rebecca,” she whispered, “is thy heart set on Hugh Arnold ? ”

A slow flush on Rebecca’s cheek answered the question, and silence fell between the mother and daughter, till Mary asked, “ Is he coming here to-day? ”

“ Yes, said the girl.

“ Well,”rejoined Mary, smiling quite brightly, “get me my best cap and straighten the bedspread, and when he comes bring him in here, and tliee go into the kitchen and finish making that quince jelly thee began yesterday.”

When, a little later, Hugh Arnold sat by Mary Gardner’s bed, she gazed at him seriously.

“Is thee a good young man?” she asked quietly.

He colored and stammered; then, stirred by a reverent instinct, he said quite simply, “ I want to be one.”

I don t know,” she said earnestly.

“ Thy ways are so different from my husband’s, I can’t tell. Would thee be patient with Rebecca if she didn’t like all thy ways ? It’s hard for a man to be patient.”

He bowed his head. “ I love her,” he answered. It, seemed the only thing fitting to say in this unworldly woman’s presence.

She smiled contentedly. “Call her in,” she said. Then, as he started to do so, she put out her thin hand and feebly detained him. “ I think,” she whispered, “ it would make Rebecca happy it she could always have a garden of her own.”

Hugh looked at her and wondered.

“ She shall have what she wants,” he said gently. He could not decide whether Mary ’s mind had gone astray in this last moment, or whether tins speech of hers about a garden really represented her inadequate conception of all possible difference between what she called “her ways and the many forces and interests which constituted his own sphere in the world. As he pondered upon the dying woman’s words, there came to him an unformed thought of the story of that garden where peace and happiness should have dwelt while the foundations of the earth endured, and at the same moment the joy of the Psalmist was revealed to him ; and he went to find Rebecca, slowly repeating to himself the old thanksgiving utterance, “ He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

Mary had fallen asleep by the time Rebecca entered the room. She and Hugh sat down together, hand in hand, and watched, The clocks ticked and struck. The faint sound of distant factory hells came once more from the outer world, calling to the girl. She kept her moistened eyes fixed on her mother’s face, but she leaned the while on her lover’s shoulder and listened to the message of the bells.

Toward night Mary Gardner opened her eyes. A sweet, happy light filled them. Rebecca knelt and kissed her mother’s fingers.

“ I see thy father,” whispered Mary ; and after that she spoke no more, but her innocent life faded with the sunshine.

Lillie B. Chace Wyman.