courage or your long-suffering, Eleanor. Lovers certainly do not follow the rule by which water seeks its own level."

"Mr. Dodd and I understand each other perfectly," snapped Eleanor.

"A more difficult feat for Mr. Dodd than for yourself," blandly. "Your encouragement is so cordial that I feel emboldened to hasten the disclosure I was about to make. Mr. Dodd has asked me to marry him, and I have accepted him."

"Phew-w!"

"Oh, Eleanor, really?" thus Mrs. Wilford.

"Yes. Marriages of convenience appear to be in the ascendant." Mr. Wilford pushed back his chair. He did not desire to have Eleanor's batteries directed upon Nannie; he had a just appreciation of his daughter's tongue. "You are old enough, certainly, to know your own mind; and I should never interfere with a deliberate choice of yours, unless for very grave reasons. You should be the best judge as to the kind of man you require as a partner for life."

"I don't profess to have made a free choice. You have made my home wretched. There was nothing left for me to do."

If Eleanor had hoped to wound her father's wife by this speech, she succeeded thoroughly. As her own flashing, angry eyes sought Nannie, she was startled by the amount of feeling shown by that little woman. She was usually pale. The color now swept up into her face painfully; the tears started into her eyes. She looked imploringly at Eleanor, then at her husband; but she possessed that rarest feminine gift and grace, the art of holding her tongue. She stooped to pick up her handkerchief which had fallen, and then she quietly walked out of the room.

"I hope you are satisfied," Mr. Wilford said, passionately. "Marry whom you please and when you please, as long as you leave me and mine in peace." And he followed his wife.

After which outbreak Miss Wilford was more reconciled to her

contemplated alliance. She longed to escape from the thraldom which it seemed to her was gaining upon her day by day. She agreed to be married early in the winter. During the interval, Myrtle Bank was not the pleasantest abode in the world; there was perpetually the sensation of

"A passing cloud that left a sense of thunder."

It required all Mrs. Wilford's tact and forbearance to prevent the daily jarrings of Eleanor and her father from ripening into a serious quarrel. But I fancy that in the end Mr. Wilford would have been less embittered against his daughter had he "had it out" with her, instead of constantly bottling up the vials of his wrath.

It may be that Mr. Wilford was pettish and irritable through illhealth at this period. He had all his life been a man of books, a man who had robbed the night of hours for study, and who was now beginning to pay the penalty by an overwrought nervous excitability that was as distressing to those around him as to himself. little Mrs. Wilford proved herself "a ministering angel now." If her husband had loved her before for twenty quaint little housewifely

ways, for her sunny temper and cheerful disposition, he found now fresh cause each day of admiration in her unvarying equanimity, her cheerful courage, her fortitude, as day by day he developed into a hopeless invalid.

Poor Nannie! it was almost with remorse that she thus spent herself for the man she had married. Her own heart knew, and but One other, with what misgivings she had married him at all. Eleanor's envenomed shaft had struck deep when she had spoken of marriages of convenience. Such had been Nannie's. She had married for a home, for a maintenance. She was anxious to relieve her uncle of the burden of her support; and she had not been brought up to work. What else was left for her to do? Her Aunt Emma also had talked her into it; and she had consented, although sorely against the promptings of her better nature. And deep down at the bottom of her heart was a passionate misgiving-since even this quiet little brown-eyed woman's soul had a passionate nerve to it that she had wronged her husband in marrying him, wronged herself, wronged the ideal that had been revealed to her of goodness and truth. Hence she threw herself into the service of the peevish, nervous man she had given herself to, with a sense of relief at its being possible in some way to expiate her error. She was easier, happier, than if she had been called upon really to be at ease and happy. And Mr. Wilford, without guessing in the least her self-torments and her struggles, loved her devotedly, and compared her life to the blooming of a pansy or the falling of the dew.

One night in November, Mr. Dodd having just taken his departure, Eleanor, after wandering disconsolately up and down the spacious, handsome rooms, decided that she would go upstairs and write a letter of instructions to her dressmaker. Neither her father nor Nannie had been down stairs since dinner. Nannie's crimson sittingroom had been Mr. Wilford's favorite evening-room of late; and he was at this moment lying back in a deep arm-chair, drawn up close to the glowing coal-fire, talking to his little wife, who was seated beside him on a low ottoman, both her small hands spread out between her face and the fire, which nevertheless was toasting it a pale brown, at the same time that it brought out the pretty red tints in her hair and eyes. Mr. Wilford was talking of the future. He had nerved himself to do so, because he had insisted upon learning from the doctor exactly how precarious was his present state of health. As Eleanor came up the stairway, silently, since the moss-soft winter carpeting had been put down, she heard her father's voice say:

"No-in no event is Eleanor to have Myrtle Bank; I have made up my mind to that. She is provided for; she has her own fortune. What I leave, I leave to you, my darling. And I mean to lose no time in seeing a lawyer about it. I shall send for Exhibit to-morrow."

Perhaps if a good angel had stirred the depths of Eleanor's beating heart at that moment, as she stood outside the door, he would have shown that grief and shame at being thus cast out of her father's heart struggled for the mastery with anger and indignation. But the clenched hand, the knitted brow, the scornful lip, were eloquent of the baser feelings. She flung into the room, quivering with rage.

"Why do you not sit with closed doors, you and Nannie?" she asked, in tones of suppressed passion. "And let Nannie keep Myrtle Bank and welcome. You owe it to her. You have no right to keep back the price from her for which you bought her.' And she turned and

went.

In spite of this and other "scoriac rivers that rolled," she made a remarkably handsome and stylish bride when she became Mrs. Dodd three or four weeks later, and no one guessed what volcanic eruptions had shaken the stately mansion, who were present at the weddingfeast; on the contrary, the "wedding-guests condoled with Mr. Wilford upon losing his daughter, and with Mrs. Wilford upon losing her companion, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilford behaved with perfect propriety and decorum, and smiled and smiled and were villains-that is, if it be villany to cloak a disreputable secret from the public gaze. Miss Wilford had done her duty to society and had always been very popular. Society in return gave her a great many wedding-presents, and congratulated Mr. Walter Dodd warmly, and said what a pity it was there were not more practical, sensible girls like Eleanor Wilford.

She went to live in the adjoining town of Chadford. She carried her energy and her practical talent into her new home, and she succeeded in making it a model and a marvel of comfort and order. She was reasonably satisfied and contented. Her husband at least came up to her expectations, which had not been lofty. He throve in his own department as she in hers; he was a fair lawyer and an excellent man of business, and for these points of superiority he commanded her respect. For his part, if his eyes became open to the fact that a wife may possess an enormous reserve-force of selfassertion and determination and arrogance, which had not been guessed at in a sweetheart, he wisely held his peace on this as on other matters of doubtful issue. Mr. Dodd held up his head among men, and was accounted a shrewd, intelligent fellow; but there can be no doubt that he stood in no slight awe of his handsome, imperious wife, who, moreover, never permitted him altogether to lose sight of her condescension in having married him at all.

Mr. Wilford lingered on for a year or so longer, kept alive by Nannie's vigilant care and forethought as much as by anything else, humanly speaking. He and she travelled, seeking health in change of air and scene. Nannie tried to brighten and vary the life at Myrtle Bank itself for him, and he himself was assured that he was transiently if not permanently improved by her wise forethought. When his son was born, he appeared to take for a time a fresh lease of life. Nannie herself believed that he was getting well; but the improvement gave way before the insidious advances of a disease which had not been taken hold of in season.

Mrs. Dodd was at no pains to conceal her indifference, to use no stronger term, to her little half-brother; and Nannie's quick instinct having divined Eleanor's feelings on the subject, she scrupulously kept little Roger out of her sight. She was in the habit of paying Eleanor stated visits; but when the baby was with her, the low barouche with the coal-black horses and the gray Myrtle Bank liveries never drew up in front of Mrs. Dodd's pretty gabled cottage.

Once, when Nannie was shopping in Chadford, Eleanor passed the carriage and stopped, with her habitual set smile.

"Ah, you have your little man with you. He is you all over again, Nannie. Well for your comfort, they say that ugly babies are apt to grow up handsome. Very small of his age, isn't he?' And Eleanor passed on. No one could be more pointedly courteous than Eleanor if she chose, but she did not always choose.

When Nannie smiled, her brown eyes had a fashion of half closing, perhaps to veil their merry twinkle. She smiled now, as she leaned over and kissed her baby. What did she care for Eleanor's malice? But one day a hurried message was brought to Mrs. Dodd that her father was dead. She was greatly shocked. I will not say what pang was lent to her grief by the fact that she and her father had parted, if not at variance, certainly not on cordial terms. But she was not troubled long with that " indigestion of the conscience" which some one has called remorse. She was possessed with a lively curiosity to know how her father had left his property. Had he ever made that will of which she had once heard him make mention to his wife?

Yes, it was found that he had. He had made it before the birth of his son, and its provisions were somewhat singular. In the event of his dying childless, Myrtle Bank and all his other property was to go to his wife. Should he have children, Myrtle Bank was to go to them, although his wife was to have a life-interest therein; besides this, other property was secured to her, valued at eighty thousand dollars. As the event had proved, little Roger inherited his father's fortune, with the exception of the sum assigned to his mother. Myrtle Bank included three valuable farms.

Mrs. Dodd was bitterly, unreasonably disappointed. This was all precisely as one would have expected, and yet she considered herself ill-used and outraged. Then was another will also found, drawn up in due form, but not signed, in which Mr. Wilford had left all his property unreservedly to his wife in the event of Roger's death. But he had died before this had been testified to. "I have no doubt that artful creature insisted upon his writing it," Eleanor said to her husband "grasping little miser!"

"I think you do her injustice," began Mr. Dodd, unwisely. However, he was warned by an unfailing storm-signal: his wife began to tap her slender foot. He drew in his colors. "Well, well- of course you know her better then I do."

Thunder-clap number one. Mr. Wilford had not been dead a month before a financial crisis swept over the country, which resulted in thunder-clap number two. Nannie's private fortune was swept away in the wreck of the great Arctic Ocean Railroad enterprise, engulfing as it did banks and corporations in which Mr. Wilford had implicitly trusted. Not that the poor little widow cared much, or in truth realised her loss. She was besides a rich woman still. What more could Roger and she want than Myrtle Bank and its fertile acres? To be sure, she must curtail her expenses, retrench here and there; but the Wilfords had always lived so lavishly and extravagantly that retrenchment did not mean exactly economy. She

was about coming to an understanding with her lawyers and agents, when the crowning misfortune of this crisis befell her. Her baby died.

I pass over her grief, which was the keenest, the most searching she could have been called upon to sustain. Crushed to the earth beneath its weight, desolate and bereaved to the verge of despair, all worldly losses and chances and changes were clean forgotten by her. She sat in the great lonely rooms of Myrtle Bank as in a stupor; she wandered up and down, in and out, in her black dress and with her white set face, until even Eleanor must have pitied her; although her pity must have been but vague, since it would have been almost impossible for her to solve the secret of such a grief.

When they the lawyers

came to her and told her what would be the outward and immediate result of her baby's death to her, she accepted it with utter composure.

"She had looked in the eyes of her deepest despair,

And she had said her most desperate prayer:

The dead were dead-"

Whatever else happened to her, the grass would still grow on over one little grave.

Moreover, this little woman had an overstrained, exaggerated conception of right and wrong; or so some of us would have thought. She realised as distinctly now as she had done in the first year of her marriage, how she had failed in marrying Mr. Wilford. If her influence had availed, he would never have left Myrtle Bank to her. She could not bear the thought of inheriting it; and when the lawyers told her that by the terms of her husband's hastily written and executed will Myrtle Bank must now pass to Eleanor Dodd, she felt almost relieved- -the price of an error had been lifted from her hands. It was as though she were released from paying a penalty. Had Eleanor possessed a confidant, which she did not, she would have expressed her surprise, I am sure, at the composure with which Mrs. Wilford accepted her reverse of fortune. Eleanor was, in truth, not only surprised but puzzled. She had always thought and spoken slightingly of Nannie as a weak little thing. Like many another, she could not take in the native strength which lies in simple goodness.

Nannie began to look about the world now for work for her hands to find to do. Three years ago it had seemed a hard thing for her to go to work; but she was then a mere child, brought up superficially both as to the education of her mind and character. Since then she had been in a training-school. She was almost glad of the necessity for exertion now; she would have the less time for grief. Also, three years ago her range of acquirements was exceedingly limited; but she had been reading and studying with her husband until there was no doubt of her knowledge of what is usually called for in a teacher. To her great joy, she received not only one offer of a situation, but

two.

The first was advantageous in every respect, but she would be obliged to leave home and go among strangers-home standing for the latitude where she had been brought up. The other offer was from