A Singular Life

XXIII.

To the end of her life Helen will see the look on Emanuel Bayard’s face when she had spoken these words.

With more of terror than delight, the woman’s nature sprang, for that instant, back upon itself. Would she have recalled what she had said ? It is possible; for now she understood how he loved her, and perceived that she had never understood what a man’s love is.

Yet when he spoke, it was with that absence of drama, with that repression amounting almost to commonplace, which characterize the intensest crises of experience.

“ Do you ? ” he said. “ Have you ? ”

And at first that was all. But his voice shook, and his hand ; and his face went so white that he seemed like a man smitten rather by death than by love.

Helen, in a pang of maiden fright, had moved away from him, and retreated to the sofa: he sank beside her silently. Leaning forward a little, he covered his eyes with one hand. The other rested on the cushion within an inch of her purple dress ; he did not touch her ; he did not touch it. Helen felt sorry, seeing him so troubled and wrung; her heart went out in a throb of that maternal compassion which is never absent from the love of any woman for any man.

“ Oh,” she sighed, “ I meant to make you happy, to give you comfort! And now I have made you unhappy ! ”

“ You have made me the happiest of all miserable men ! ”

He raised his head, and looked at her till hers was the face to fall.

“ Oh, don’t ! ” she pleaded. “Not like that! ”

He paid no heed to this entreaty. The soul of the saint and the heart of the man made duel together; and the man won, and exulted in it, and wondered how he dared ; but his gaze devoured her willfully. The first embrace of the eyes— more delicate, more deferent, and at once less guarded than the meeting of hands or clasp of arms — he gave her, and did not restrain it. Before it, Helen felt more helpless than if he had touched her. She seemed to herself to be annihilated in his love.

“ Happy ? ” he said exultingly. “ You deify me ! You have made a god of me ! ”

“ No,”she shook her head with a little teasing smile, “ I have made a man of you.”

“ Then they are one thing and the same ! ” cried the lover. “ Let me hear you say it. Tell it to me again ! ”

She was silent, and she crimsoned to the brows.

“ You are not sure ! ” he accused her. “ You want to take it back. It was a madness, an impulse. You don’t mean it. You do not, you have not, loved me. . . . How could you ? ” he added humbly. “ You know I never counted on it, never expected, did not trust myself to think of it — all this while.”

She lifted her head proudly. “ I have nothing to take back. It was not an impulse. I am not that kind of woman. I have been meaning to tell you — when you gave me the chance. I love you. I have loved you ever since ” —

She stopped.

“ Since when ? How long have you loved me ? Come ! Speak ! I will know ! ” commanded Bayard deliriously.

“ Oh, what is going to be gained if I tell you ? ”

Helen gave him a prisoner’s look. She turned her head from side to side rebelliously, as if she had flown into a cage whose door was now unexpectedly shut.

“ I meant to make you happy. All I say seems to make everything worse. I shall tell you nothing more.”

“ You will tell me,” he said in a tone of calm authority, “all I ask. It is my affair whether I am happy or wretched. Yours is to obey my wish: because you love me, Helen.”

His imperious voice fell to a depth of tenderness in which her soul and body seemed to sink and drown.

“ I have loved you,” she whispered, “ ever since that night — the first time I saw you here, in my father’s house.”

“ Now, sir !” she added, with her sudden, pretty willfulness, “ make the most of it. I ’m not ashamed of it, either. But I shall he ashamed of you if — this — if after I’ve said it all, it does n’t make you happy. . . . That’s all I care for, ” she said quietly. “ It is all I care for in this world.”

“ Oh, what shall we do ? ” pleaded Bayard.

“ You have your work,” said Helen dreamily, “ and I your love.” Her voice sank to a whisper.

“ Is that enough for you ? ” demanded the man. “ I shall perish of it, I shall perish! ”

Something in his tone and expression caused Helen to regard him keenly. He looked so wasted, so haggard, that her heart stood still, and said to her, “ This is truer than he knows.”

“ No,” she answered, with a sweet, womanly composure, “ it is not enough for me.”

“ And yet,” he said, with the brutality of the tormented, “ I cannot, I must not, ask you to be my ” —

She put the tips of her fingers to his lips to check the word. He seized her hand and held it there; then, for he came to himself, he relinquished it, and laid it down.

“ Dear,” said Helen, “ I should n’t mind it ... to be poor. I want you to understand — to know how it is. I have never felt . . . any other way. It shall be just as you say,” she added, with a gentleness which gave a beautiful dignity to her words. “We need not . . . do it, because I say this. But I wanted you to know — that I was not afraid of a hard life with you.”

“ Oh, you cannot understand ! ” he groaned. “ It is no picturesque poverty you would have to meet. It would mean cold, hunger, misery you’ve never thought of, cruel suffering — for you. It would mean all that a man has no right to ask a woman to endure for him, because he loves her . . . as I love you.”

“ I could starve,” said Helen.

“ God help us ! ” cried the man. Nothing else came to his dry lips.

Then Helen answered him in these strong and quiet words : “ I told you I would trust you, and I shall do it to the end. When you are ready for me, I shall come. I am not afraid — of anything, except that you should suffer, and that I could not comfort you. If you never see the way to think it right . . . I can wait. I love you ; and I am yours to take or leave.”

“This,” whispered Bayard reverently, for he could have knelt before her, “ is a woman’s love ! I am unworthy of it — and of you.”

“ Oh, there is the other kind of woman,” said Helen, trying rather unsuccessfully to smile. “This is only my way of loving. I am not ashamed of it.”

“ Ashamed of it ? It honors you ! It glorifies you ! ”

He held out his arms, but she did not swervetowards them; they dropped. She seemed to him encompassed in a shining cloud, in which her own celestial tenderness and candor had wrapped and protected her.

“ Love me ! ” he pleaded. “ Love me, trust me, till we can think. I must do right by you, whatever it means to me.”

“ We love each other,” repeated Helen, holding out her hands ; “ and I trust you. Let us live on that a little while, till we — till you ” —

But she faltered, and her courage forsook her when she looked up into his face. All the anguish of the man that the woman cannot share, and may not understand, started out in visible lines and signs upon his features; all the solemn responsibility for her, for himself, and for the unknown consequences of their sacred passion ; the solitary burden, which it is his to bear in the name of love, and which presses hardest upon him whose spirit is higher and stronger than mere human joy.

But at this moment a sound was heard upon the stone steps of the Queen Anne house. It was the footfall of the Professor himself, returning from his closing lecture of the series on Eschatology. Mrs. Carruth pattered behind him with short, stout steps. She had wound the affairs of the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with blankets to a condition in which they could run along without her till the exegetical trip to the German Professor’s in Berlin should be over, and the slush of Cesarea should know her again.

XXIV.

The summer slid, Bayard knew not how. They separated, as so many confused lovers do in the complicated situations of our later life ; wherein we love no longer in the old, outright, downright way, when men and women took each other for better, for worse, and dared to run the risk of loving without feeling responsible for the consequences. We are past all that; and whether it is the worse or the better for us, who shall say?

At least, these two had the healthy ring to their love; in that great and simple feeling was no delinquency or default. Bayard did not hesitate or quibble — one day a lover, the next a prudential committee, after the fashion of such feeble mathematicians as go by the name of men to-day. He was incapable of calculating his high passion ; there was no room in his soul or body for a doubt to take on lease of life. He loved her, as the greatest of women might be proud and humble to be loved, as the smallest would be vain to be.

He loved her too much to make her miserable, and he knew, with that dreary, practical perception of the truth sometimes, but rarely, granted to men of the seer’s temperament, that he could not make her happy. Between love and joy a dead wall shut down ; it seemed to him to reach from the highest heavens to the waters under the earth. What elemental chaos could rend it ? What miracle was foreordained to shatter it ? Would the busy finger of God stretch out to touch it ?

“God knows,” he wrote her. “And He purposes, I am fain to believe, if He purposes anything we do or suffer. The hour may come, and the way might clear. More incredible things have happened to men and women loving less than we. If I can, I claim you when I can. Oh, wait for me, and trust me ! Life is so short; it is not easy. Sometimes madness enters into me, to fling all these cold, these cruel considerations, these things we call honor, unselfishness, chivalry, to the gales. . . . Then I come to myself. I will not wrong you. Help me to bear to live without you till I see your face again.”

Helen wrote him noble letters ; brave, womanly, and as trustful as the swing of the earth in its orbit. It is not too much to say that few women in her place would have shown the strong composure of this ardent girl. The relation between acknowledged lovers unbetrothed is one whose difficulty only an inspired delicacy can control. Helen’s clear eyes held no shadows. The dark wing of regret for a moment’s weakness never brushed between her heart and this Sir Galahad who loved her like man and spirit too. Few women reared as she had been would have trusted the man as she did; we may add that fewer men would have deserved it.

Emanuel Bayard did. Her heart knew him for one of the sons of light, who will not, because he cannot, cause the woman whom he loves an hour’s regret that she has believed in him utterly and told him so. Now, the value of a woman’s intuition in most of the problems or relations of life cannot be overestimated; when she loves, it is the least reliable of her attributes or qualities. Helen, in her composed way, recognized this fact perfectly, but it gave her no uneasiness.

“ My own perception might fail me,” she wrote. “You could not. It is not my own sense of what is best to do that I am trusting in this ; it is you.”

When he read these words, he put the paper to his lips, and laid his face upon it, and covered it from the sight even of his own eyes.

The date of Professor Carruth’s return was set for early October. In September Bayard received from Helen the news that her mother had met with an accident — a fall; an arm was broken, and, at the age of the patient, the surgeon forbade the voyage. The Professor would get back to his lecture-room, as he must. The two ladies were indefinitely delayed in Berlin.

The winter proved a bleak one, and went with Bayard as was to be expected. The devotee had yet to learn how a woman’s absence may work upon a lover; but of this, since he had no right to do so, he did not complain. Headlong, fathoms down into his work he leaped, and with the diver’s calm he did the diver’s duty. The new chapel progressed after the manner of its kind. The pastor had peremptorily insisted upon the severest economy of plan ; demanding a building which should be a “ shelter for worship,” and nothing more. Not a waste dollar went into architecture. Not a shingle went into debt. No mortgage desecrated the pulpit of Christlove Church. Bayard built what he could pay for, and nothing more. The dedication of the building was expected to take place in the spring.

Meanwhile his audiences grew upon his hands, and Windover First Church looked darkly at Windover town hall. Orthodoxy, decorum, property, position, gazed at gaping pews, and regretted that “ these temperance movements estranged themselves from the churches.”

Obscurity, poverty, religious doubt, sin and shame and repentance jammed the aisles to hear “ the Christman” interpret decency and dignity and the beauty of holiness. He spoke to these, not with the manner of preachers, but with the lips and heart of a man. Week after week, strange, unkempt, unlettered seamen poured in ; they stood sluggishly, like forming lava, to listen to him. Certain of his audiences would have honored Whitefield or Robertson. Bayard’s soul seemed, that winter, alight with a sacred conflagration. He prayed and wrought for Windover as a tongue of flame goes up to the sky, because it was the law of life and fire. It is pathetic to think now how it would have comforted the man if he had known how much they loved him, these undemonstrative people of the sea, for whom he gave himself. The half of it was never told him. Censure, and scorn, and scandal, and the fighting of foes in the dark he knew. The real capacity for affection and loyalty which existed in the rough, warm heart of Windover he sometimes thought he understood. He did not see — as we see now — that he had won this allegiance.

This was the more obscure to him because the tension between himself and the liquor interests of Windover was growing quietly into a serious thing, and heavily occupied his attention ; and here we know that he was never deceived or blinded.

His methods were deliberate, his moves were intelligent, he ran no stupid risks; he measured his dangers, he took them in the name of good citizenship and good Christianity, and strode on to their consequences with that martial step characteristic of him. Of this chapter of the winter’s story he wrote little or nothing to Helen. She heard how the chapel grew, how the library gathered and the smoking-room was fitted ; about the hope of a gymnasium, the vision of a bowlingalley, the schedule for lectures and entertainments ; all his dreams and schemes to give homeless and tempted men shelter and happiness under the rising roof of Christlove, all the little pleasures and hopes of the missionary life, she shared, as Helen had it in her to share the serious energy of a man’s life. Upon the subject of the dangers he was silent. The extent to which these existed she could not measure, for Helen belonged to those social and religious circles into whose experience the facts in the remote lives of that worthy class of people known as temperance agitators do not enter. She had no traditions to enlighten her, and her own joyous nature vaguely filled in the darker outlines of her lover’s life. How should the summer girl understand the winter Windover ? She thought of Bayard’s real situation with little more vividness than if he had been a missionary in Darkest Africa. Pleasant sketches of Job Slip and Joey, little reminiscences of Captain Hap and Lena, pretty, womanly plans for replacing the burned furniture and decorations, flitted across the leisurely Continental tour by which she escorted her mother homewards. Mrs. Carruth was now quite recovered, but had developed the theory that the dangers of a midwinter voyage were lessened by every week’s delay. As a result, the two ladies engaged passage in February, at the height of the gales.

It was a bitter winter. Two hundred Windover fishermen were drowned, and poverty of the dreariest kind sat sullenly in the tragic town. Bayard worked till he staggered for the women and children whom the sea bereft. Afterwards a cry went up out of scores of desolate homes which told what the man had been and done in Windover when the gales went down.

One night, a short time before Helen was to sail for home, there happened to Bayard one of those little mysteries which approach us so much oftener than we recognize them that we have never properly classified them, and may he long yet in doing so.

He had been in his own rooms since noon; for there was a heavy snowstorm on, and he was conscious of obvious physical inability to brave the weather unless the call of duty should be louder than a certain oppression on his lungs which he had been forced of late to observe more often than usual. It was a gray day at Mrs. Granite’s. Jane was sad, and coughed. Her mother had cried a good deal of late, and said that “Jane was goin’ off like her aunt Annie before her.”

Ben Trawl came sullenly and seldom, now, to see the reluctant girl.

Mrs. Granite thought if Jane could go to her aunt Annie’s second cousin Jenny, in South Carolina, for a spell, she would be cured ; but Mrs. Granite said climate was only meant for rich folks ; she said you lived and died here in Windover, if your lungs was anyways delicate, like frozen herring packed into a box. She was almost epigrammatic — for Mrs. Granite.

Bayard had been sitting in his studychair, writing steadily, while his mind, with his too sensitive sympathy, followed the fortunes of these poor women who made him all the home he knew. It was towards six o’clock, and darkening fast. The noise on the beach opposite the cottage was heavy, and the breakers off Ragged Rock boomed mightily.

Snow was falling so thickly that he could not see the water. The fog-bell was tolling, and yells of agony came from the whistling-buoy. It was one of the days when a man delicately reared winces, with a soreness impossible to be understood unless experienced, from life in a place and in a position like his ; when the uncertain value of the ends of sacrifice presents itself to the mind like the spatter from a stream of vitriol ; when the question, Is what I achieve worth its cost ? burns in upon the bravest soul, and gets no answer for its scorching.

Bayard laid down his pen, and looked patiently out of the window ; putting his empty hand in his pocket as he did so. His eyes gazed into the curtain of the whirling snow. He wondered how far out to sea it extended; how many miles of it dashed between himself and Helen. It was one of the hours when she seemed to fill the world.

The snowflakes took on fantastic shapes — so ! That was the way she held out her white hands. The soft trailing of her gown sounded in the room. If he turned his head, should he see her standing, a vision in purple and gold, smiling, warm, and sweet ? It would be such a disappointment not to find her ! Rather believe that he should, if he would, and so not stir.

Suddenly his hand in his own pocket struck an object whose character he did not at the moment recall. He drew it out and looked at it. It was the key of his old home in Beacon Street.

For three years, perhaps, he had not thought of his uncle’s words : “ Keep your latch-key. You will want to use it, some day.”

Bayard regarded the latch-key steadily. The senseless thing burned bis palm, as if it were trying to articulate.

He never sought to explain to himself, and I see no reason why we should explain for him, the subtile meaning which went from the metal to the man.

The key said, “ Go !”

And Bayard went. He made such efforts as all cool-headed people make to buffet the inexplicable and to resist an unreasonable impression. But after an hour’s protest with himself he yielded to the invisible summons.

“ It is a long while since I have seen my uncle,” be reasoned. “ This may be as good a time as any other to look him up.”

He dressed for the storm, and took the nine-o’clock train to Boston.

It was blowing a blizzard when he arrived in town, and eleven o’clock. He took a carriage, and drove to his uncle’s house. The lights were out on the front of the house, and the servants asleep. Bayard stood a moment irresolute. The folly of his undertaking presented itself to him with emphasis, now that he was there. He could not tell when he had yielded to any of that class of highly wrought emotions which we call presentiments or “ leadings.” Impatient with himself, and suddenly vividly aware that Mr. Hermon Worcester was a man who particularly objected to being disturbed in his sleep, Bayard was about to call the cab back to take him away, when he perceived that the driver had started off, and was laboring heavily up Beacon Street, with the snow to the hubs of the wheels. (Who has ever fathomed the inscrutable mind of the Boston cabman who has to be snowed under before he will get on runners ?) Resisting no longer, Bayard softly put his key in the lock.

It creaked a little, for it had grown rusty in the Windover salts, but the boy’s key turned in the man’s hand, and admitted him loyally into his old home.

The hall was dark, and the house still. He brushed off the snow in silence, and stood wondering what to do next. He felt mortified at his own lack of good sense.

Why was he here? And what reason could he give for this stupendous foolishness ? He dripped on the Persian rugs awhile, and, finding neither enlightenment nor consolation in this moist occupation, proceeded to take off his overcoat and hang it on his own nail on the mahogany hat - tree under the stairs. When had such a shabby overcoat put that venerable piece of furniture to the blush ? Never, if one excepted the case of the Vermont clergyman who had been known to take a lunch with his benefactor, and who received a barrel of old clothes the following week. Bayard hung up his wet hat, too, in the old place, took off his shoes, and crept upstairs in his stockings, as he had done how many hundred nights, coming home from Cambridge, late, in college days !

His uncle’s door was closed, but, to his surprise, he found the door of his own room open. He slipped in. It seemed warm and pleasant — how incredibly pleasant and natural ! The register appeared to be open. Oh, the luxury of a furnace ! The wet and tired man crawled along, feeling his way in the familiar dark, and got down by the register. He remembered where the safetymatches used to be that struck and made no sound. Groping, he found them, in their paper match - box set within the old bronze one. He struck one, softly, and looked about. In the little flare he saw that the room was just as it had always been. Nothing was changed or disturbed, except that his books had gone to Mrs. Granite’s. His bed lay turned back, open for the night, as it always was; the big, soft pillow, the luxurious mattresses, the light warmth of the snowy blankets, invited him. His mother’s picture hung over the head of his bed. Those old pipes and silk menus and college traps and trifles were crossed on the wall by the bureau ; his gun was there, and his fishing-rods.

Bayard was about to yield to his weariness, and get into his own bed, thinking to see his uncle in the morning, as a sane man should, when his attention was attracted by a slight sound in Mr. Worcester’s room. It was repeated ; and something about it struck the young man unpleasantly.

Without noise he opened the door of the bath-room intervening between his own and his uncle’s apartment. Then he perceived a crack of light at the threshold of Mr. Worcester’s closed door.

As he stood uncertain and troubled, the sound which he had heard was reiterated. It resembled the effort of difficult breathing, and was accompanied by a slight groan.

Then a thick voice called — “ Partredge ? ”

“ Partredge always did sleep like the dead,” thought Bayard. “ I hope he does n’t neglect my uncle, now he is growing old.”

“ Nancy ? ” summoned the voice again. Nancy always woke easily and good naturedly. But Nancy heard nothing now. Bayard, afraid to shock the old man by so astounding an appearance, was moving quickly and quietly to find the servants, when something caused him to change his purpose. Apparently, Mr. Worcester had tried to reach the bell— it was one of the old-fashioned kind, with a long, embroidered bell - handle — he had partly crossed the room, when Bayard intercepted the fall, and caught him.

The gas was lighted, and recognition was instant. Without shock, it seemed without surprise, Hermon Worcester lay back in the young man’s arms, and smiled pleasantly into his face.

“ I thought you would use the latchkey — some night,” he said with difficulty. “You ’ve chosen the right one, Manuel. The servants did not hear— and — I ’m afraid I ’m not — quite — well, my boy.”

After this he said nothing, but lingered for three days, without evident suffering, and with evident content, making signs that Manuel should not leave him, which he did not, to the end.

Hermon Worcester passed on serenely, in the Faith, and the prominence and usefulness thereof, though the last prayer that he heard on earth came from the lips of the affectionate heretic in whose arms he died.

Bayard had been so long out of the world and the ways of it that it did not occur to him, till he received the summons of the family lawyer, that he would be required to be present at the reading of his uncle’s will.

“ As the nearest of kin, my dear sir,” suggested the attorney, “ the occasion will immediately concern you, doubtless.”

Bayard bowed in silence. He did not think it necessary to explain to the attorney that he had been for a long time aware of the fact of his disinheritance.

“ Possibly Uncle may have left me his library,” he thought, “or the furniture of my old room.”

He had, indeed, received the library. The rest of Hermon Worcester’s fortune, barring the usual souvenirs to relatives, had been divided between Mr. Worcester’s favorite home missionary associations and Cesarea Seminary, of which he had been for thirty years trustee.

The house in Beacon Street, with its contents, went unreservedly, “and affectionately,” the testator had expressed it, to his nephew, Emanuel Bayard.

“I think,” observed the lawyer at the first decent opportunity, “ that Mr. Worcester intended, or — hoped that you might make your plans of life in accordance with such circumstances as would enable you to keep, and to keep up, the homestead. But of course,” added the attorney, shrewdly reading Bayard’s silent face, “ that might be — as you say — impossible.”

“ I said nothing,” replied Bayard in a low voice.

“ The place is yours, without conditions,” pursued the lawyer, with polite indifference. “ It can be sold, or converted into income — rented, if you please, if ever unfortunately necessary. It would seem a pity ; it would bring so little. But still, it could, of course, be done.”

“ What do you call a little ? ” asked Bayard.

“ Oh, enough for a small fresh-water professor or retail grocer to get along on, if he knew how,” replied the Back Bay lawyer carelessly. He mentioned the figures.

The house was old and in need of repair; the furniture out of date and worn. The probable values were not large, as the attorney said. To the pastor from Angel Alley their possession seemed to represent the shock of nature involved in a miracle.

XXV.

Helen was to sail for Boston the following Saturday. It lacked three days of that date. It being out of the question to reach her now by letter, Bayard cabled to her : —

“ Will meet you arrival steamer. Future clear before me. I await you. E. B.”

To this impulsive message he found himself expecting a reply. The wan missionary had burst into a boyish and eager lover. Oh, that conscientious, cruel past! He dashed it from him. He plunged into the freedom of his heart. In honor — in his delicate honor — he could win her now.

Helen did not answer the cable message. A hundred hindrances might have prevented her, yet he had believed she would. He thought of her ardent, womanly candor, her beautiful courage, her noble trust. It did not occur to him that a woman has two natures — this for the unfortunate, and that for the fortunate lover. One he had tasted ; the other he had yet to know.

He vibrated restlessly to and fro between Windover and Boston, where his presence was urgently required in the settlement of his uncle’s affairs. A snowstorm set in, and increased to a gale. Ten days passed somehow. The steamer was due in twenty-four hours. She did not arrive.

Bayard had lived in Windover long enough to acquire the intelligent fear of the sea which characterizes the coast, and when the next day went, and another, and the boat was admitted at headquarters to be three days overdue, he suffered the unspeakable. It had been nothing less than a terrible midwinter gale. Wrecks lined the coast; glasses scoured it; watchers thronged it; friends besieged the offices of the steamship company. The great line which boasted that it had never lost a life held its stanchest steamer three days, four days overdue.

It was like him that he did not overlook his duty in his trouble, but stood to his post, and remembered the little service appointed for that most miserable evening when he was expected to be with his people. Those who were present that night say that the scene was one impossible to forget. Looking more like death than life, the preacher prayed before them “to the God of the sea.”

Now, for the first time, he felt that he knew what Windover could suffer. Now the torment of women all their lives watching for returning sails entered into his soul; those aged men looking for the sons who never came back; the blurred eyes peering off Windover Point to see the half-mast flag on the schooner as she tacked up the bay ; the white lips that did not ask, when the boat came to anchor, “Which is it?” because they dared not — all this, at last, he understood. His personal anguish melted into the great sum of misery in the seaport town.

“ If she comes back to me,” he thought, “how I shall work for them, my poor people ! ”

Now, for the first time, this devout, unselfish man understood that something else than consecration is needed to do the best and greatest thing by the human want or woe that leans upon us. Now that he took hold on human experience, he saw that he had everything to learn from it. The knowledge of a great love, the lesson of the common tie that binds the race together — these taught him, and he was their docile scholar.

Five days overdue ! . . . Six days. Bayard had gone back to Boston, to haunt the offices and the docks. Old friends met him among the white-lipped watchers, and a classmate said, “Thank God, Bayard, you have n’t wife and child aboard her.” He added, “ Man alive ! you look like the five days dead ! ”

Suddenly the stir ran along the crowd, and a whisper said, “They’ve sighted her! . . . She ’s in ! ”

Then came the hurrah. Shouts of joy reëchoed about him. But Bayard’s head fell upon his breast in silence. At that moment he was touched upon the arm by a beautiful Charter Oak cane, and, looking up, he saw the haggard face of the Professor of Theology.

“I was belated,” thickly articulated the Professor, with dry lips. “ I came straight from the lecture-room. It is the course on the Nature of Eternal Punishment— a most important course. I felt it my duty to be at my desk. But — Bayard, I think I shall substitute to-morrow my lecture (perhaps you may recall it) on the Benevolence and Beneficence of God.”

The two men leaped into the tug together, and ploughed out to the steamer.

Helen was forward, leaning on the rail. Her thick steamer-dress blew like muslin in the heavy wind. Her eyes met Bayard’s first — yes, first. Her father came in second, but his were too dim to know it.

“ Mother is in the cabin, dear Papa ! ” cried Helen. “We have to keep her warm and still, yon know.”

His daughter’s precious kiss invited him, but the old man put Helen gently aside, and dashed after his old wife.

For that moment Helen and Bayard stood together. Before all the world he would have taken her in his arms, but she retreated a little step.

“ Did you get my message ? ” he demanded.

“ Yes.”

“ Did you answer it ? ”

“ No.”

“Why not?”

“ I thought it would do just as well when I got here.”

“ And you might have been — you might never have got here at all! ” cried Bayard fiercely.

“Have you been anxious?” asked Helen demurely.

He did not think it was in her to coquet with a man in a moment like that, and he made her no reply. Then Helen looked full in his face, and saw the havoc on it.

“ Oh, you poor boy ! ” she whispered ; “ you poor, poor boy ! ”

This was in the afternoon; and he was compelled to see her carried off to Cesarea on her father’s arm, without him. There was no help for it ; and he waited till the next day, unreconciled and nervous in the extreme. He had been so overworn and overwrought that his mind took on feverish fancies.

“ Something may happen by to-morrow,” he thought, “ and I shall have never — once ” —

He rebuked his own thought, even then, for daring to dream of the touch of her lips. But the dream rode over his delicacy, and rushed on.

At an early hour the next day he went to Cesarea, and sought her in her father’s house. It was a cold, dry, bright day. Cesarea shivered under her ermine. The Professor’s house was warm with the luxurious, even warmth of the latest modern heater, envied by the rest of the Faculty in the old-fashioned, draughty houses of the Professors’ Row. Flowers in the little window conservatory of the drawing-room breathed the soft air easily, and were of rich growth and color. Helen was watering the flowers. She colored when she saw him, and put down the silver pitcher which she had abstracted from the breakfastroom for the purpose of encouraging her lemon verbena, that had, plainly, missed her while she was abroad. She wore a purple morning-gown with plush upon it. She had a royal look.

“ How early you have come ! ” she said half complainingly.

He paid no attention to her tone, but deliberately shut the door, and advanced towards her. “ I have come to stay; that is — if you will let me, Helen.”

“ Apparently,” answered Helen, taking up the pitcher, “I am not allowed a choice in the matter.”

But he saw that the silver pitcher shook in her hand.

“ No,” he said firmly, “ I do not mean to give you any choice. I mean to take you. I do not mean to wait one hour more.”

He held out his arms, but suspended them, not touching her. The very air which he imprisoned around her seemed to clasp her. She trembled in that intangible embrace.

“ It will be a poor man’s home, Helen — but you will not suffer. I can give you common comforts. I cabled to you the very hour that I knew. . . . Oh, I have trusted your trust! ” he said.

“ And you may trust it,” whispered Helen, suddenly lifting her eyes.

His, it seemed to her, were far above her. How blinding beautiful joy made them !

Then his starved arms closed about her, and his lips found hers.

The Professor of Theology sat in his study. The winter sun struck his loaded shelves ; the backs of his books inspected him tenderly. At the western window, on the lady’s desk reserved for Mrs. Carruth, her sewing-basket stood. The Professor glanced at it contentedly. He had never been separated from his wife so long before, and they had been married thirty-five years. She had unpacked that basket and taken it into the study that morning, with a girlish eagerness to sit down and darn a stocking while the Professor wrote.

“ This is a great gratification, Statira,” he had said.

Mrs. Carruth had gone out, now, to engage in the familiar delights of a morning contest with the Cesarca butcher, and the Professor was alone when Emanuel Bayard sturdily knocked at the study door.

The Professor welcomed the youngman with some surprise, but no uncertain warmth. He expressed himself as grateful for the prompt attention of his former pupil, on the joyful occasion of this family reunion.

“ And it was kind of you, Bayard, too, meeting the ladies on that tug. I was most agreeably surprised. I was wishing yesterday — in fact, it occurred to me what a comfort some young fellow would have been whom I could have sent down, all those anxious days. But we never had a son. Pray sit down, Mr. Bayard. . . . I am just reading the opinions of Olshausen on a most interesting point. I have collected valuable material in Berlin. I shall be glad to talk it over with you. I found Professor Kammelschkreiter a truly scholarly man. His views on the errors in the Revised Version are the most instructed of any I have met.”

“ Professor,” said Bayard stoutly, “ will you pardon me if I interrupt you for a minute ? I have come on a most important matter. I am sorry to seem uncivil, but the fact is, I — I cannot wait another moment, sir. . . . Sir, I have the honor to tell you that your daughter has consented to become my wife.”

At this truly American declaration, the Phofessor of Theology laid down his copy of Olshausen, and stared at the heretic missionary.

“ My daughter ! ” he gasped — “ your wife ? I beg your pardon,” he added, when he saw the expression of Bayard’s face. “ But you have taken me altogether by surprise. I may say that such a possibility has never — no, never once so much as occurred to me.”

“ I have loved her,” said Bayard tenaciously, “ for three years. I have never been able to ask her to marry me till now. I think perhaps my uncle meant to make it possible for me to do so, but I do not know. I am still a poor man, sir, but I can keep her from suffering. She does me the undeserved honor to love me, and she asked me to tell you so.”

The Professor had risen, and was pacing the study hotly. His face was rigid. He waved his thin, long fingers impatiently at Bayard’s words.

“ Scholars do not dwell upon paltry, pecuniary facts, like parents in lower circles of society ! ” cried the Professor, with superbly unconscious hauteur. “ There would have lacked nothing to my daughter’s comfort, sir, in any event, if the right man had wooed her. I was not the father to refuse him mere pecuniary aid to Helen’s happiness.”

“ And I was not the lover to ask for it,” observed Bayard proudly.

“Hum—m—m,” said the Professor. He stopped his walk across the study floor, and looked at Bayard with troubled respect.

“I will not take her from you at once,” urged Bayard gently ; “ we will wait till fall — if I can. She has said that she will become my wife then.”

His voice sank. He spoke the last words with a delicate reverence which would have touched a ruder father than the Professor of Theology.

“ Bayard,” he said brokenly, “ you always were my favorite student. I could n’t help it. I always felt a certain tenderness for you. I respect your intellectual traits and your spiritual quality. Poverty, sir ? What is poverty ? But, Bayard, you are not sound ! ”

Against this awful accusation Bayard had no reply; and the old Professor turned about ponderously, like a man whose body refused to obey the orders of his shocked and stricken mind.

“ How can I see my daughter, my daughter, the wife of a man whom the Ancient Faith has cast out ? ” he pleaded piteously.

He lifted his shrunken hands, as if he reasoned before an invisible tribunal. His attitude and expression were so solemn that Bayard felt it impossible to interrupt the movement by any mere lover’s plea. Perhaps, for the first time, he understood what it meant to the old man to defend the beliefs that had ruled the world of his youth and vigor. He perceived that they too suffered who seemed to be the inflicters of suffering; that they too had their Calvary, these determined souls who doggedly died by the cross of the old Faith in whose shelter their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had lived and prayed, had battled and triumphed. Bayard felt that his own experience, at that moment, was an intrusion upon the sanctuary of a sacred struggle. He bowed his head before his Professor, and left the study in silence.

But Helen, who had the small reverence for the theologic drama characteristic of those who have been reared on its stage, put her beautiful arms around his neck, and, laughing, whispered, “ Leave the whole system of Old School Orthodoxy to me ! I can manage ! ”

“ You may manage him,” smiled Bayard, “but can you manage it? ”

“ Wait a day, and see ! ” said Helen.

He would have waited a thousand for the kiss with which she lifted up the words.

The next day she wrote him, at Windover, where he was dutifully trying to preach as if nothing had happened: —

“Papa says I have never been quite sound myself, and that he supposes I will do as I please, as I always have.”

There followed a little love-letter, so deliciously womanly and tender that Bayard did not for hours open the remainder of his mail. When he did so, he read what the Professor of Theology had Written, after a night of prayer and vigil such as only aged parents know.

MY DEAR BAYARD [the letter said], — Take her if you must, and God be with you both ! I cannot find it in my heart to impose the shadow of my religious convictions upon the happiness of my child. I can battle for the Truth with men and with demons. I cannot fight with the appeal of a woman’s love. I would give my life to make Helen happy, and to keep her so. Do you as much ! Yours sincerely,

HAGGAI CARRUTH.

P. S. We will resume our discussion on the views of Professor Kammelschkreiter at some more convenient season.

XXVI.

Early June came to Windover joyously, that year. May had been a gentle month, warmer than its wont, and the season was in advance of its schedule.

Mrs. Carruth, found paling a little, and thought to be less strong since her accident abroad, had been ordered to the seaside some three or four weeks before the usual flitting of the family. Helen accompanied her ; the Professor ran down as often as he might, till Anniversary week should set him free to move his ponderously increasing manuscript on the Errors in the Revised Version from Cesarea to the clam study. The long lace curtains blew in and out of the windows of the Flying Jib; Helen’s dory glittered upon the float, in two coats of fresh pale yellow paint. And Helen, in pretty summer gowns of corn color, or violet, or white, listened on the piazza for the foot-ring of her lover. She was lovely that spring, with the loveliness of youth and joy. Bayard watched her through a mist of that wonder and that worship which mark the highest altitudes of energy in a man’s life. It was said that he had never wrought for Windover, in all his lonely time of service there, as he did in those few glorified weeks.

It is pleasant to think that the man had this draught of human rapture ; that he tasted the brim of such joy as only the high soul in the ardent nature knows.

Helen offered him her tenderness with a sweet reserve, alternating between compassion for what he had suffered and moods of pretty coquettish economy of his present privilege that taunted and enraptured him by turn. He floated on clouds ; he trod on the summer air.

Their marriage was appointed for September : it was Helen’s wish to wait till then, and he submitted with such gentleness as it wrung her heart, afterwards, to remember.

“ We will have one perfectly happy summer,” she pleaded. “ People can be lovers but once.”

“ And newly wed but once,” he answered gravely.

“ Dear,” said Helen, with troubled eyes, “ it shall be as you say. You shall decide.”

“ God will decide it,” replied the lover unexpectedly.

His eyes had a look which Helen could not follow. She felt shut out from it; and both were silent.

Her little dreams and plans occupied hours of their time together. She was full of schemes for household comfort and economy, for serving his people, for blessing Windover. She talked of what could be done for Job Slip and Mari, Joey, Lena, Captain Hap and Johnny’s mother, Mrs. Granite and poor Jane. Her mind dwelt much upon all these children of the sea who had grown into his heart. “ Jane,” she said, “ should have her winter in the South.” She spoke of Jane with a reticent, but special gentleness. They would rent the cottage ; they would furnish the old dreary rooms.

Helen did not come to her poor man quite empty-handed. The Professor had too much of the pride of total depravity left in him for that.

“ I shall be able to buy my own gowns, sir, if you please ! ” she announced prettily. “And I am going to send Mrs. Granite, with Jane, to her aunt Annie’s cousin Jenny’s (was that it ?) in South Carolina, next winter, to get over that Windover cough. We’ve got to go ourselves, if you don’t stop coughing. No ? We ’ll see ! ”

“I shall stop coughing! ” cried Bayard joyously.

She did not contradict him, for she believed in Love the healer, as the young and the beloved do. So she went dreaming on.

“I came across a piece of gold tissue in Florence ; it will make such a pretty portière in place of that old mosquito net ! And we ’ll make those dismal old rooms over into ” —

And Bayard, who had thought never to know paradise on earth, but only to toil for heaven, closed her sentence by one ecstatic word.

The completion of the chapel, still delayed, after the fashion of contractors, was approaching the belated dedication day of which all Windover talked, and for which a growing portion of Windover interested itself. Bayard was overbusy for a newly betrothed man. His hours with Helen were shortened ; his brief snatches of delight marked spaces between days of care. Erected upon the site of the burned building, the new chapel rose sturdily in the thick and black of Angel Alley. The old illuminated swinging sign remained — “ for luck,” the fishermen said. It was to be lighted on the day when the first service should be held in the new Christlove.

There came a long, light evening, still in the early half of June. Bayard was holding some service or lecture in the town, and had late appointments with his treasurer, with Job Slip and Captain Hap. He saw no prospect of freedom till too late an hour to call on Helen, and had gone down to tell her so ; had bade her good-night, and left her. She had gone out rowing, in the delicious loneliness of a much-loved and neverneglected girl, and was turning the bow of the dory homewards. She drifted and rowed by turns, idle and happy, dreamy and sweet. It was growing dark, and the boats were setting shorewards. One, she noticed (a rough, green fishing-dory from the town), lay, rudely held by a twist of the painter to the cliffs, at the left, below the float. The dory was empty. A sailor hat and an old tancolored reefer lay on the stern seat. Two girls sat on the rocks, sheltered in one of the deep clefts or chasms which cut the North Shore, talking earnestly together. One of the girls had her foot upon the painter. Neither of them noticed Helen ; she glanced at them without curiosity, rowed in, tossed her painter to the keeper of the float, and went up to the house. Her father was in Windover that night; he and her mother were discussing the inconceivable prospect of an Anniversary without entertaining the Trustees ; they were quite absorbed in this stupendous event. Helen strolled out again, and off upon the cliff.

She had but just tossed her Florentine slumber-robe of yellow silk upon the rocks, and thrown herself upon it, when voices reached her ear. Eavesdropping is an impossible crime on Windover Point, where the cliffs are common trysting-ground ; still, Helen experienced a slight discomfort, and was about to exchange her rock for some less public position, when she caught a word which struck the blood to her heart, and back again, like a smart, stinging blow.

The voices were the voices of two girls. The stronger and the bolder was speaking.

“ So I come to tell you. Do as you please. If you don’t let on, I shall.”

“ Lena ! “ groaned the other, “ are you sure ? Is n’t there some mistake ? ”

“Not a — chance of any,” replied Lena promptly. “ Do you s’pose I ’d thrust myself upon you this way, and tell, for nothin’ ? Lord, I know how decent girls feel, bein’ seen with the likes of me. That’s why I set it after dark, and never come nigh your house. Besides, he ’s there. I warn’t a-goin’ to make no talk, yon better believe, Jane Granite, I’ve seen enough o’ that.”

“ Mr. Bayard says you are a —good girl, now,” faltered Jane, not knowing what to say. “ I ’m sure he would n’t want me to be ashamed to be seen with you — now. And I — I’m much obliged to you, Lena. Oh, Lena ! what ever in the world are we going to do ? ”

“ Do ? ” said Lena sharply. “ Why, head ’em olf — that’s all! It only needs a little horse sense, and — to care enough. I ’d be drownded in the mud in the inner harbor in a land wind, I ’d light a bonfire in the powder factory and stand by it, if that would do him any good. I guess you would, too.”

Jane made no answer. She felt that this was a subject which could not be touched upon with Lena. It was too dark to see how Jane looked.

“ Why,” said the other, “ you ’re shaking like a topsail in a breeze o’ wind ! ”

“ How do you mean ? What is your plan ? What do you mean to have me do ? ” asked Jane, whose wits seemed to have dissolved in terror.

“ Get him out of Windover,” replied Lena coolly ; “ leastways for a spell. Mebbe it ’ll blow by. There ain’t but one thing I know that "11 do it. Anyhow, there ain’t but one person.”

“ I can’t think what you can mean ! ” feebly gasped Jane.

“ She can,” replied Lena tersely.

Jane made a little inarticulate moan.

Lena went on rapidly : “ You go tell her. That’s what I come for. Nothin’ else — nor nobody else — can do it. That’s your part of this infernal business. Mine ’s done. I’ve give you the warnin’. Now you go ahead.”

“Oh, are you sure ? ” repeated Jane weakly. “ Is n’t it possible you’ve got it wrong, somehow ? ”

“Is it possible the dust in the street don’t hear the oaths of Windover ? ” exclaimed Lena scornfully. “ Do you s’pose there ain’t a black deed doin’ or threatenin’ in Angel Alley that I don’t know? I tell you his life ain’t worth a red herrin’, no, nor a bucketful of bait, if them fellars has their way in this town ! . . . It ’s the loss of the license done it. It’s the last wave piled on. It’s madded ’em to anything. It’s madded ’em to murder. . . . Lord,” muttered Lena, “ if it come to that, would n’t I be even with ’em ! ”

She grated her teeth like an animal grinding a bone, took her foot from the painter, sprang into the fishing-dory, and rowed with quick, powerful strokes into the dark harbor.

Helen, without a moment’s hesitation, descended the cliff, and peremptorily said, “ Jane, I heard it. Tell me all. Tell me everything, this minute.”

Jane, who was sobbing bitterly, stopped like a child at a firm word, and, with more composure than she had yet shown, she gave her version of Lena’s startling story.

Lena was right, she said : the rum people were very angry with Mr. Bayard; he had got so many shops shut up, and other places ; he had shut up so much in Angel Alley this year. And now old Trawl had lost his license. Folks said a man could n’t make a decent living there any longer.

“ That’s what Ben said,” observed Jane, with a feeble sense of the poignancy of the phrase. “ A man could n’t make an honest living there, now. But there’s one thing,” added Jane, with hanging head. “ Lena don’t know it. I could n’t tell Lena. God have mercy on me, for it ’s me that helped it on ! ”

“ I do not understand you, Jane,” replied Helen coldly ; “ how could you injure Mr. Bayard, or have any connection with any plot to do him harm ? ”

“ I sent Ben off last Sunday night,” said Jane humbly. “I sent him marching for good. I told him I never could marry him. I told him I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told him what I heard on Ragged Rock — that night — last year.”

“ What did you hear on Ragged Rock ? ” asked Helen, still distant and doubtful.

“ Did n’t the minister ever tell you ? ” answered Jane. “ Then I won’t.”

“Very well,” said Helen, after an agitated silence, “ I shall not urge you. But if Mr. Bayard’s life is in real danger — I cannot believe it! ” cried the sheltered, happy woman. Such scenes, such possibilities, belonged to the stage, to fiction, not to New England life. The Professor’s daughter had a healthy antagonism in her to the excessive, the too dramatic. Her mind grasped the facts of the situation so slowly that the Windover girl half pitied her.

“ You don’t see,” said Jane. “You don’t understand. You ain’t brought up as we are.”

“If Mr. Bayard is in danger ” — repeated Helen. “ Jane ! ” she cried sharply, thinking to test the girl’s sincerity and judgment, “ should you have come and told me what Lena said, if I had not overheard it ? ”

“ Miss Carruth,” answered Jane, with a dignity of her own, “ don’t you know there is not one of his people but would do anything to save Mr. Bayard ? ”

Through the dark Jane turned her little pinched face towards this fortunate woman, this other girl, blessed and chosen. Her dumb eyes grew bright, and flashed fire for that once ; then they smouldered, and their spaniel look came on again.

“ You ought to speak differently to me,” she said. “ You should feel sorry for me because it’s along of Ben. I tried to keep it up — all this while. I have n’t dared to break with him. I thought if I broke, and we ’d been keeping company so long, may be he might do a harm to Mr. Bayard. Then it come to me that I could n’t, could n’t, could n’t bear it, not another time ! And I told him so. And Ben, be swore an awful oath to me, and cleared out. And then Lena came and told.”

“ What was it Ben swore ? ” asked Helen, whose sanguine heart was beginning to sink in earnest. “This is no time for being womanly, and — and not saying things. If it takes all the oaths in the répertoire of Angel Alley, it is my right to know what he said, and it is your duty to tell me ! ”

“Well,” answered Jane stolidly, “he said, ‘Damn him to hell! If we ain’t a-goin’ to be married, he shan’t, neither ! ’ ”

“Thankyou, Jane,” said Helen gently, after a long silence. She held out her hand. Jane took it, but dropped it quickly.

“ Do you know the details, the plan, the plot, if there is a plot ? ” asked Helen, without outward signs of agitation.

“ Lena said they said Christlove should never be dedicated,” answered Jane drearily. “ Not if they had to put the parson out of the way to stop it.”

“ Oh!”

“ That’s what Lena said. She thought if Mr. Bayard could be got out of town for a spell, right away, Lena thought maybe that would set ’em off the notion of it. I told her Mr. Bayard would n’t go. She said you ’d see to that.”

“Yes,” said Helen softly, “I will see to that.”

Jane made no reply, but started unexpectedly to lier feet. The two girls clambered down from tiio cliff in silence, and began to walk up the shore. At the path leading to the hotel Jane paused and shrank away.

“ How you cough ! ” said Miss Carruth compassionately. “ You are quite wet with this heavy dew. Do come into the cottage with me.”

She put her hand affectionately on the damp shoulder of Jane’s blue-and-white calico blouse.

The hotel lights reached faintly after the figures of the two. Jane looked stunted and shrunken; Helen’s superb proportions seemed to quench her. The fisherman’s daughter lifted her little homely face.

“I don’t suppose,” she faltered, “you ’d be willing to be told. But mother and me have done for him so long — he ain’t well, the minister ain’t — there’s ways he likes his tea made, and we het the bricks, come cold weather, for him — and — all those little things. We ’ve tried to take good care of Mr. Bayard ! It’s been a good many years ! ” wailed Jane piteously. It was more dreadful to her to give up boarding the minister than it was that he should marry the summer lady in the gold and purple gowns.

“ I suppose you and he will go — somewhere ? ” she added bitterly.

“We shan’t forget you, Jane,” replied Helen gently.

The calico-blouse shoulder shook off the delicate hand that rested upon it.

“ I won’t come in,” she said. “ I ’ll go right home.”

Jane turned away, and walked across the cliffs. The hotel lights fell short of her, and the darkness swallowed her undersized, pathetic figure, as the mystery of life draws down the weak, the uncomely, and the unloved.

Jane went home, and unlocked her bureau drawer. From beneath the sachetbag, on which her little pile of six handkerchiefs rested precisely, she drew out an old copy of Coleridge. The book was scented with the sachet, and had a sickly perfume; it was incense to Jane. She turned the leaves to find “ Alph, the sacred river ; ” then shut the book, and put it back in the bureau drawer. She did not touch it with her lips or cheek. She handled it more tenderly than she did her Bible.

Left to herself, Helen felt the full force of the situation fall upon her, in a turmoil of fear and perplexity. The whole thing was so foreign to her nature and to the experience of her protected life that it seemed to her more than incredible, There were moments when she was in danger of underrating the facts, and letting the chances take their course, it seemed to her so impossible that Jane and Lena should not somehow be mistaken. Her mind was in a whirlwind of doubt and dismay. With a certain coolness in emergencies characteristic of her, she tried to think the position out by herself. This futile process occupied perhaps a couple of hours.

It was between eleven and twelve o’clock when the Professor, with a start, laid down his manuscript upon the Revised Version, for the door of the clam study had opened quietly, and revealed his daughter’s agitated face.

“ Papa,” she said, “ I am in a great trouble. I have come to you first — to know what to do — before I go to him. I’ve been thinking,” she added, “that perhaps this is one of the things that fathers are for.”

Like a little girl, she dropped at his knee, and told him the whole story.

“ I could n’t go to a man and ask him to marry me ’without letting you know, Papa! ” said the Professor’s daughter.

The Professor of Theology reached for his Charter Oak cane as a man gropes for a staff on the edge of a precipice. The manuscript chapter on the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel fell to the floor. The Professor and the cane paced the clam study together feverishly.

The birds were singing when Helen and her father stopped talking, and wearily stole back to the cottage for an hour’s rest.

“ You could go right home,” said the old man gently. “The house is open, and the servants are there. I am sure your mother will wish it whenever she is acquainted with the facts,”

“We won’t tell Mother just yet. Papa — not till we must, you know. Perhaps Mr. Bayard won’t — won’t take me.”

The Professor straightened himself, and looked about with a guilty air. He felt as if he were party to an elopement. Eager, ardent, boyishly sympathetic with Helen’s position, quivering with that perfect thoughtfulness which she never found in any other than her father’s heart, the Professor of dogmatic orthodox theology flung himself into the emergency as tenderly as if he had never written a lecture on Foreordination, or preached a sermon on the Inconceivability of Second Probation.

It was he, indeed, and none other, who summoned Bayard to Helen’s presence at an early hour of the morning; and to the credit of the Department and of the ancient Seminary in whose stern faith the kindest graces of character and the best graciousness of manner have never been extinguished, be it said that Professor Haggai Carruth did not once remind Emanuel Bayard that he was meeting the consequences of unsoundness and the natural fate of heresy. Nobly sparing the young man any reference to his undoubtedly deserved misfortune, the Professor only said, “ Helen, here is Mr. Bayard,” and softly shut the door.

Helen’s hearty color was quite gone. Such a change had touched her that Bayard uttered an exclamation of horror, and took her impetuously in his arms.

“ Love, what ails you ? ” he cried, with quick anxiety.

Arrived at the moment when she must speak, if ever, Helen’s courage and foresight failed her utterly. She found herself no nearer to knowing what to say, or how to say it, than she had been at the first moment when she heard the girls talking on the rocks. To tell him her fears, and the grounds for them, would be the fatal blunder. How could she say to a man like Bayard, “Your life is in danger. Come on a wedding-trip, and save yourself ” ? Yet how could she quibble or be dumb before the truth ?

Following no plan or little preacted part, but only the moment’s impulse of her love and her trouble, Helen broke into girlish sobs, the first that he had ever heard from her, and hid her wet face against his cheek.

“ Oh,” she breathed, “ I don’t know how to tell you! But I am so unhappy — and I have grown so anxious about you! I don’t see . . . how I can bear it ... as we are I ” . . .

Her heart beat against his so wildly that she could have said no more if she had tried. But she had no need to try; for he said, “ Would you marry me this summer, dear? It would make me very happy.... I have not dared to ask it.”

“I would marry you to-morrow.” Helen lifted her head, and “ shame departed, shamed,” from her sweet, wet face. “ I would marry you to-day. I want to be near you. I want ... if anything — whatever comes.”

“ Whatever comes,” he answered solemnly, “we ought to be together — now.”

Thus they deceived each other — neither owning to the tender fault — with the divine deceit of love.

Helen comforted herself that she had not said a word of threat or danger or escape, and that Bayard suspected nothing of the cloudburst which hung over him. He let her think so, smiling tenderly ; for he knew it all the time, and more, far more than Helen ever knew.

Elizabeth Stuart phelps.