Barbara walked along the slender road in front of Rosemont's grove. The sun was gone. Her father had not arrived yet with Johanna, but she questioned every stir of the air for the sound of their coming. A yearning which commonly lay very still in her bosom and ought in these two long years to have got reconciled to its lovely prison, was up once more in silent mutiny.

With slow self-compulsion she turned toward the house. The dim, vacated dormitories grew large against the fading after-glow. The thrush's song ceased. Remotely from the falling slope beyond the unlighted house the voices of a negro boy and girl, belated in the milking-pen, came to her ear more lightly than the gurgle of the shallow creek so near her feet. Suddenly the cry of the whip-Will's-widow filled the grove—"whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow!"—in headlong importunity until the whole air sobbed and quivered with the overcharge of its melancholy passion. Then as abruptly it was hushed, the echoes died, and Barbara, at the grove gate, recalled the other twilight hour, a counterpart of this in all but its sadness, when, on this spot, she had bidden John March come the next day to show Widewood to Henry Fair.

And now Henry Fair "some day soon," his unexpected letter said, was to come again. And she was letting him come. One of his sweet mother's letters—always so welcome—had ever so delicately hinted a hope that she would do so, the fond mother affectionately imputing to the father's wisdom the feeling that Henry's present life contained more uncertainties than were good for his, or anyone's, future. He was coming at last for her final word, and in her meditations, his patient constancy, like a great ambassador, pleaded mightily in advance.

Henry Fair, gentle, strong, and true, will come; the other never comes. The explanation is very simple; she has made it to Johanna twice within the year: a strained relation—it happens among the best of men—between him and Rosemont's master. Besides, Mr. March, she says, visits nowhere. He is, as Fannie herself testifies, more completely out of all Suez's little social eddies than even the overtasked young mistress of Rosemont, and does nothing day or night but buffet the flood of his adversities. As she reminds herself of these things now, she recalls Fannie's praise of his "indomitable pluck," and feels a new, warm courage around her own heart. For as long as men can show valor, she gravely reflects, surely women can have fortitude. How small a right, at best—how little honest room—there is in this huge world of strifes and sorrows for a young girl's heart to go breaking itself with its own grief and longing.

The right thing is, of course, to forget. She should! She must! But—she has said so every evening and morning for two years. Old man! old woman! do you remember what two years meant when you were in the early twenties? Even yet, with the two years gone, by hard crowding of the hours with cares, as a ship crowds sail or steam, it seems at times as if her forgetting were about to make headway; but just then the unexpected happens—merely the unexpected. O why not the romantic? She hears him praised or blamed; or, as now, he is ill; or she meets him in a dream; or between midnight and dawn she cannot sleep; or, worst of all, by some sad mischance she sees him, close by, in a throng or in a public way—for an instant—and, when it is too late, knows by his remembered look that he wanted to speak; and the flood lifts and sweeps her back, and she must begin again. The daylight hours are the easiest; there is so much to do and see done, and just the clear, lost, silent-hearted mother's ways to follow. One can manage everything but the twilights with their death of day, their hush of birds, the mind gazing back into the past and the heart asking unanswerable questions of the future. For the evenings there are books, though not all; especially not Herrick, any more; nor Tennyson, for it opens of itself at "Mariana," who wept, "I am aweary, aweary. Oh, God, that I were dead!"

Barbara walked again. Moving at a slow pace, so, one can more soberly—She heard wheels. A quarter of a mile away they rumbled on a small bridge and were unheard again, and while she still listened to hear them on the ground others sounded on the bridge. She hurried back to the steps of the house and had hardly reached them when Johanna drove into the grove and Fannie's voice called,

"Is that you, Barb?"

"Yes. Where's pop-a? Has anything happened?"

"He's got to stay in town to-night. Barb," said the visitor, springing to the ground, "Mr. Fair's just behind. He's only come so's to take me back to my baby."

"Fannie, something's happened!"

"Yes, Barb, dear, come into the house."

About midnight—"Doctor, her head hasn't stopped that motion since it touched the pillow," murmured Fannie. Fair had gone back and brought the physician. But the patient was soon drugged to slumber, and Fannie and Fair started for town to return early in the morning. The doctor and Johanna watched out the night. At dawn Fair rose from a sleepless couch.

At sunrise he could hear no sound through March's door; but as he left the hotel he saw Leggett come up from the train, tap at Garnet's door and go in.

Barbara awoke in a still bliss of brain, yet wholly aware of what had befallen.

"Johanna"—the maid showed herself—"has Miss Fannie gone home?"

"Yass'm. But she comin' back. She be here ve'y soon now, I reckon."

Barbara accepted a small cup of very black coffee. When it was drunk, "Johanna," she said, with slow voice and gentle gaze, "were you in the hotel?"

"Yass'm," murmured the maid. "I uz in Mr. March's room. He uz talkin' wid Mr. Fair, an' knock' his suppeh by accident onto de flo', an'"—she withdrew into herself, consulted her conscience and returned. "Miss Barb——"

"What, Johanna?"

Johanna told.

Long after she was done her mistress lay perfectly still gazing into vacancy. But the moment Fannie was alone with her she dragged the kind visitor's neck down to her lips and with unaccountable blushes mingled her tears with bitter moanings.

By and by—"And Fannie, dear, make them stay to breakfast. And thank Mr. Fair for me, as sweetly as you can. I don't know how I can ever repay him!"

"Don't you?" dryly ventured Fannie; but her friend's smile was so sad that she went no farther. Tears sprang to her eyes, as Barbara, slowly taking her hand, said,

"Of course pop-a can't keep Rosemont now. If he tries to begin a new life, Fannie, wherever it is, I shall stay with him."

Fair gave the day mainly to the annual meeting of the trustees at Suez University. The corner-stone was not to be laid until the morrow. March reopened his office, but did almost no work, owing to the steady stream of callers from all round the square coming to wish him well with handshake and laugh, and with jests which more or less subtly implied their conviction that he was somehow master of the hour. When Ravenel came others slipped out, although he pleasantly remarked that they need not, and those who looked in later and saw the two men sitting face to face drew back. "That thing last night," said Weed to Usher, going to the door of their store to throw his quid into the street, "givm the Courier about the hahdest kick in the ribs she evva got." But no one divined Ravenel's errand, unless Garnet darkly suspected it as he waited beside Jeff-Jack's desk for its owner's return, to ask him for ten thousand dollars on a mortgage of his half of Widewood, with which to quiet, he serenely explained, any momentary alarm among holders of his obligations. And even Garnet did not guess that Ravenel would not have telegraphed, as he did, to a bank in Pulaski City in which he was director, to grant the loan, had not John March just declined his offer of a third interest in the Courier.

At evening March and Fair dined together in Hotel Swanee. They took a table at a window and talked but little, and then softly, with a placid gravity, on trivial topics, keeping serious ones for a better privacy, though all other guests had eaten and gone. Only Shotwell, unaware of their presence, lingered over his pie and discussed Garnet's affair with the head waitress, an American lady. He read to her on the all-absorbing theme, from the Pulaski City Clarion; whose editor, while mingling solemn reprobations with amazed regrets, admitted that a sin less dark than David's had been confessed from the depths of David's repentance. In return she would have read him the Suez Courier's much fuller history of the whole matter; but he had read it, and with a kindly smile condemned it as "suspended in a circumaambient air of edito'ial silence."

"I know not what co'se othe's may take, my dea' madam, but as faw me, give me neither poverty naw riches; give me political indispensability; the pa-apers have drawn the mantle of charity ove' 'im, till it covers him like a circus-tent."

"Ah! but what'll his church do?" The lady bent from her chair and tied her slipper.

"My dea' madam, what can she do? She th'ows up—excuse the figgeh—she th'ows up, I say, her foot to kick him out; he tearfully ketches it in his ha-and an' retains it with the remahk, 'I repent!' What can his church do? She can do jest one thing!"

"What's that?" asked the lady, gathering his dishes without rising.

"Why she can make him marry Miz Proudfit!"

The lady got very red. "Captain Shotwell, I'll thaynk you not to allude to that person to me again, seh!" She jerked one knee over the other and folded her arms.

"My dea' madam! I was thoughtless! Fawgive me!" The Captain stood up. "I'm not myself to-day. Not but what I'm sobeh; but I—oh, I'm in trouble! But what's that to you?" He pulled his soft hat picturesquely over his eyes, and starting out, discovered March and Fair. He looked sadly mortified as he saluted them, but quickly lighted up again and called March aside.

"John, do you know what Charlie Champion's been doin'? He's been tryin' to get up a sort o' syndicate to buy Rosemont and make you its pres—O now, now, ca'm yo'self, he's give it up; we all wish it, but you know, John, how ow young men always ah; dead broke, you know. An' besides, anyhow, Garnet may ruin Rosemont, but, as Jeff-Jack says, he'll neveh sell it. It's his tail-holt. Eh—eh—one moment, John, I want to tell you anotheh thing. You've always been sich a good friend—John, I've p'posed to Miss Mahtha-r again, an' she's rejected me, as usual. I knew you'd be glad to hear it." He smiled through his starting tears. "But she cried, John, she did!—said she'd neveh ma' anybody else!"

"Ah, Shot, you're making a pretty bad flummux of it!"

"Yes, John, I know I am—p'posin' by da-aylight! It don't work! But, you know, when I wait until evenin' I ain't in any condition. Still, I'll neveh p'pose to her by da-aylight again! I don't believe Eve would 'a' ma'd Adam if he'd p'posed by da-aylight."

The kind Captain passed out. He spent the night in his room with our friend, the commercial traveler, who, at one in the morning, was saying to him for the tenth time,

"I came isstantly! For whareverss Garness's troubl'ss my trouble! I can't tell you why; thass my secret; I say thass my secret! Fill up again; this shocksh too much for me! Capm—want to ask you one thing: Muss I be carried to the skies on flow'ry bedge of ease while Garnet fighss to win the prise 'n' sails through bloody seas? Sing that, Capm! I'll line it! You sing it!" Shotwell sang; his companion wept. So they closed their sad festivities; not going to bed, but sleeping on their arms, like the stern heroes they were.

"Why, look at the droves of ow own people!" laughed Captain Champion at the laying of the corner-stone. And after it, "Yes, Mr. Fair's address was fi-ine! But faw me, Miz Ravenel, do you know I liked just those few words of John March evm betteh?"

"They wa'n't so few," drawled Lazarus Graves, "but what they put John on the shelf."

The hot Captain flashed. "Politically, yes, seh! On the top shelf, where we saave up ow best men faw ow worst needs, seh!"

Fair asked March to take a walk. They went without a word until they sat down on the edge of a wood. Then Fair said,

"March, I have a question to ask you. Why don't you try?"

"Fair, she won't ever let me! She's as good as told me, up and down, I mustn't. And now I can't! I'm penniless, and part of her inheritance will be my lost lands. I can't ignore that; I haven't got the moral courage! Besides, Fair, I know that if she takes you, there's an end of all her troubles and a future worthy of her—as far as any future can be. What sort of a fellow would I be—Oh, mind you! if I had the faintest reason to think she'd rather have me than you, I George! sir——" He sprang up and began to spurn the bark off a stump with a strength of leg that made it fly. "Fair, tell me! Are you going to offer yourself, notwithstanding all?"

"Yes. Yes; if the letter I expect from home to-morrow, and which I telegraphed them to write, is what I make no doubt it will be; yes."

March gazed at his companion and slowly and soberly smiled. "Fair," he softly exclaimed, "I wish I had your head! Lord! Fair, I wish I had your chance!"

"Ah! no," was the gentle reply, "I wish one or the other were far better."

A third sun had set before Barbara walked again at the edge of the grove. Two or three hours earlier her father had at last come home, and as she saw the awful change in his face and the vindictive gleam with which he met her recognition of it, she knew they were no longer father and daughter. The knowledge pierced like a slow knife, and yet brought a sense of relief—of release—that shamed her until she finally fled into the open air as if from suffocation. There she watched the west grow dark and the stars fill the sky while thoughts shone, vanished, and shone again in soft confusion like the fireflies in the grove. Only one continued—that now she might choose her future. Her father had said so with an icy venom which flashed fire as he added, "But if you quit Rosemont now, so help me God, you shall never own it, if I have to put it to the torch on my dying bed!"

She heard something and stepped into hiding. What rider could be coming at this hour? John March? Henry Fair? It was neither. As he passed in at the gate she shrank, gasped, and presently followed. Warily she rose up the front steps, stole to the parlor blinds, and, peering in, saw her father pay five crisp thousand dollar bills to Cornelius Leggett.

In her bed Barbara thought out the truth: that Cornelius still held some secret of her father's; that in smaller degree he had been drawing hush money for years; and that he had concluded that any more he could hope to plunder from the blazing ruin of his living treasury must be got quickly, and in one levy, ere it fell. But what that secret might be she strove in vain to divine. One lurking memory, that would neither show its shape nor withdraw its shadow, haunted her ringing brain. The clock struck twelve; then one; then two; and then she slept.

And then, naturally and easily, without a jar between true cause and effect, the romantic happened! The memory took form in a dream and the dream became a key to revelation. When Johanna brought her mistress's coffee she found her sitting up in bed. On her white lap lay the old reticule of fawn-skin. She had broken the clasp of its inner pocket and held in her hand a rudely scrawled paper whose blue ink and strutting signature the unlettered maid knew at a glance was from her old-time persecutor, Cornelius. It was the letter her father had dropped under the chair when she was a child. Across its face were still the bold figures of his own pencil, and from its blue lines stared out the secret.

Garnet breakfasted alone and rode off to town. The moment he was fairly gone Johanna was in the saddle, charged by her mistress with the delivery of a letter which she was "on no account to show or mention to anyone but——"

"Yass'm," meekly said Johanna, and rode straight to the office of John March.

A kind greeting met her as she entered, but it was from Henry Fair, and he was alone. He, too, had been reading a letter, a long one in a lady's writing, and seemed full of a busy satisfaction. Mr. March, he said, had ridden out across the river, but would be back very shortly. "Johanna, I may have to go North to-night. I wonder if it's too early in the day for me to call on Miss Garnet?"

"No-o, seh," drawled the conscientious maid, longing to say it was. "H-it's early, but I don't reckon it's too early," and was presently waiting for Mr. March, alone.

Hours passed. He did not come. She got starving hungry, yet waited on. Men would open the door, look in, see or not see her sitting in the nearest corner, and close it again. About two o'clock she slipped out to the Hotel Swanee, thinking she might find him at dinner. They said he had just dined and gone to his office. She hurried back, found it empty, and sat down again to wait. Another hour passed, and suddenly the door swung in and to again, and John March halted before his desk. He did not see her. His attitude was as if he might wheel and retrace his steps.

Mrs. March had broken off her engagement promptly. But when Garnet, by mail, still flattered and begged, the poetess, with no notion of relenting, but in her love of dramatic values and the gentle joy of perpetuating a harrowing suspense, had parleyed; and only just now had her tyrannical son forced a conclusion unfavorable to the unfortunate suitor. So here in his office March smote his brow and exclaimed,

"O my dear mother! that what is best for you should be so bad for me! Ahem! Why—why, howdy, Johanna? Hmm!"

With silent prayers and tremors the girl watched him read the letter. At the first line he sank into his chair, amazed and pale. "My Lord!" he murmured, and read on. "O my Lord! it can't be! Why, how?—why—O it shan't be!—O—hem! Johanna, you can go'long home, there's no answer; I'll be there before you."

At the post-office March reined in his horse while Deacon Usher brought out a drop letter from Henry Fair. But he galloped as he read it, and did not again slacken speed till he turned into the campus—except once. At the far edge of the battle-field, on that ridge where in childhood he had first met Garnet, he overtook and passed him now. As he went by he slowed to a trot, but would not have spoken had Garnet not glared on him like a captured hawk. The young man's blood boiled. He stood up in his stirrups.

"Don't look at me that way, sir; I've just learned your whole miserable little secret and expect to keep it for you." He galloped on. When, presently, he looked behind, Garnet had turned back—to find Leggett. That search was vain. Cornelius and his "Delijah," kissing their hands to their creditors, were already well on their way into that most exhilarating of all conundrums, the wide, wide world.

From Pulaski City Garnet returned on the early morning train to Suez, intending to ride out to Rosemont without a moment's delay. But on the station platform he came face to face with John March. They went to the young man's office and sat there, locked in, for an hour. Another they used up in the court-house and in Ravenel's private office with him between them in the capacity of an attorney. Yet when the three men parted Ravenel had neither asked nor been told what the matter was which had occasioned the surprising legal transaction that they had just completed.

"Now," said Garnet, briskly, "I must hurry home, for I want to leave on the evening train."

He rode out alone upon the old turnpike and over the knoll where Suez still hopes some day to build the reservoir, and reached the spot where he and his young adjutant picked blackberries that first day we ever saw them. There he stopped, and looking across the land to the roofs of distant Rosemont, straightened up in the saddle with a great pride, and then, all at once, let go a long groan of anguish and, covering his face, heaved with sobs that seemed as though each tore a separate way up from his heart. Then, as suddenly, he turned his horse's head and rode slowly back. Twice, as he went, he handled something in the pocket of his coat's skirt, and the third time drew it out—a small repeater. He did not raise the weapon; he only looked down at it in his trembling hand, the old thimbles still in the three discharged chambers, the lead peeping from the other two, and, thinking of the woman who shared his ruin, said in his mind, "One for each of us."

But it never happened so. He often wishes, yet, that it had, although he is, and has been for years, a "platform star;" "the eloquent Southern orator, moralist and humorist"—yes, that's the self-same man. He's booked for the Y. M. C. A. lecture course in your own town this season. His lecture, entitled "Temptation and How to Conquer It," is said to be "a wonderful alternation of humorous and pathetic anecdotes, illustrative, instructive and pat." I have his circular. His wife travels with him. They generally put up at hotels; tried private hospitality the first season, but it didn't work, somehow.

They have never revisited Dixie; and only once in all these years have they seen a group of Suez faces. But a season or two ago—I think it was ninety-three—in Fourteenth Street, New York, wife and I came square upon Captain Charlie Champion, whom I had not seen for years, indeed, not since his marriage, and whom my wife, never having been in Suez, did not know. Still he would have us up to dinner at his hotel with Mrs. Champion. He promised me I should find her "just as good and sweet and saane as of old, and evm prettieh!" Plainly the hearty Captain was more a man than ever, and she had made him so! He told us we should meet Colonel Ravenel and also—by pure good luck!—Mr. and Mrs. Henry Fair. You may be sure we were glad to go.

Ravenel had to send us word from the rotunda begging us to go in to dinner without him and let him join us at table. Champion neglected his soup, telling us of two or three Suez people. "Pettigrew?—O he left Suez the year Rosemont chaanged haynds. Po' Shot!—he's ow jail-keepeh, now, you know—he says one day, s'e, 'Old Pettie may be in heavm by now, but I don't believe he's happy; he'll neveh get oveh the loss of his sla-aves!'"

Fair spoke of John March, saying his influence in that region was not only very strong but very fine. Whereto Champion responded,

"—Result is we've got a betteh town and a long sight betteh risin' generation than we eveh had befo'. I don't reckon Mr. Fair thinks we do the dahkeys justice. John says we don't and I don't believe we do. When it comes to that, seh, where on earth does the under man get all his rights? But we come neareh toe it in the three counties than anywheres else in Dixie, and that I know."

I dropped an interrogative hint as to how March stood with Ravenel.

The Captain smiled. "They neveh cla-ash. Ravenel's the same mystery he always was, but not the same poweh; his losin' Garnet the way he did, and then John bein' so totally diffe'nt, you know—John don't ofm ask Jeff-Jack to do anything, but he neveh aasks in vaain.—John's motheh? Yes, she still lives with him.—No, she ve'y seldom eveh writes much poetry any mo', since heh book turned out to be such a' unaccountable faailu'e. She jest lives with him, and really"—he dropped his voice—"you'd be amaazed to see how much she's sort o' sweetened and mellered under the influence of—Ah! there's Colonel Ravenel——"

He broke off with a whisper of surprise. At a table near the door Garnet's wife sat smiling eagerly after her husband as if it was at her instigation he had risen and effusively accosted Ravenel; and both she and Garnet knew that we all saw, when Ravenel said with an unmoved face and colorless voice,

"No. No, I'm perfectly sure I never saw you before, sir." It may have been wholly by chance, but in drawing a handkerchief as he spoke he showed the hand whose thumb he had lost in saving Garnet's life.

The "star" hurried back to his seat and resumed conversation with the partner of his fate—for a moment. But all at once she rose and went out, he following, leaving their meal untouched.

Wife, as it was right she should, fell in love with Mrs. Fair on the spot, and agreed with me by stolen glances I knew how to interpret, that she was as lovely and refined a woman as she had ever met. Boston had not removed that odd, winning drawl so common in the South, and which a Southerner learns to miss so in the East. But when wife tried to have her talk about Suez and its environs she looked puzzled for an instant and then, with a light of mild amusement in her smile, said,

"O!—I never saw Suez; I was born and brought up in Chicago."

"No," said Ravenel, "it's Mrs. Champion who can tell you all about Suez."

"That's so!" cried Champion, and turning to his wife, added, "What the Saltehs don't know about Suez ain't wuth knowin', is it, Mahtha?"

That night I told wife this whole story. As I reached this point in it she interposed a strong insinuation that I am a very poor story-teller.

"I thought," she continued, "I thought I had heard you speak of John March as a married man, father of vast numbers of children."

To the last clause I objected and she modified it. "But, anyhow, you leave too much to be inferred. I want to know what Garnet's fatal secret was; and—well, I don't care especially what became of the commercial traveler, but I do want to hear a little about Barbara! Did she marry the drummer?"

I said no, apologized for my vagueness and finished, in effect, thus:

Before Barbara came down-stairs, at Rosemont, that day, to see Mr. March, she sent him Leggett's letter. Cornelius had caught scent of the facts in it from Uncle Leviticus's traditions and had found them in the county archives, which he had early learned the trick of exploring. The two Ezra Jaspers, cousins, one the grantee of Widewood, the other of Suez, had had, each, a generous ambition to found a college. He of Suez—the town that was to be—selected for his prospective seat of learning a parcel of sixty acres close against the western line of Widewood. Whereupon the grantee of Widewood good-naturedly, as well as more wisely, "took up" near the Suez tract the sixty acres which eventually became Rosemont. Both pieces lay on the same side of the same creek and were both in Clearwater County, as was much, though not the most, of Widewood. Moreover, both were in the same "section" and "range," and in their whole description differed scarcely more than by an N and an S, one being in the northwest and the other in the southwest corner of the same township. On the ill-kept county records these twin college sites early got mixed. When Garnet founded Rosemont his friends in office promised to tax that public benefaction as gently as they dared, and he was only grateful and silent, not surprised, when his tax-bill showed no increase at all. But while Rosemont was still small and poor and he seriously embarrassed by the cost of an unsuccessful election, came this letter of Leggett's to open his eyes and complete his despair. There across it were his own pencilings of volume and page to show that he had seen the record. In one of his mad moments, and in the hopeful conviction that the mulatto would soon get himself shot or hung, he paid him to keep still. From that time on, making Leggett's silence just a little more golden than his speech, he had, "in bad faith," as the lawyers say, been pouring all his gains, not worse spent, into property built on land belonging to the Widewood estate; that is, into Rosemont. When Judge March found his Clearwater taxes high, he was only glad to see any of his lands growing in value. When John came into possession, Garnet, his party being once more in power, had cunningly arranged for Rosemont not to be taxed on its improvements, but only on its land, and March discovered nothing. In the land boom Garnet kept the odd sixty acres, generally supposed to be a part of Widewood, out of sight, and induced John to deed it to his mother. But when John came back from Europe landless, there arose the new risk that he might persuade her to sell the odd sixty acres, and, on looking into the records to get its description, find himself and his mother the legal owners of Rosemont.

"That's why the villain was so anxious to marry her!" said John to himself audibly as he paced up and down in the Rosemont parlor.

"Mr. March," said Barbara's slow voice. She had entered as she spoke.

"Miss—Miss Garnet!"

"Please be seated." There was a tempest in her heart, but her words were measured and low. "You were very kind to come." She dragged her short sentences and at the same time crowded them upon each other as if afraid to let him speak. He sat, a goodly picture of deferential attention, starving to see again her old-time gaze; but she kept her eyes on the floor. "Mr. March, of course—of course, this is terrible to—me. I only say it because I don't want to seem heartless to—others—when I tell you I thank God—O please don't speak yet, sir"—her hands trembled—"I thank God this thing has come to light. For my dear father's own sake I am glad, gladder than I can tell, that he has lost Rosemont. The loss may save him. But I'm glad, too, Mr. March, that it's come to you—please hear me—and to your mother. Of course I know your lost Widewood isn't all here; but so much of it is. I wish——"

March stopped her with a gesture. "I will not—O I cannot—hear any more! I'm ashamed to have let you say so much! Rosemont is yours and shall stay yours! That's what I came to say. Two properties were exchanged by accident when each was about as near worthless as the other, and your mother's family and my father's have lived up to the mistake and have stood by it for three generations. I will not take it! My mother will not! She renounced it this morning! Do you understand?"

Barbara gave a start of pain and murmured, "I do." Her heart burned with the knowledge that he was waiting for her uplifted glance. He began again.

"The true value of Rosemont never came out of Widewood. It's the coined wealth of your mother's character and yours!" He ceased in a sudden rage of love as he saw the colors of the rose deepen slowly on the beautiful, half-averted face, and then, for very trepidation, hurried on. "O understand me, I will not be robbed! Major Garnet cannot have Rosemont. But no one shall ever know I have not bought it of him. And it shall first be yours; yours in law and trade as it is now in right. Then, if you will, you, who have been its spirit and soul, shall keep it and be so still. But if you will not, then we, my mother and I, will buy it of you at a fair price. For, Miss—Miss——"

"Barb—" she murmured.

"O thank you!" cried he. "A thousand times! And a thousand times I promise you I'll never misunderstand you again! But hem!—to return to the subject; Miss Barb—I—O well, I was going to add merely that—that, eh—I—hem!—that, eh—O—However!" She raised her eyes and he turned crimson as he stammered, "I—I—I've forgotten what I was going to say!"

"I can neither keep Rosemont nor sell it, Mr. March. It's yours. It's yours every way. It's yours in the public wish; my father told me so last night. And there's a poetic justice——"

"Poetic—O!"

"Mr. March, didn't we once agree that God gives us our lives in the rough for us to shape them into poetry—that it's poetry, whether sad or gay, that makes alive—and that it's only the prose that kills?"

"Oh! do you remember that?"

"Yes." Her eyes fell again. "It was the time you asked me to use your first name."

"O! Miss Barb, are you still going to hold that against me?"

"Rosemont should be yours, Mr. March. It rhymes!" She stood up.

"No! No, no! I give it to you!" he said, springing to his feet.

"Will you, really, Mr. March?" She moved a step toward the door.

"O Miss Barb, I do! I do!"

"But your mother's consent——"

A pang of incertitude troubled his brave face for an instant, but then he said, "Oh, there can be no doubt! Let me go and get it!" He started.

"No," she falteringly said, "don't do it."

"Yes! Yes! Say yes! Tell me to go!" He caught her hand beseechingly. As their eyes gazed into each other's, hers suddenly filled and fell.

"Go," was her one soft word. But as he reached the door another stopped him:

"John——"

He turned and stood trembling from head to foot, his brow fretted with an agony of doubt. "Oh, Barbara Garnet!" he cried, "why did you say that?"

"Johanna told me," she murmured, smiling through her tears.

He started with half-lifted arms, but stopped, turned, and with a hand on his brow, sighed, "My mother!"

But a touch rested on his arm and a voice that was never in life to be strange to him again said, "If you don't say 'our mother,' I won't call you John any——"

Oh! Oh! Oh! men are so rough sometimes!

THE END.