ON TIPTOE FOR A FLIGHT.

A period of three months goes by after Lulu's marriage, swiftly to those who are gone, slowly to those who remain. Mrs. Clendenon, in quiet household employments, in prayerful study of her Bible, fills up the aching void of her daughter's absence. Grace, in pursuance of the charge Lulu has left her, finds much of her leisure employed in scenes and undertakings that gently divert her mind from her own troubles to those of others. Under it all, the wound that time has only seared lies hidden, as near as she can hide it, from the probing of careless fingers.

Captain Clendenon shuts himself up in his dusty law office with his red-tape documents and law books. Of late he has covered himself with glory in the winning of a difficult suit at law, and Norfolk is loud in praise of the one-armed soldier, the maimed hero who has grown into such an erudite lawyer. He takes the adulation very quietly. "The time has passed when he sighed for praise." A shadow lies darkly on his life—the shadow of Grace Winans' unhappiness. In that strong, pure heart of his, no thought of himself, no selfish wish for his own happiness ever intrudes. Had peace folded his white wings over her fair head she would long ago have become to his high, honorable heart, a thing apart from his life, as something fair and lovely that was dead; and with her safe in the shelter of another man's love he would have tutored his heart to forget her. As it was, when he looked on the fair face that was to him but a reflex of the saintly soul within, his whole soul yearned over her; his love, which had in it more of heaven than earth, infolded her within the sphere of its own idolizing influence. She became to him, not the fair, fascinating, but sometimes faulty mortal woman the world saw in her, but rather a goddess, a creature most like

Such worship as this has always been the attribute of the purest, most unselfish love.

He sat alone in his office one day, his head bowed idly over Blackstone, his thoughts far away, when the sharp grating of wheels on the street outside startled him into rising and glancing out of the window. She was springing from her little pony-phaeton, and in another moment came flitting down the steps and into the room like a ray of sunshine.

"Moping, are you?" she asked with her head on one side, and a glimmer of her old-time jaunty grace.

"Not exactly," he answered, cheerfully bowing over the gloved hand she extended with frank sweetness—"only thinking; our life is too short for moping."

She might have added:

"Are you busy?" glancing, as he offered her a seat, at the table littered with books and papers.

"Not at all; I am at your service," he replied.

"I want to talk to you; but—excuse me—your office looks so gloomy—makes me blue," she shivered a little. "Is your mother quite well?"

"Quite well—thanks. Will you not go up and see her?—or shall I bring her down?"

"Thanks—neither, I believe. I saw her a day or two since, and I am come on business now. Captain Clendenon, is it quite comme il faut for a lady to ask you to take a drive? If so, my phaeton is at your service. I want to ask you something; I cannot here. Some of your tiresome clients may disturb me."

The soft appealing eyes and voice work their will with this infatuated man. If she had asked him to lie down under the hoofs of her cream-white ponies and be trampled on, I fear he would have done it. A man's love for a woman sometimes rises above its ordinary ridiculousness into the sublimity of pathos, and how little it is for him to consent to sit by her side and hear those magical tones, perhaps give some advice to that ever restless young spirit. He calls his office boy, takes his hat, and goes. Presently they are rolling over one of Norfolk's handsome drives, and censorious people, looking from their windows, exchange opinions that Mrs. Winans is "rather fast."

"I have been over to Portsmouth this morning," she says, in the midst of their small talk. "It is rather a nice little jaunt over there on the ferry-boat over the Elizabeth River—don't you think so?"

"Yes, I do think so; had you a nice time?"

"I don't know—yes, I suppose so. I visited some friends, and we went down and saw the beautiful grounds of the Naval Hospital—what a handsome building it is! The pride of Portsmouth. And what romantic grounds! I sat there a long time and looked at the sea."

To what is all this idle chatter leading, he wonders, seeing perfectly well with what consummate art she is leading the subject whither she wants it to go.

"We were all talking of that dreadful fever at Memphis," she resumes, constrainedly. "What swift progress it is making! The newspaper accounts of it are just terrible—heart-rending, indeed; and they are so fearfully in need of nurses and money. I have sent them a small sum—a mere 'drop in the ocean.'"

"So have I," he answers, white to the lips. He knows what is coming.

She gives him a flitting glance, fanning herself energetically the while. A useless proceeding, for the sea-breeze, that flutters her fair curls like golden banners, is simply delicious.

"I heard something about you over there," she ventures. "One always has to go abroad to hear news from home, you know."

"Very likely; you can hear anything you want to over there. Little Portsmouth is the hot bed of gossip," he answers, smiling dryly.

"Well, for that matter, all places are," she returns. "But you do not ask what it was that I heard?"

"Is it worth the repetition?"

"I think so, but you are not interested, I see;" and she leans back with some displeasure—a pout on the curve of her crimson lip.

He rouses himself, all penitence and forced gallantry.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Winans. Any remark from yourself cannot fail to be interesting."

"I heard—I wonder you did not tell me of it yourself—that you and your mother are going next week to Memphis to help to nurse the fever patients."

No answer.

"Is this true?"

Her eyes are seeking his. He looks down on her, answering constrainedly:

"It is perfectly true, Mrs. Winans."

"Why have you kept it from me?" in some wonder this.

"We intended telling you, of course, before we left; but it is such a harrowing topic—the sufferings of those poor yellow fever patients—that I have hesitated in mentioning it to you."

"Was that your only reason?"

No answer. He cannot bear to speak.

"I know," she resumes, "why you have not told me. You feared I would want to go, too, and so kept it from me in your good, true, brotherly love; but in this case," smiling willfully up into his disturbed face, "your painstaking has been 'Love's Labor Lost.' I have been making my mind up to go all along, and now I mean to make the trip there under the protection of your mother and yourself—if you will permit me."

The murder is out. She looks away from him demurely, waiting his reply. It comes, full of a shocked horror.

"Mrs. Winans, are you mad?"

"Not at all; are you? I am quite as strong, quite as able to help those poor sufferers, as your mother is; and yet you do not think she is mad," she answers, half offended.

"No; for she has had the fever, and so have I. You have heard of the fever that desolated Norfolk and Portsmouth in 1855? Mother and I both had the yellow fever in its worst form then, so you see it is perfectly safe and our bounden duty for us to go to the relief of those poor sufferers. But you are frail and delicate yourself. You have never had the fever; you are not acclimated there, and would only fall a victim. It would be a sort of disguised suicide, for you would be voluntarily rushing into the jaws of death."

"No, no," she answered, half bitterly. "I bear a charmed life. Nothing seems to check the current of my doomed existence. And you forget that Memphis is my native home. I lived there the first sixteen years of my life, and am quite accustomed to the peculiar climate. And what if death should come? It would only be to 'leave all disappointment, care, and sorrow, and be at rest forever,' But no, I shall not die. I have borne illness, suffering, sorrow—everything that breaks the heart, and snaps the frail threads of existence—yet here I am still, quite healthy, passably rosy, and willing to devote my strength to those who need it. I have been 'through the fire,' Captain Clendenon, and really," with a subdued smile, "I think I am fireproof."

"Some are refined in the furnace of affliction," he repeats, very gently.

Soothed by the softly spoken words, she asks, timidly:

"Tell me if I may go under your care?"

"If you will go, I shall be most happy to take all the annoyances of travel off your hands; but, little friend, think better of it, and give up this mad, quixotic scheme."

"Do you think it such a mad scheme?" she asks, mortified and humiliated. "Do you think I could do no good to those poor suffering victims who need gentle womanly tending so badly? Do you think the sacrifice of my ease, and luxury, and comfort, would count as nothing with Christ? If you think this, Captain Clendenon, tell me so frankly, and I will remain in Norfolk—not otherwise."

There is nothing for him to urge against this appeal. She touches up the ponies with her slim, little whip, lightly and impatiently. They are off, like the wind, for home again, as he makes the last appeal he can think of to this indomitable young spirit.

"News may come of your husband at any time, Mrs. Winans. Were you to go, and he, returning, found you gone, he would be most bitterly displeased. Remember, it was his express desire that you should remain in your home here. I beg your pardon, if I seem persistent, but it is only through friendly interest in you and yours that I take the liberty."

"Ah! but," a gleam of triumph lightening under her black lashes, "you forget that I have my husband's consent to visit Memphis? You brought it to me. I'm returning to the home of my childhood. I am not violating any command or desire of his."

"Once more," he says, desperately "let me beg you not to think, for the sake of all those who love you, all you love, of going to that plague-stricken city."

"It is useless." She set her lips firmly. "I am sorry to refuse your request, but the call of duty I must obey. My arrangements are all made. Norah is to stay and to take care of my home. My visit to Portsmouth this morning was for the purpose of leaving Lulu's precious charge in the hands of a dear Christian friend; so," trying to win him to smile by an affected lightness, "you may tell your mother she will have company she did not anticipate, though you were so ungallant as to persuade me not to come."

"When a woman will she will."

She carried her point against the entreaties of all her friends, and in less than two weeks, three dusty travelers—weary in body, but very strong in prayerful resolves and hopes—were entered as assistants in nursing in one of the crowded hospitals of the desolated, plague-stricken city of Memphis.