BY H. C. BUNNER.

The yellow afternoon sun came in through the long blank windows of the room wherein the Superior Court of the State of New York, Part II., Gillespie, Judge, was in session. The hour of adjournment was near at hand, a dozen court-loungers slouched on the hard benches in the attitudes of cramped carelessness which mark the familiar of the halls of justice. Beyond the rail sat a dozen lawyers and lawyers’ clerks, and a dozen weary jurymen. Above the drowsy silence rose the nasal voice of the junior counsel for the defence, who in a high monotone, with his faint eyes fixed on the paper in his hand, was making something like a half-a-score of “requests to charge.”

Nobody paid attention to him. Two lawyers’ clerks whispered like mischievous schoolboys, hiding behind a pile of books that towered upon a table. Junior counsel for the plaintiff chewed his pencil and took advantage of his opportunity to familiarize himself with certain neglected passages of the New Code. The crier, like a half-dormant old spider, sat in his place and watched a boy who was fidget ting at the far end of the room, and who looked as though he wanted to whistle.

The jurymen might have been dream-men, vague creations of an autumn afternoon’s doze. It was hard to connect them with a world of life and business. Yet, gazing closer, you might have seen that one looked as if he were thinking of his dinner, and another as if he were thinking of the lost love of his youth; and that the expression on the faces of the others ranged from the vacant to the inscrutable. The oldest juror, at the end of the second row, was sound asleep. Everyone in the court-room, except himself, knew it. No one cared.

Gillespie, J., was writing his acceptance of an invitation to a dinner set for that evening at Delmonico’s. He was doing this in such a way that he appeared to be taking copious and conscientious notes. Long years on the bench had whitened Judge Gillespie’s hair, and taught him how to do this. His seeming attentiveness much encouraged the counsel for the defence, whose high-pitched tone rasped the air like the buzzing of a bee that has found its way through the slats of the blind into some darkened room, of a summer noon, and that, as it seeks angrily for egress, raises its shrill scandalized protest against the idleness and the pleasant gloom.

“We r’quest y’r Honor t’ charge: First, ’t forcible entry does not const’oot tresp’ss, ’nless intent’s proved. Thus, ’f a man rolls down a bank”—

But the judge’s thoughts were in the private supper-room at Delmonico’s. He had no interest in the sad fate of the hero of the suppositious case, who had been obliged, by a strange and ingenious combination of accidents, to make violent entrance, incidentally damaging the persons and property of others, into the lands and tenements of his neighbor.

And further away yet the droning lawyer had set a-travelling the thoughts of Horace Walpole, clerk for Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather; for the young man sat with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, a sad half-smile on his lips, and his brown eyes looking through vacancy to St. Lawrence County, New York.

He saw a great, shabby old house, shabby with the awful shabbiness of a sham grandeur laid bare by time and mocked of the pitiless weather. There was a great sham Grecian portico at one end; the white paint was well-nigh washed away, and the rain-streaked wooden pillars seemed to be weeping tears of penitence for having lied about themselves and pretended to be marble.

The battened walls were cracked and blistered. The Grecian temple on the hillock near looked much like a tomb, and not at all like a summer-house. The flower-garden was so rank and ragged, so overgrown with weed and vine, that it was spared the mortification of revealing its neglected maze, the wonder of the county in 1820. All was sham, save the decay. That was real; and by virtue of its decrepitude the old house seemed to protest against modern contempt, as though it said: “I have had my day. I was built when people thought this sort of thing was the right sort of thing; when we had our own little pseudo-classic renaissance in America. I lie between the towns of Aristotle and Sabine Farms. I am a gentleman’s residence, and my name is Montevista. I was built by a prominent citizen. You need not laugh through your lattices, you smug new Queen Anne cottage, down there in the valley! What will become of you when the falsehood is found out of your imitation bricks and your tiled roof of shingles, and your stained glass that is only a sheet of transparent paper pasted on a pane? You are a young sham; I am an old one. Have some respect for age!”

Its age was the crowning glory of the estate of Montevista. There was nothing new on the place except a third mortgage. Yet had Montevista villa put forth a juster claim to respect, it would have said: “I have had my day. Where all is desolate and silent now, there was once light and life. Along these halls and corridors, the arteries of my being, pulsed a hot blood of joyous humanity, fed with delicate fare, kindled with generous wine. Every corner under my roof was alive with love and hope and ambition. Great men and dear women were here; and the host was great and the hostess was gracious among them all. The laughter of children thrilled my gaudily decked stucco. To-day an old man walks up and down my lonely drawing-rooms, with bent head, murmuring to himself odds and ends of tawdry old eloquence, wandering in a dead land of memory, waiting till Death shall take him by the hand and lead him out of his ruinous house, out of his ruinous life.”

Death had indeed come between Horace and the creation of his spiritual vision. Never again should the old man walk, as to the boy’s eyes he walked now, over the creaking floors, from where the Nine Muses simpered on the walls of the south parlor to where Homer and Plutarch, equally simpering, yet simpering with a difference,—severely simpering,—faced each other across the north room. Horace saw his father stalking on his accustomed round, a sad, familiar figure, tall and bent. The hands were clasped behind the back, the chin was bowed on the black stock; but every now and then the thin form drew itself straight, the fine, clean-shaven, aquiline face was raised, beaming with the ghost of an old enthusiasm, and the long right arm was lifted high in the air as he began, his sonorous tones a little tremulous in spite of the restraint of old-time pomposity and deliberation,—

“Mr. Speaker, I rise;”—or, “If your Honor please”—

The forlorn, helpless earnestness of this mockery of life touched Horace’s heart; and yet he smiled to think how different were the methods and manners of his father from those of brother Hooper, whose requests still droned up to the reverberating hollows of the roof, and there were lost in a subdued boom and snarl of echoes such as a court-room only can beget.

Two generations ago, when the Honorable Horace Kortlandt Walpole was the rising young lawyer of the State; when he was known as “the Golden-Mouthed Orator of St. Lawrence County,” he was in the habit of assuming that he owned whatever court he practised in; and, as a rule, he was right. The most bullock-brained of country judges deferred to the brilliant young master of law and eloquence, and his “requests” were generally accepted as commands and obeyed as such. Of course the great lawyer, for form’s sake, threw a veil of humility over his deliverances; but even that he rent to shreds when the fire of his eloquence once got fairly aglow.

“May it please your Honor! Before your Honor exercises the sacred prerogative of your office—before your Honor performs the sacred duty which the State has given into your hands—before, with that lucid genius to which I bow my head, you direct the minds of these twelve good men and true in the path of strict judicial investigation, I ask your Honor to instruct them that they must bring to their deliberations that impartial justice which the laws of our beloved country—of which no abler exponent than your Honor has ever graced the bench,—which the laws of our beloved country guarantee to the lowest as well as to the loftiest of her citizens—from the President in the Executive Mansion to the humble artisan at the forge—throughout this broad land, from the lagoons of Louisiana to where the snow-clad forests of Maine hurl defiance at the descendants of Tory refugees in the barren wastes of Nova Scotia”—

Horace remembered every word and every gesture of that speech. He recalled even the quick upward glance from under the shaggy eyebrows with which his father seemed to see again the smirking judge catching at the gross bait of flattery; he knew the little pause which the speaker’s memory had filled with the applause of an audience long since dispersed to various silent country graveyards; and he wondered, pityingly, if it were possible that even in his father’s prime that wretched allusion to old political hatreds had power to stir the fire of patriotism in the citizen’s bosom.

“Poor old father!” said the boy to himself. The voice which had for so many years been but an echo was stilled wholly now. Brief victory and long defeat were nothing now to the golden-mouthed orator.

“Shall I fail as he failed?” thought Horace: “No! I can’t. Haven’t I got her to work for?”

And then he drew out of his breast pocket a red silk handkerchief and turned it over in his hand with a movement that concealed and caressed at the same time.

It was a very red handkerchief. It was not vermilion, nor “cardinal,” nor carmine,—a strange Oriental idealization of blood-red which lay well on the soft, fine, luxurious fabric. But it was an unmistakable, a shameless, a barbaric red.

And as he looked at it, young Hitchcock, of Hitchcock & Van Rensselaer, came up behind him and leaned over his shoulder.

“Where did you get the handkerchief, Walpole?” he whispered; “you ought to hang that out for an auction flag, and sell out your cases.”

Horace stuffed it back in his pocket.

“You’d be glad enough to buy some of them, if you got the show,” he returned; but the opportunity for a prolonged contest of wit was cut short. The judge was folding his letter, and the nasal counsel, having finished his reading, stood gazing in doubt and trepidation at the bench, and asking himself why his Honor had not passed on each point as presented. He found out.

“Are you prepared to submit those requests in writing?” demanded Gillespie, J., sharply and suddenly. He knew well enough that that poor little nasal, nervous junior counsel would never have trusted himself to speak ten consecutive sentences in court without having every word on paper before him.

“Ye-yes,” the counsel stammered, and handed up his careful manuscript.

“I will examine these to-night,” said his Honor, and, apparently, he made an endorsement on the papers. He was really writing the address on the envelope of his letter. Then there was a stir, and a conversation between the judge and two or three lawyers, all at once, which was stopped when his Honor gave an Olympian nod to the clerk.

The crier arose.

“He’ ye! he’ ye! he’ ye!” he shouted with perfunctory vigor. “Wah—wah—wah!” the high ceiling slapped back at him; and he declaimed, on one note, a brief address to “Awperns han bins” in that court, of which nothing was comprehensible save the words “Monday next at eleven o’clock.” And then the court collectively rose, and individually put on hats for the most part of the sort called queer.

All the people were chattering in low voices; chairs were moved noisily, and the slumbering juror opened his weary eyes and troubled himself with an uncalled-for effort to look as though he had been awake all the time and didn’t like the way things were going, at all. Horace got from the clerk the papers for which he had been waiting, and was passing out, when his Honor saw him and hailed him with an expressive grunt.

Gillespie, J., looked over his spectacles at Horace.

“Shall you see Judge Weeden at the office? Yes? Will you have the kindness to give him this—yes? If it’s no trouble to you, of course.”

Gillespie, J., was not over-careful of the feelings of lawyers’ clerks, as a rule; but he had that decent disinclination to act ultra prÆscriptum which marks the attitude of the well-bred man toward his inferiors in office. He knew that he had no business to use Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather’s clerk as a messenger in his private correspondence.

Horace understood him, took the letter, and allowed himself a quiet smile when he reached the crowded corridor.

What mattered, he thought, as his brisk feet clattered down the wide stairs of the rotunda, the petty insolence of office now? He was Gillespie’s messenger to-day; but had not his young powers already received recognition from a greater than Gillespie? If Judge Gillespie lived long enough he should put his gouty old legs under Judge Walpole’s mahogany, and prose over his port—yes, he should have port, like the relic of mellow old days that he was—of the times “when your father-in-law and I, Walpole, were boys together.”

Ah, there you have the spell of the Red Silk Handkerchief!

It was a wonderful tale to Horace; for he saw it in that wonderful light which shall shine on no man of us more than once in his life—on some of us not at all, Heaven help us!—but, in the telling, it is a simple tale:

“The Golden-Mouthed Orator of St. Lawrence” was at the height of his fame in that period of storm and stress which had the civil war for its climax. His misfortune was to be drawn into a contest for which he was not equipped, and in which he had little interest. His sphere of action was far from the battle-ground of the day. The intense localism that bounded his knowledge and his sympathies had but one break—he had tasted in his youth the extravagant hospitality of the South, and he held it in grateful remembrance. So it happened that he was a trimmer,—a moderationist he called himself,—a man who dealt in optimistic generalities, and who thought that if everybody—the slaves included—would only act temperately and reasonably, and view the matter from the standpoint of pure policy, the differences of South and North could be settled as easily as, through his own wise intervention, the old turnip-field feud of Farmer Oliver and Farmer Bunker had been wiped out of existence.

His admirers agreed with him, and they sent him to Congress to fill the unexpired short term of their representative, who had just died in Washington of what we now know as a malarial fever. It was not to be expected, perhaps, that the Honorable Mr. Walpole would succeed in putting a new face on the great political question in the course of his first term; but they all felt sure that his first speech would startle men who had never heard better than what Daniel Webster had had to offer them.

But the gods were against the Honorable Mr. Walpole. On the day set for his great effort there was what the theatrical people call a counter-attraction. Majah Pike had come up from Mizourah, sah, to cane that demn’d Yankee hound, Chahles Sumnah, sah,—yes, sah, to thrash him like a dawg, begad! And all Washington had turned out to see the performance, which was set down for a certain hour, in front of Mr. Sumner’s door.

There was just a quorum when the golden-mouthed member began his great speech,—an inattentive, chattering crowd, that paid no attention to his rolling rhetoric and rococo grandiloquence. He told the empty seats what a great country this was, and how beautiful was a middle policy, and he illustrated this with a quotation from Homer, in the original Greek (a neat novelty: Latin was fashionable for parliamentary use in Webster’s time), with, for the benefit of the uneducated, the well-known translation by the great Alexander Pope, commencing:

When Nestor and Mr. Walpole closed, there was no quorum. The member from New Jersey, who had engaged him in debate, was sleeping the sleep of honorable intoxication in his seat. Outside, all Washington was laughing and cursing. Majah Pike had not appeared.

It was the end of the golden-mouthed orator. His voice was never heard again in the House. His one speech was noticed only to be laughed at, and the news went home to his constituents. They showed that magnanimity which the poets tell us is an attribute of the bucolic character. They, so to speak, turned over the pieces of their broken idol with their cow-hide boots, and remarked that they had known it was clay, all along, and dern poor clay at that.

So the golden-mouthed went home, to try to make a ruined practice repair his ruined fortune; to give mortgages on his home to pay the debts his hospitality had incurred; to discuss with a few feeble old friends ways and means by which the war might have been averted; to beget a son of his old age, and to see the boy grow up in a new generation, with new ideas, new hopes, new ambitions, and a lifetime before him to make memories in.

They had little enough in common, but they came to be great friends as the boy grew older, for Horace, inherited all his traits from the old man, except a certain stern energy which came from his silent, strong-hearted mother, and which his father saw with a sad joy.

Mr. Walpole sent his son to New York to study law in the office of Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather, who were a pushing young firm in 1850. Horace found it a very quiet and conservative old concern. Snowden and Gilfeather were dead; Weeden had been on the bench and had gone off the bench at the call of a “lucrative practice;” there were two new partners, whose names appeared only on the glass of the office door and in a corner of the letter-heads.

Horace read his law to some purpose. He became the managing clerk of Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather. This particular managing clerkship was one of unusual dignity and prospective profit. It meant, as it always does, great responsibility, little honor, and less pay. But the firm was so peculiarly constituted that the place was a fine stepping-stone for a bright and ambitious boy. One of the new partners was a business man, who had put his money into the concern in 1860, and who knew and cared nothing about law. He kept the books and managed the money, and was beyond that only a name on the door and a terror to the office-boys. The other new partner was a young man who made a specialty of collecting debts. He could wring gold out of the stoniest and barrenest debtor; and there his usefulness ended. The general practice of the firm rested on the shoulders of Judge Weeden, who was old, lazy, and luxury-loving, and who, to tell the honest truth, shirked his duties. Such a state of affairs would have wrecked a younger house; but Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather had a great name, and the consequences of his negligent feebleness had not yet descended upon Judge Weeden’s head.

That they would, in a few years, that the Judge knew it, and that he was quite ready to lean on a strong young arm, Horace saw clearly.

That his own arm was growing in strength he also saw; and the Judge knew that, too. He was Judge Weeden’s pet. All in the office recognized the fact. All, after reflection, concluded that it was a good thing that he was. New blood had to come into the firm sooner or later, and although it was not possible to watch the successful rise of this boy without a little natural envy and heart-burning, yet it was to be considered that Horace was one who would be honorable, just, and generous wherever fortune put him.

Horace was a gentleman. They all knew it. Barnes and Haskins, the business man and the champion collector, knew it down in the shallows of their vulgar little souls. Judge Weeden, who had some of that mysterious ichor of gentlehood in his wine-fed veins, knew it and rejoiced in it. And Horace—I can say for Horace that he never forgot it.

He was such a young prince of managing clerks that no one was surprised when he was sent down to Sand Hills, Long Island, to make preparations for the reorganization of the Great Breeze Hotel Company, and the transfer of the property known as the Breeze Hotel and Park to its new owners. The Breeze Hotel was a huge “Queen Anne” vagary which had, after the fashion of hotels, bankrupted its first owners, and was now going into the hands of new people, who were likely to make their fortunes out of it. The property had been in litigation for a year or so; the mechanics’ liens were numerous, and the mechanics clamorous; and although the business was not particularly complicated, it needed careful and patient adjustment. Horace knew the case in every detail. He had drudged over it all the winter, with no especial hope of personal advantage, but simply because that was his way of working. He went down in June to the mighty barracks, and lived for a week in what would have been an atmosphere of paint and carpet-dye had it not been for the broad sea wind that blew through the five hundred open windows, and swept rooms and corridors with salty freshness. The summering folk had not arrived yet; there were only the new manager and his six score of raw recruits of clerks and servants. But Horace felt the warm blood coming back to his cheeks, that the town had somewhat paled, and he was quite content; and every day he went down to the long, lonely beach, and had a solitary swim, although the sharp water whipped his white skin to a biting red. The sea takes a long while to warm up to the summer, and is sullen about it.

He was to have returned to New York at the end of the week, and Haskins was to have taken his place; but it soon became evident to Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather that the young man would attend to all that was to be done at Sand Hills quite as well as Mr. Haskins, or—quite as well as Judge Weeden himself, for that matter. He had to shoulder no great responsibility; the work was mostly of a purely clerical nature, vexatious enough, but simple. It had to be done on the spot, however; the original Breeze Hotel and Park Company was composed of Sand Hillers, and the builders were Sand Hillers, too, the better part of them. And there were titles to be searched; for the whole scheme was an ambitious splurge of Sand Hills pride and it had been undertaken and carried out in a reckless and foolish way. Horace knew all the wretched little details of the case, and so Horace was entrusted with duties such as do not often devolve upon a man of his years; and he took up his burden proudly, and with a glowing consciousness of his own strength.

Judge Weeden missed his active and intelligent obedience in the daily routine of office business; but the Judge thought it was just as well that Horace should not know that fact. The young man’s time would come soon enough, and he would be none the worse for serving his apprenticeship in modesty and humility. The work entrusted to him was an honor in itself. And then, there was no reason why poor Walpole’s boy shouldn’t have a sort of half-holiday out in the country, and enjoy his youth.

He was not recalled. The week stretched out. He worked hard, found time to play, hugged his quickened ambitions to his breast, wrote hopeful letters to the mother at Montevista, made a luxury of his loneliness, and felt a bashful resentment when the “guests” of the hotel began to pour in from the outside world.

For a day or two he fought shy of them. But these first comers were lonely too, and not so much in love with loneliness as he thought he was, and very soon he became one of them. He had found out all the walks and drives; he knew the times of the tides; he had made friends with the fishermen for a league up and down the coast, and he had amassed a store of valuable hints as to where the first blue-fish might be expected to run. Altogether he was a very desirable companion. Besides, that bright, fresh face of his, and a certain look in it, made you friends with him at once, especially if you happened to be a little older, and to remember a look of the sort, lost, lost forever, in a boy’s looking-glass.

So he was sought out, and he let himself be found, and the gregarious instinct in him waxed delightfully.

And then It came. Perhaps I should say She came; but it is not the woman we love; it is our dream of her. Sweet and tender, fair and good, she may be; but let it be honor enough for her that she has that glory about her face which our love kindles to the halo that lights many a man’s life to the grave, though the face beneath it be dead or false.

I will not admit that it was only a pretty girl from Philadelphia who came to Sand Hills that first week in July. It was the rosy goddess herself, dove-drawn across the sea, in the warm path of the morning sun—although the tremulous, old-fashioned handwriting on the hotel register only showed that the early train had brought—

It was the Honorable Samuel Rittenhouse, ex-Chief-Justice of Pennsylvania, the honored head of the Pennsylvania bar, and the legal representative of the Philadelphia contingent of the new Breeze Hotel and Park Company.

In the evening Horace called upon him in his rooms with a cumbersome stack of papers, and patiently waded through explanations and repetitions until Mr. Rittenhouse’s testy courtesy—he had the nervous manner of age apprehensive of youthful irreverence—melted into a complacent and fatherly geniality. Then, when the long task was done and his young guest arose, he picked up the card that lay on the table and trained his glasses on it.

“‘H. K. Walpole?’” he said: “are you a New Yorker, sir?”

“From the north of the State,” Horace told him.

“Indeed, indeed. Why, let me see—you must be the son of my old friend Walpole—of Otsego—wasn’t it?” said the old gentleman, still tentatively.

“St. Lawrence, sir.”

“Yes, St. Lawrence—of course, of course. Why, I knew your father well, years ago, sir. We were at college together.”

“At Columbia?”

“Yes—yes. Why, bless me,” Judge Rittenhouse went on, getting up to look at Horace: “you’re the image of your poor father at your age. A very brilliant man, sir, a very able man. I did not see much of him after we left college—I was a Pennsylvanian, and he was from this State—but I have always remembered your father with respect and regard, sir,—a very able man. I think I heard of his death some years ago.”

“Three years ago,” said Horace. His voice fell somewhat. How little to this old man of success was the poor, unnoticed death of failure!

“Three years only!” repeated the judge, half apologetically; “ah, people slip away from each other in this world—slip away. But I’m glad to have met you, sir—very much pleased indeed. Rosamond!”

For an hour the subdued creaking of a rocking-chair by the window had been playing a monotonously pleasant melody in Horace’s ears. Now and then a coy wisp of bright hair, or the reflected ghost of it, had flashed into view in the extreme lower left-hand corner of a mirror opposite him. Once he had seen a bit of white brow under it, and from time to time the low flutter of turning magazine leaves had put in a brief second to the rocking-chair.

All this time Horace’s brains had been among the papers on the table; but something else within him had been swaying to and fro with the rocking-chair, and giving a leap when the wisp of hair bobbed into sight.

Now the rocking-chair accompaniment ceased, and the curtained corner by the window yielded up its treasure, and Miss Rittenhouse came forward, with one hand brushing the wisp of hair back into place, as if she were on easy and familiar terms with it. Horace envied it.

“Rosamond,” said the judge: “This is Mr. Walpole, the son of my old friend Walpole. You have heard me speak of Mr. Walpole’s father.”

“Yes, papa,” said the young lady, all but the corners of her mouth. And, oddly enough, Horace did not think of being saddened because this young woman had never heard of his father. Life was going on a new key, all of a sudden, with a hint of a melody to be unfolded that ran in very different cadences from the poor old tune of memory.

My heroine, over whose head some twenty summers had passed, was now in the luxuriant prime of her youthful beauty. Over a brow whiter than the driven snow fell clustering ringlets, whose hue—

That is the way the good old novelists and story-tellers of the Neville and Beverley days would have set out to describe Miss Rittenhouse, had they known her. Fools and blind! As if anyone could describe—as if a poet, even, could more than hint at what a man sees in a woman’s face when, seeing, he loves.

For a few moments the talkers were constrained, and the talk was meagre and desultory. Then the Judge, who had been rummaging around among the dust-heaps of his memory, suddenly recalled the fact that he had once, in stage-coach days, passed a night at Montevista, and had been most hospitably treated. He dragged this fact forth, professed a lively remembrance of Mrs. Walpole,—“a fine woman, sir, your mother; a woman of many charms,”—asked after her present health; and then, satisfied that he had acquitted himself of his whole duty, withdrew into the distant depths of his own soul and fumbled over the papers Horace had brought him, trying to familiarize himself with them, as a commander might try to learn the faces of his soldiers.

Then the two young people proceeded to find the key together, and began a most harmonious duet. Sand Hills was the theme. Thus it was that they had to go out on the balcony, where Miss Rittenhouse might gaze into the brooding darkness over the sea, and watch it wink a slow yellow eye with a humorous alternation of sudden and brief red. Thus, also, Horace had to explain how the lighthouse was constructed. This moved Miss Rittenhouse to scientific research. She must see how it was done. Mr. Walpole would be delighted to show her. Papa was so much interested in those mechanical matters. Mr. Walpole had a team and light wagon at his disposal, and would very much like to drive Miss Rittenhouse and her father over to the lighthouse. Miss Rittenhouse communicated this kind offer to her father. Her father saw what was expected of him, and dutifully acquiesced, like an obedient American father. Miss Rittenhouse had managed the Rittenhouse household and the head of the house of Rittenhouse ever since her mother’s death.

Mr. Walpole really had a team at his disposal. He came from a country where people do not chase foxes, nor substitutes for foxes; but where they know and revere a good trotter. He had speeded many a friend’s horse in training for the county fair. When he came to Sand Hills his soundness in the equine branch of a gentleman’s education had attracted the attention of a horsey Sand-Hiller, who owned a showy team with a record of 2.37. This team was not to be trusted to the ordinary summer boarder on any terms; but the Sand-Hiller was thrifty and appreciative, and he lured Horace into hiring the turnout at a trifling rate, and thus captured every cent the boy had to spare, and got his horses judiciously exercised.

There was a showy light wagon to match the team, and the next day the light wagon, with Horace and the Rittenhouses in it, passed every carriage on the road to the lighthouse, where Miss Rittenhouse satisfied her scientific spirit with one glance at the lantern, after giving which glance she went outside and sat in the shade of the white tower with Horace, while the keeper showed the machinery to the Judge. Perhaps she went to the Judge afterward, and got him to explain it all to her.

Thus it began, and for two golden weeks thus it went on. The reorganized Breeze Hotel and Park Company met in business session on its own property, and Horace acted as a sort of honorary clerk to Judge Rittenhouse. The company, as a company, talked over work for a couple of hours each day. As a congregation of individuals, it ate and drank and smoked and played billiards and fished and slept the rest of the two dozen. Horace had his time pretty much to himself, or rather to Miss Rittenhouse, who monopolized it. He drove her to the village to match embroidery stuffs. He danced with her in the evenings when two stolidly soulful Germans, one with a fiddle and the other with a piano, made the vast dining-room ring and hum with SuppÉ and Waldteufel,—and this was to the great and permanent improvement of his waltzing. She taught him how to play lawn-tennis—he was an old-fashioned boy from the backwoods, and he thought that croquet was still in existence, so she had to teach him to play lawn-tennis—until he learned to play much better than she could. On the other hand, he was a fresh-water swimmer of rare wind and wiriness, and a young sea-god in the salt, as soon as he got used to its pungent strength. So he taught her to strike out beyond the surf-line, with broad, breath-long sweeps, and there to float and dive and make friends with the ocean. Even he taught her to fold her white arms behind her back, and swim with her feet. As he glanced over his shoulder to watch her following him, and to note the timorous, admiring crowd on the shore, she seemed a sea-bred Venus of Milo in blue serge.

I have known men to be bored by such matters. They made Horace happy. He was happiest, perhaps, when he found out that she was studying Latin. All the girls in Philadelphia were studying Latin that summer. They had had a little school Latin, of course; but now their aims were loftier. Miss Rittenhouse had brought with her a Harkness’s Virgil, an Anthon’s dictionary, an old Bullion & Morris, and—yes, when Horace asked her, she had brought an Interlinear; but she didn’t mean to use it. They rowed out to the buoy, and put the Interlinear in the sea. They sat on the sands after the daily swim, and enthusiastically labored, with many an unclassic excursus, over P. V. Maronis Opera. Horace borrowed some books of a small boy in the hotel, and got up at five o’clock in the morning to run a couple of hundred lines or so ahead of his pupil, “getting out” a stint that would have made him lead a revolt had any teacher imposed it upon his class a few years before—for he was fresh enough from schooling to have a little left of the little Latin that colleges give.

He wondered how it was that he had never seen the poetry of the lines before. Forsan et hÆc olim meminisse juvabit—for perchance it will joy us hereafter to remember these things! He saw the wet and weary sailors on the shore, hungrily eating, breathing hard after their exertions; he heard the deep cheerfulness of their leader’s voice. The wind blew toward him over the pine barrens, as fresh as ever it blew past Dido’s towers. A whiff of briny joviality and adventurous recklessness seemed to come from the page on his knee. And to him, also, had not She appeared who saw, hard by the sea, that pious old buccaneer-Lothario, so much tossed about on land and upon the deep?

This is what the moderns call a flirtation, and I do not doubt that it was called a flirtation by the moderns around these two young people. Somehow, though, they never got themselves “talked about,” not even by the stranded nomads on the hotel verandas. Perhaps this was because there was such a joyous freshness and purity about both of them that it touched the hearts of even the slander-steeped old dragons who rocked all day in the shade, and embroidered tidies and talked ill of their neighbors. Perhaps it was because they also had that about them which the mean and vulgar mind always sneers at, jeers at, affects to disbelieve in, always recognizes and fears,—the courage and power of the finer strain. Envy in spit-curls and jealousy in a false front held their tongues, may be, because, though they knew that they, and even their male representatives, were safe from any violent retort, yet they recognized the superior force, and shrunk from it as the cur edges away from the quiescent whip.

There is a great difference, too, between the flirtations of the grandfatherless and the flirtations of the grandfathered. I wish you to understand that Mr. Walpole and Miss Rittenhouse did not sprawl through their flirtation, nor fall into that slipshod familiarity which takes all the delicate beauty of dignity and mutual respect out of such a friendship. Horace did not bow to the horizontal, and Miss Rittenhouse did not make a cheese-cake with her skirts when he held open the door for her to pass through; but the bond of courtesy between them was no less sweetly gracious on her side, no less finely reverential on his, than the taste of their grandparents’ day would have exacted,—no less earnest, I think, that it was a little easier than puff and periwig might have made it.

Yet I also think, whatever was the reason that made the dragons let them alone, that a simple mother of the plain, old-fashioned style is better for a girl of Miss Rosamond Rittenhouse’s age than any such precarious immunity from annoyance.

Ah, the holiday was short! The summons soon came for Horace. They went to the old church together for the second and last time, and he stood beside her, and they held the hymn-book between them.

Horace could not rid himself of the idea that they had stood thus through every Sunday of a glorious summer. The week before he had sung with her. He had a boyish baritone in him, one of those which may be somewhat extravagantly characterized as consisting wholly of middle register. It was a good voice for the campus, and, combined with that startling clearness of utterance which young collegians acquire, had been very effective in the little church. But to-day he had no heart to sing “Byefield” and “Pleyel”; he would rather stand beside her and feel his heart vibrate to the deep lower notes of her tender contralto, and his soul rise with the higher tones that soared upward from her pure young breast. And all the while he was making that act of devotion which—“uttered or unexpressed”—is, indeed, all the worship earth has ever known.

Once she looked up at him as if she asked, “Why don’t you sing?” But her eyes fell quickly, he thought with a shade of displeasure in them at something they had seen in his. Yet as he watched her bent head, the cheek near him warmed with a slow, soft blush. He may only have fancied that her clear voice quivered a little with a tremolo not written in the notes at the top of the page.

And now the last day came. When the work-a-day world thrust its rough shoulder into Arcadia, and the hours of the idyll were numbered, they set to talking of it as though the two weeks that they had known each other were some sort of epitomized summer. Of course they were to meet again, in New York or in Philadelphia; and of course there were many days of summer in store for Miss Rittenhouse at Sand Hills, at Newport, and at Mount Desert; but Horace’s brief season was closed, and somehow she seemed to fall readily into his way of looking upon it as a golden period of special and important value, their joint and exclusive property—something set apart from all the rest of her holiday, where there would be other men and other good times and no Horace.

It was done with much banter and merriment; but through it all Horace listened for delicate undertones that should echo to his ear the earnestness which sometimes rang irrepressibly in his own speech. In that marvellous instrument, a woman’s voice, there are strange and fine possibilities of sound that may be the messengers of the subtlest intelligence or the sweet falterings of imperfect control. So Horace, with love to construe for him, did not suffer too cruelly from disappointment.

On the afternoon of that last day they sat upon the beach and saw the smoke of Dido’s funeral pile go up, and they closed the dog’s-eared Virgil, and, looking seaward, watched the black cloud from a coaling steamer mar the blinding blue where sea and sky blent at the horizon; watched it grow dull and faint, and fade away, and the illumined turquoise reassert itself.

Then he was for a farewell walk, and she, with that bright acquiescence with which a young girl can make companionship almost perfect, if she will, accepted it as an inspiration, and they set out. They visited together the fishermen’s houses, where Horace bade good-bye to mighty-fisted friends, who stuck their thumbs inside their waistbands and hitched their trousers half way up to their blue-shirted arms, and said to him, “You come up here in Orgust, Mr. Walpole—say ’bout the fus’ t’ the third week ’n Orgust, ’n’ we’ll give yer some bloo-fishin’ ’t y’ won’t need t’ lie about, neither.” They all liked him, and heartily.

Old Rufe, the gruff hermit of the fishers, who lived a half-mile beyond the settlement, flicked his shuttle through the net he was mending, and did not look up as Horace spoke to him.

“Goin’?” he said; “waal, we’ve all gotter go some time oruther. The’ aint no real perma-nen-cy on this uth. Goin’? Waal, I’m”—he paused, and weighed the shuttle in his hand as though to aid him in balancing some important mental process. “Sho! I’m derned ’f I ain’t sorry. Squall comin’ up, an’ don’t y’ make no mistake,” he hurried on, not to be further committed to unguarded expression; “better look sharp, or y’ ’ll git a wettin’.”

A little puff of gray cloud, scurrying along in the south-east, had spread over half the sky, and now came a strong, eddying wind. A big raindrop made a dark spot on the sand before them; another fell on Miss Rittenhouse’s cheek, and then, with a vicious, uncertain patter, the rain began to come down.

“We’ll have to run for Poinsett’s,” said Horace, and stretched out his hand. She took it, and they ran.

Poinsett’s was just ahead—a white house on a lift of land, close back of the shore-line, with a long garden stretching down in front, and two or three poplar trees. The wind was turning up the pale under-sides of grass-blade and flower leaf, and whipping the shivering poplars silver white. Cap’n Poinsett, late of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was tacking down the path in his pea-jacket, with his brass telescope tucked under his arm. He was making for the little white summer-house that overhung the shore; but he stopped to admire the two young people dashing up the slope toward him, for the girl ran with a splendid free stride that kept her well abreast of Horace’s athletic lope.

“Come in,” he said, opening the gate, and smiling on the two young faces, flushed and wet; “come right in out o’ the rain. Be’n runnin’, ain’t ye? Go right int’ the house. Mother!” he called, “here’s Mr. Walpole ’n’ his young lady. You’ll hev to ex-cuse me; I’m a-goin’ down t’ my observatory. I carn’t foller the sea no longer myself, but I can look at them that dooz. There’s my old woman—go right in.”

He waddled off, leaving both of them redder than their run accounted for, and Mrs. Poinsett met them at the door, her arms folded in her apron.

“Walk right in,” she greeted them; “the cap’n he mus’ always go down t’ his observatory, ’s he calls it, ’n’ gape through thet old telescope of hisn, fust thing the’s a squall—jus’s if he thought he was skipper of all Long Island. But you come right int’ the settin’-room ’n’ make yourselves to home. Dear me suz! ’f I’d ’a’ thought I’d ’a’ had company I’d ’a’ tidied things up. I’m jus’ ’s busy as busy, gettin’ supper ready; but don’t you mind me—jus’ you make yourselves to home,” and she drifted chattering away, and they heard her in the distant kitchen amiably nagging the hired girl.

It was an old-time, low-ceiled room, neat with New England neatness. The windows had many panes of green flint glass, through which they saw the darkening storm swirl over the ocean and ravage the flower-beds near by.

And when they had made an end of watching Cap’n Poinsett in his little summer-house, shifting his long glass to follow each scudding sail far out in the darkness; and when they had looked at the relics of Cap’n Poinsett’s voyages to the Orient and the Arctic, and at the cigar-boxes plastered with little shells, and at the wax fruit, and at the family trousers and bonnets in the album, there was nothing left but that Miss Rittenhouse should sit down at the old piano, bought for Amanda Jane in the last year of the war, and bring forth rusty melody from the yellowed keys.

“What a lovely voice she has!” thought Horace as she sang. No doubt he was right. I would take his word against that of a professor of music, who would have told you that it was a nice voice for a girl, and that the young woman had more natural dramatic expression than technical training.

They fished out Amanda Jane’s music-books, and went through “Juanita,” and the “Evergreen Waltz,” and “Beautiful Isle of the Sea;” and, finding a lot of war songs, severally and jointly announced their determination to invade Dixie Land, and to annihilate Rebel Hordes; and adjured each other to remember Sumter and Baltimore, and many other matters that could have made but slight impression on their young minds twenty odd years before. Mrs. Poinsett, in the kitchen, stopped nagging her aid, and thought of young John Tarbox Poinsett’s name on a great sheet of paper in the Gloucester post-office, one morning at the end of April, 1862, when the news came up that Farragut had passed the forts.

The squall was going over, much as it had come, only no one paid attention to its movements now, for the sun was out, trying to straighten up the crushed grass and flowers, and to brighten the hurrying waves, and to soothe the rustling agitation of the poplars.

They must have one more song. Miss Rittenhouse chose “Jeannette and Jeannot,” and when she looked back at him with a delicious coy mischief in her eyes, and sang,—

Horace felt something flaming in his cheeks and choking in his breast, and it was hard for him to keep from snatching those hands from the keys and telling her she knew better.

But he was man enough not to. He controlled himself, and made himself very pleasant to Mrs. Poinsett about not staying to supper, and they set out for the hotel.

The air was cool and damp after the rain.

“You’ve been singing,” said Horace, “and you will catch cold in this air, and lose your voice. You must tie this handkerchief around your throat.”

She took his blue silk handkerchief and tied it around her throat, and wore it until just as they were turning away from the shore, when she took it off to return to him; and the last gust of wind that blew that afternoon whisked it out of her hand, and sent it whirling a hundred yards out to sea.

“Now, don’t say a word,” said Horace; “it isn’t of the slightest consequence.”

But he looked very gloomy over it. He had made up his mind that that silk handkerchief should be the silk handkerchief of all the world to him, from that time on.

It was one month later that Mr. H. K. Walpole received, in care of Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather, an envelope postmarked Newport, containing a red silk handkerchief. His initials were neatly—nay, beautifully, exquisitely—stitched in one corner. But there was absolutely nothing about the package to show who sent it, and Horace sorrowed over this. Not that he was in any doubt; but he felt that it meant to say that he must not acknowledge it; and, loyally, he did not.

And he soon got over that grief. The lost handkerchief, whose origin was base and common, like other handkerchiefs, and whose sanctity was purely accidental—what was it to this handkerchief, worked by her for him?

This became the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that had changed the boy’s whole life. Before this he had had purposes and ambitions. He had meant to take care of his mother, to do well in the world, and to restore, if he could, the honor and glory of the home his father had left him. Here were duty, selfishness, and an innocent vanity. But now he had an end in life, so high that the very seeking of it was a religion. Every thought of self was flooded out of him, and what he sought he sought in a purer and nobler spirit than ever before.

Is it not strange? A couple of weeks at the sea-side, a few evenings under the brooding darkness of hotel verandas, the going to and fro of a girl with a sweet face, and this ineradicable change is made in the mind of a man who has forty or fifty years before him wherein to fight the world, to find his place, to become a factor for good or evil.

And here we have Horace, with his heart full of love and his head full of dreams, mooning over a silk handkerchief, in open court.

Not that he often took such chances. The daws of humor peck at the heart worn on the sleeve; and quite rightly, for that is no place for a heart. But in the privacy of his modest lodging-house room he took the handkerchief out, and spread it before him, and looked at it, and kissed it sometimes, I suppose,—it seems ungentle to pry thus into the sacredness of a boy’s love,—and, certainly, kept it in sight, working, studying, or thinking.

With all this, the handkerchief became somewhat rumpled, and at last Horace felt that it must be brought back to the condition of neatness in which he first knew it. So, on a Tuesday, he descended to the kitchen of his lodging-house, and asked for a flat-iron. His good landlady, at the head of an industrious, plump-armed Irish brigade, all vigorously smoothing out towels, stared at him in surprise.

“If there’s anything you want ironed, Mr. Walpole, bring it down here, and I’ll be more’n glad to iron it for you.”

Horace grew red, and found his voice going entirely out of his control, as he tried to explain that it wasn’t for that—it wasn’t for ironing clothes—he was sure nobody could do it but himself.

“Do you want it hot or cold?” asked Mrs. Wilkins, puzzled.

“Cold!” said Horace desperately. And he got it cold, and had to heat it at his own fire to perform his labor of love.

That was of a piece with many things he did. Of a piece, for instance, with his looking in at the milliners’ windows and trying to think which bonnet would best become her—and then taking himself severely to task for dreaming that she would wear a ready-made bonnet. Of a piece with his buying two seats for the theatre, and going alone and fancying her next him, and glancing furtively at the empty place at the points where he thought she would be amused, or pleased, or moved.

What a fool he was! Yes, my friend, and so are you and I. And remember that this boy’s foolishness did not keep him tossing, stark awake, through ghastly nights; did not start him up in the morning with a hot throat and an unrested brain; did not send him down to his day’s work with the haunting, clutching, lurking fear that springs forward at every stroke of the clock, at every opening of the door. Perhaps you and I have known folly worse than his.

Through all the winter—the red handkerchief cheered the hideous first Monday in October, and the Christmas holidays, when business kept him from going home to Montevista—he heard little or nothing of her. His friends in the city, or rather his father’s friends, were all ingrained New Yorkers, dating from the provincial period, who knew not Philadelphia; and it was only from an occasional newspaper paragraph that he learned that Judge Rittenhouse and his daughter were travelling through the South, for the Judge’s health. Of course, he had a standing invitation to call on them whenever he should find himself in Philadelphia; but they never came nearer Philadelphia than Washington, and so he never found himself in Philadelphia. He was not so sorry for this as you might think a lover should be. He knew that, with a little patience, he might present himself to Judge Rittenhouse as something more than a lawyer’s managing clerk.

For, meanwhile, good news had come from home, and things were going well with him. Mineral springs had been discovered at Aristotle—mineral springs may be discovered anywhere in north New York, if you only try; though it is sometimes difficult to fit them with the proper Indian legends. The name of the town had been changed to Avoca, and there was already an Avoca Improvement Company, building a big hotel, advertising right and left, and prophesying that the day of Saratoga and Sharon and Richfield was ended. So the barrens between Montevista and Aristotle, skirting the railroad, suddenly took on a value. Hitherto they had been unsalable, except for taxes. For the most part they were an adjunct of the estate of Montevista; and in February Horace went up to St. Lawrence County and began the series of sales that was to realize his father’s most hopeless dream, and clear Montevista of all incumbrances.

How pat it all came, he thought, as, on his return trip, the train carried him past the little old station, with its glaring new sign, AVOCA, just beyond the broad stretch of “Squire Walpole’s bad land,” now sprouting with the surveyors’ stakes. After all was paid off on the old home, there would be enough left to enable him to buy out Haskins, who had openly expressed his desire to get into a “live firm,” and who was willing to part with his interest for a reasonable sum down, backed up by a succession of easy installments. And Judge Weeden had intimated, as clearly as dignity would permit, his anxiety that Horace should seize the opportunity.

Winter was still on the Jersey flats on the last day of March; but Horace, waiting at a little “flag station,” found the air full of crude prophecies of spring. He had been searching titles all day, in a close and gloomy little town-hall, and he was glad to be out-of-doors again, and to think that he should be back in New York by dinner time, for it was past five o’clock.

But a talk with the station-master made the prospect less bright. No train would stop there until seven.

Was there no other way of getting home? The lonely guardian of the Gothic shanty thought it over, and found that there was a way. He talked of the trains as though they were whimsical creatures under his charge.

“The’s a freight comin’ down right now,” he said, meditatively, “but I can’t do nothin’ with her. She’s gotter get along mighty lively to keep ahead of the Express from Philadelphia till she gets to the junction and goes on a siding till the Express goes past. And as to the Express—why, I couldn’t no more flag her than if she was a cyclone. But I tell you what you do. You walk right down to the junction—’bout a mile ’n’ a half down—and see if you can’t do something with number ninety-seven on the other road. You see, she goes on to New York on our tracks, and she mostly’s in the habit of waiting at the junction ’bout—say five to seven minutes, to give that Express from Philadelphia a fair start. That Express has it pretty much her own way on this road, for a fact. You go down to the junction—walk right down the line—and you’ll get ninety-seven—there ain’t no kind of doubt about it. You can’t see the junction; but it’s just half a mile beyont that curve down there.”

So there was nothing to be done but to walk to the junction. The railroad ran a straight, steadily descending mile on the top of a high embankment, and then suddenly turned out of sight around a ragged elevation. Horace buttoned his light overcoat, and tramped down the cinder-path between the tracks.

Yes, spring was coming. The setting sun beamed a soft, hopeful red over the shoulder of the ragged elevation; light, drifting mists rose from the marsh land below him, and the last low rays struck a vapory opal through them. There was a warm, almost prismatic purple hanging over the outlines of the hills and woods far to the east. The damp air, even, had a certain languid warmth in it; and though there was snow in the little hollows at the foot of the embankment, and bits of thin whitish ice were in the swampy pools, it was clear enough to Horace that spring was at hand. Spring—and then summer; and, by the sea or in the mountains, the junior partner of the house of Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather might hope to meet once more with Judge Rittenhouse’s daughter.

The noise of the freight-train, far up the track behind him, disturbed Horace’s springtime revery. A forethought of rocking gravel-cars scattering the overplus of their load by the way, and of reeking oil-tanks, filling the air with petroleum, sent him down the embankment to wait until the way was once more clear.

The freight-train went by and above him with a long-drawn roar and clatter, and with a sudden fierce crash, and the shriek of iron upon iron, at the end, and the last truck of the last car came down the embankment, tearing a gully behind it, and ploughed a grave for itself in the marsh ten yards ahead of him.

And, looking up, he saw a twisted rail raising its head like a shining serpent above the dim line of the embankment. A furious rush took Horace up the slope. A quarter of a mile below him the freight-train was slipping around the curve. The fallen end of the last car was beating and tearing the ties. He heard the shrill creak of the brakes and the frightened whistle of the locomotive. But the grade was steep, and it was hard to stop. And if they did stop they were half a mile from the junction—half a mile from their only chance of warning the Express.

Horace heard in his ears the station-master’s words: “She’s gotter get along mighty lively to keep ahead of the Express from Philadelphia.”

“Mighty lively—mighty lively,”—the words rang through his brain to the time of thundering car-wheels.

He knew where he stood. He had made three-quarters of the straight mile. He was three-quarters of a mile, then, from the little station. His overcoat was off in half a second. Many a time had he stripped, with that familiar movement, to trunks and sleeveless shirt, to run his mile or his half-mile; but never had such a thirteen hundred yards lain before him, up such a track, to be run for such an end.

The sweat was on his forehead before his right foot passed his left.

His young muscles strove and stretched. His feet struck the soft, unstable path of cinders with strong, regular blows. His tense forearms strained upward from his sides. Under his chest, thrown outward from his shoulders, was a constricting line of pain. His wet face burnt. There was a fire in his temples, and at every breath of his swelling nostrils something throbbed behind his eyes. The eyes saw nothing but a dancing dazzle of tracks and ties, through a burning blindness. And his feet beat, beat, beat till the shifting cinders seemed afire under him.

That is what this human machine was doing, going at this extreme pressure; every muscle, every breath, every drop of blood alive with the pain of this intense stress. Looking at it you would have said, “A fleet, light-limbed young man, with a stride like a deer, throwing the yards under him in fine style.” All we know about the running other folks are making in this world!

Half-way up the track Horace stopped short, panting hard, his heart beating like a crazy drum, a nervous shiver on him. Up the track there was a dull whirr, and he saw the engine of the express-train slipping down on him—past the station already.

The white mists from the marshes had risen up over the embankment. The last rays of the sunset shot through them, brilliant and blinding. Horace could see the engine; but would the engineer see him, waving his hands in futile gestures, in time to stop on that slippery, sharp grade? And of what use would be his choking voice when the dull whirr should turn into a roar? For a moment, in his hopeless disappointment, Horace felt like throwing himself in the path of the train, like a wasted thing that had no right to live, after so great a failure.

As will happen to those who are stunned by a great blow, his mind ran back mechanically to the things nearest his heart, and in a flash he went through the two weeks of his life. And then, before the thought had time to form itself, he had brought a red silk handkerchief from his breast, and was waving it with both hands, a fiery crimson in the opal mist.

Seen. The whistle shrieked; there was a groan and a creak of brakes, the thunder of the train resolved itself into various rattling noises, the engine slipped slowly by him, and slowed down, and he stood by the platform of the last car as the express stopped.

There was a crowd around Horace in an instant. His head was whirling, but in a dull way he said what he had to say. An officious passenger, who would have explained it all to the conductor if the conductor had waited, took the deliverer in his arms—for the boy was near fainting—and enlightened the passengers who flocked around.

Horace hung in his embrace, too deadly weak even to accept the offer of one of the dozen flasks that were thrust at him. Nothing was very clear in his mind; as far as he could make out, his most distinct impression was of a broad, flat beach, a blue sea and a blue sky, a black steamer making a black trail of smoke across them, and a voice soft as an angel’s reading Latin close by him. Then he opened his eyes and saw the woman of the voice standing in front of him.

“Oh, Richard,” he heard her say,“it’s Mr. Walpole!”

Horace struggled to his feet. She took his hand in both of hers and drew closer to him; the crowd falling back a little, seeing that they were friends.

“What can I ever say to thank you?” she said. “You have saved our lives. It’s not so much for myself, but”—she blushed faintly, and Horace felt her hands tremble on his; “Richard—my husband—we were married to-day, you know—and”—

Something heavy and black came between Horace and life for a few minutes. When it passed away he straightened himself up out of the arms of the officious passenger and stared about him, mind and memory coming back to him. The people around looked at him oddly. A brakeman brought him his overcoat, and he stood unresistingly while it was slipped on him. Then he turned away and started down the embankment.

“Hold on!” cried the officious passenger excitedly; “we’re getting up a testimonial”—

Horace never heard it. How he found his way he never cared to recall; but the gas was dim in the city streets, and the fire was out in his little lodging-house room when he came home; and his narrow white bed knows all that I cannot tell of his tears and his broken dreams.

“Walpole,” said Judge Weeden, as he stood between the yawning doors of the office safe, one morning in June, “I observe that you have a private package here. Why do you not use the drawer of our—our late associate, Mr. Haskins? It is yours now, you know. I’ll put your package in it.” He poised the heavily sealed envelope in his hand. “Very odd feeling package, Walpole. Remarkably soft!” he said. “Well, bless me, it’s none of my business, of course. Horace, how much you look like your father!”