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It is more like a pale China rose in November." What could Rose do but cry at this allusion? It was kind of the old lady (who was always kind), to give her this excellent reason and excuse for the tears in her eyes.

And then there came, with a strange, hollow, far-off sound, proposals of dates and days to be fixed, and talk about the wedding dresses and the wedding tour. She listened to it all with an inward shiver; but, fortunately for Rose, Mrs. Damerel would hear of no wedding until after the anniversary of her husband's death, which had taken place in July. The Green discussed the subject largely, and most people blamed her for standing on this punctilio; for society in general, with a wise sense of the uncertainty of all human affairs, has a prejudice against the postponement of marriages which it never believes in thoroughly till they have taken place. They thought it ridiculous in a woman of Mrs. Damerel's sense, and one, too, who ought to know how many slips there are between the cup and the lip; but Mr. Incledon did not seem to object, and, of course, everybody said no one else had a right to interfere. All this took place in April, when the Damerels had been but three months in their new house. Even that little time had proved bitterly to them many of the evils of their impoverished condition, for already Mr. Hunsdon had begun to write of the long time Bertie had been at school, and the necessity there was that he should exert himself; and even Reginald's godfather, who had always been so good, showed signs of a disposition to launch his charge, too, on the world, suggesting that perhaps it might be better, as he had now no prospect of anything but working for himself, that he should leave Eton. Mrs. Damerel kept these humiliations to herself, but it was only natural that they should give fire to her words in her arguments with Rose; and it could not be denied that the family had spent more than their income permitted in the first three months. There had been the mourning, and the removal, and so many other expenses, to begin with. It is hard enough to struggle with bills as Mrs. Damerel had done in her husband's lifetime, when by means of the wisest art and never-failing attention it was always possible to pay them as they became urgent; but when there is no money at all, either present or in prospect, what is a poor woman to do? They made her sick many a time when she opened the drawer in her desk and looked at them. Even with all she could accept from Mr. Incledon (and that was limited by pride and delicacy in many ways), and with one less to provide for, Mrs. Damerel would still have care sufficient to make her cup run over. Rose's good fortune did not take her burden away.

Thus things went on through the early summer. The thought of Rose's trousseau nearly broke her mother's heart. It must be to some degree in consonance with her future position, and it must not come from Mr. Incledon ; and where was it to come from? Mrs. Damerel had begun to write a letter to her brother, appealing, which it was a bitter thing to do, for his help, one evening early in May. She had written after all her children had left her, when she was alone in the old-fashioned house, where all the old walls and the old stairs uttered strange creaks and jars in the midnight stillness, and the branches of the creepers tapped ghostly taps against the window. Her nerves were overstrained, and her heart was sore, notwithstanding her success in the one matter which she had struggled for so earnestly; and after writing half her letter Mrs. Damerel had given it up, with a strange feeling that something opposed the writing of it, some influence which she could not define, which seemed to stop her words, and made her incapable of framing a sentence. She gave it up with almost a superstitious thrill of feeling, and a nervous tremor which she tried in vain to master; and, leaving it half-written in her blotting-book, stole up-stairs to bed in the silence, as glad to get out of the echoing, creaking room as if it had been haunted. Rose heard her come up-stairs, and thought with a little bitterness as she lay awake, her pillow wet with the tears which she never shed in the daylight, of her mother's triumph over her, and how all this revolution was her work. She heard something like a sigh as her mother

passed her door, and wondered almost contemptuously what she could have to sigh about, for Rose felt all the other burdens in the world to be as nothing in comparison with her burden; as, indeed we all do.

Next morning, however, before Rose was awake, Mrs. Damerel came into her room in her dressing-gown, with her hair, which was still so pretty, curling about her shoulders, and her face lit up with a wonderful pale illumination like a northern sky.

"What is it?" cried Rose, springing up from her bed. "Rose," said Mrs. Damerel, gasping for breath, "we are rich again! No! it is impossible-but it is true; here it is in this letter-my uncle Ernest is dead, and he has left us all his money. We are richer than ever I was in all my life."

Rose got up, and ran and kissed her mother, and cried, with a great cry that rang all over the house, " Then I am free!

CHAPTER XVI.

or new.

(To be continued.)

HIS TWO WIVES.1

BY MARY CLEMMER AMES.

AGNES AT THE CAPITAL: THE NEW MEMBER.

But

IN those days the capital of the United States was at once both a quaint and a crude city. Its old houses suggested a past more ancient than themselves; for not only were the bricks from which many of them were builded brought across the Atlantic, but without and within they repeated the architecture of old England's homes. Nevertheless the new government buildings, looming up in many directions, while their staring outlines pointed to Greece and Rome as the source of their origin, seemed also to supplicate that remote future which alone could crown them with completeness and touch their stark splendors with the mellowness of time. It was a weariness to look upon them now. Their white marble gleaming through miles of scaffolding, their domes and capitals wound in ropes like innumerable spider-webs, they oppressed you at once with a sense of vastness and of hopeless incompleteness. the capital of her country gave far more to Agnes than the traditions or prophecies of its buildings, either old It gave perpetually new revelations to her observant and reverent eyes. Till she reached its latitude she had never seen such sun-risings and sun-settings such cloud scenery, such prismatic refractions of polarized light, such a depth of purple distance in the atmosphere, which in one palpitating and luminous sea floated over the emerald city and touched with suffusing gold the far Maryland and Virginia hills. She had never dreamed of a city with such vistas; of such broad streets with wide, ever open gates in the distance, opening on the great river with its passing sails, upon glimpses of meadows and peaceful farms, upon the flush and frontage of the encircling hills. She had never dreamed that a metropolis could lead to such an inviolable sanctuary of nature as the Rock Creek road. Here the starry anemone, the trailing arbutus, the flower innocent the tri-colored violet, came earliest; here the wild honeysuckle and laurel covered the rocks with bloom and fragrance; here the choristers of nature sang their Te Deums undisturbed. The oak, the elm, the maple, the fringing willow here bent low above the

1 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by H. O. HOUGHTON & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

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creek, and there arose in lofty walls of verdure high | above it. On its uplands wilted sweet the grass of the early mowing, and at rare intervals a primitive house lifted its lowly whitewashed walls amid blooming orchards and fields of delicious clover. Far below, mile after mile wound the creek beloved of nature and of all nature-loving souls. Dear Rock Creek! The little child loves the laughter of thy rippling waters; the weary statesman leaves behind him the din of the capital to find rest in the peaceful murmur of thy primeval stream; and the woman with whom human life has broken faith, within sound of thy voice draws nearer to nature's heart, till she feels on the part of her own the saving touch of the mighty mother! So much, and more, nature at the capital gave Agnes; not at once, but before she left it. It was well that even here she did not go astray from her lifelong comforter, for the human life that confronted her startled, confused, and at last aroused her. It was a type of human life of which previously she had had no comprehension. She did not comprehend it now. A daughter of the republic, she had grown up to believe herself favored of God because of that daughterhood. No country could be so free, so enlightened, so great, as this land of her birth. What meant this slave on the street what these gangs of slaves chained together on their way to the human market? What meant the slave pen in Alexandria, into which she was shown one day? What meant these men, armed and defiant, who stalked in the halls of the Capitol showing their weapons and shouting loud their threats? What meant these stormy, wild, and passionate debates in Congress, which in spite of herself drew her out of her own meagre life into the atmosphere of their own tremendous portents? Never till now had her being sprung to its highest level. She was not by nature a partisan. She had a constitutional inaptitude to extremes. The warm Southern temperament with which for the first time she now came in personal contact, was full of attraction to her. In the quick impulse, the suave manner, the generosity, the grace of the Southron she found a charm which, when she was conscious of it, she knew she had often missed in her earlier associates. She felt this charm through all her heart, yet it was powerless to dim her moral perceptions, to dull the clear impression of early precepts, or to deaden the clear currents of her inherited blood. At last John Darcy had resurrection in his child. She could not remember her father's speech, nevertheless, when almost a baby she sat on the lap of her young mother, and the sound that smote her infant ears was the voice of that father lifted in thrilling eloquence in behalf of human rights and the inviolable brotherhood of man. The same intense love for human nature, the same eloquence, unvoiced, now thrilled in the pulses of his child. Social companionship, equality of race, made no conflict in her mind with the thought: Whatever God has given my brother, be it much or little, he has by that birth gift the indestructible right to his selfhood. What God has given, let not man essay to take away. "How dare one human being, however superior, attempt to own another?" This question she asked in sorrow day by day while for the first time she found herself in contact with, and compelled to avail herself of the services of an enslaved

race.

Why should not little Dan be taught, as well as little Cyril? she would ask, gazing into the bright eyes of her nurse's little boy. Why should Cæsar or Chloe

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be arrested, more than I, if their daily toil holds them from their homeward way till one moment past nine o'clock in the evening? Because they are slaves; i is, but it should not be," was the only reply which she could wring from the sense of justice within.

Thus, with a woman's intuitive reasoning, she struck inward from the universal to the individual. But i measuring the rights of one as a human being, she measured the rights of all humanity and struck at one to the very roots of despotism and of justice. Touching the inner issue, it vibrated to the remotest spring of universal life.

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We who study the national legislation of to-daywho listen to eager and acrid debates in Congress colcerning manufacturing and railroad monopolies, concerning the material industries and resources of ou land, concerning "jobs" and "claims," whose highes end is money and power to the individual realize but faintly the moral insurrection which, near a gener ation ago, filled the nation with agitation, and the halls of Congress with conflicts of passionate debate. We live in more prosperous days. We have fallen upon ar era of lower issues. The storm of fire and blood and unavailing tears died in peace at last, when the flowers of May were scattered upon the graves of the Blu and the Gray alike, but four little weeks ago. But we who were children then can never realize what it was to those who received upon heart and conscience the unabated force of its first fury. In that dark day of our history, Cyril and Agnes King came to Washing ton. There was but one power in the land: that was the power of Slavery. From the President in the ex ecutive chair, to the smallest page in the Capitol, all loved or condoned it. Every office in the gift of the government was a bribe to silence in behalf of this monstrous wrong. Abject subserviency to its decrees was the test, not only of accepted patriotism, but of personal popularity and of social success. The smiles of women, the light of drawing-rooms, the pleasures of the table, the emoluments of office, the prizes of power. were not for the hated abolitionists. The administra tion of law, the richest possibilities of society, belonged alike to the potentates of oppression. To the new comer on one side was power, wealth, ease, the favor of women, the recognition of the great; on the other, con tumely, scorn, sneers, and utter ban. Do you marvel that so few had moral nerve to choose the latter? No one could, save he or she in whom conscience was the omnipotent force, crushing instinct and desire till they had no life left to cry. The right or wrong of anything was what Cyril King felt last. The right or wrong of any thought or act was what Agnes King felt the first and the most keenly. Hither she had come to take on the full yoke of her nature. No one endowed by God with a preponderance of moral per ception united to extreme sensibility can ever hope for happiness in this life in the presence of wrong-doing or of human pain. These are they who with unutterable yearning attempt to make the crooked straight. Never are they" the idle singers of an empty day." They are the unconscious Christs of the human race, who make the sins and sorrows of all humanity their own. Often they pray that the cup of mortal burden may pass by them, but it never does.

In this new, quickening atmosphere Agnes realized how narrow a life she had lived - not in womanly cares or duties, but in concentration of thought and feeling. Had not all her reflection, aspiration, sorrow,

"

and love introverted upon herself and upon what belonged to her? Had she not lived as unconsciously and as indifferently to the wrongs and pangs of her fellow creatures, as if she herself made the whole of the race instead of one tiny atom in the vast human family?

The debates in Congress became a potent element in the new process of education upon which she entered. They moved her powerfully because they touched and quickened the most powerful faculties of her moral nature-her love of truth, her passion for justice, her keen perception of its most imponderable demands, her love of mercy, her tenderness for all suffering things. Shrinking in temperament, she still possessed every quality of a moral heroine. Had she been a man in that legislative hall, no moral or mental quality need to have been added to have caused her to stand in the vanguard, battling for truth and right against might; one of the precious few against the potent

many.

From its gallery she gazed down upon the Senate of the United States. From its councils had forever passed the three historic men who, combined, had made the political will of the last generation, and whose words, for bale more than for blessing, were to mould the destiny of the generation to come. A new triumvirate had arisen. Already three Olympian men stood forth prophets and martyrs of the future. Chase, colossal, cold, and grand; Seward, subtle, wise, cool, 'serene optimist; Sumner, cast in the mould of the Vatican Apollo, with shape and gesture proudly eminent, the dauntless youth with the single sling, whose heroic hand was soon to strike that death-blow to oppression, which in its terrible rebound further on, would also prove to be his own. Calhoun was dead. Clay, with his illuminated face, his scimitar-flashing wit, his imperial voice with the beguiling music in its tones murmuring of "compromise," had succumbed to the final fiat, laid down his crown for another, and passed out forever. Webster, the mighty lion of the state, baffled at last after seventy years of battle, worn out with the echo of his own futile roar, had gone broken-hearted into his own retreat to die. In his place stood the young Puritan, pure, implacable, aggressive, he who but a few years before had cried to Webster out from among the people, as a defender of the Constitution, to work the overthrow of slavery. 66 Assume," he said, "a more illustrious name. The aged shall bear witness to you; the young shall kindle with rapture as they repeat the name of Webster; the large company of the ransomed shall teach their children, and their children's children to the latest generation to call you blessed; and you shall have yet another title, never to be forgotten on earth or in heaven, Defender of Humanity!"

Prescient words! Little did he who uttered them dream that it was his own god-like head that would bear down to posterity the immortelle of such a name. In those days mental individuality marked the Senate of the United States. There was Benton, with his eagle front and imperious speech; Soulé of Louisiana, with his dark beauty and dramatic eloquence; Hale of New Hampshire, radiant with laughter and wit, the sparkling frontlets of his granite nature; Foote of Mississippi, with his passionate and nervous energy; Jefferson Davis, mixing the military and the ministerial in his unconciliatory tirades; Butler of South Carolina, with mocking eyes and snow-white hair, the Don Quixote of Charles Sumner's fatal Kansas speech; and

Cass and Fillmore, gentle gentlemen, but most unctuous of compromisers: all were there, and every day more and more, the fate of the nation trembled in the balance, and drew nearer to its day of doom.

"Sir, to men on earth it belongs only to deserve success; not to secure it."

These words from the lips of the Senator from Massachusetts rang through the brain of Agnes as she took her seat in the gallery of the House of Representatives. Cyril was to speak that day. In uttering himself would he speak for her also? In her love of truth and justice would he represent her, his wife, who must be silent?

She asked this question with bated breath as she leaned over the gallery to listen, while "the honorable member from New York," Cyril King, arose to his feet. His clear, melodious voice rose and floated through the noble old hall. No matter what words it uttered, the music of its vibrations would cause all men and women to pause and to listen.

"Not for compromise! Oh, not for compromise!" cried the soul of Agnes in mute protest, as the first sentence fell upon her ears.

I do not hear aright; I know that I cannot!" she said to herself as she pushed her bonnet-strings back and leaned farther over the gallery. She heard all too clearly. The excited color slowly faded from her face as she drew back and sat motionless as a marble image to the end of his speech.

"What do I want?" she asked herself. "Revolt, anarchy, revolution? No, a thousand times, no. I want truth because it is truth; honor because it is honor; justice because it is justice. Woe to the nation that would build itself upon a grievous wrong. For this will its blood flow." Could the commingled thought, emotion, and prescience which met in this woman's brain in a single moment have taken on utterance, men, the crude men of affairs in the great arena below, would have listened breathless, as men listened in ages agone, to the words of the inspired sibyl who foresaw their doom and prophesied their fate. Dumb, the eloquence of that awakened and exalted spirit was never to find translation in speech. All that any one could see who glanced at her was a slight woman, worn in features, and pale, almost to pallor, sitting perfectly motionless on a seat in the gallery, apparently gazing upon her husband, who was making an eloquent, witty, and popular speech.

She knew that she saw him, yet she seemed to see something more. Beyond him the future opened like a gate. From beyond, and still beyond, came armies of marching men. The nation was in arms. Her battle-fields were red with blood, sown thick with the bodies of her slaughtered sons. Her homes were desolate. Her loves were bleeding at myriad pores. Her flag was torn, dishonored, trampled in the dust. Brother was slaying brother. By such death-throes was Freedom to be born. By such baptism of blood and flame was the nation to be regenerated and perpetuated - and because of such words as these.

So much her soul forecast, yet her face made no betrayal. She had a look on it that some might have called absent, and some uninterested for the reason that it was beyond their ken to interpret it at all.

"Stupid!" Circe Sutherland chose to declare it, from her front seat further along, from whence she could command the entire situation below and above. "Think of such a man, with such an image as that staring at

him. You can afford to be sorry for him," she whispered to her lady companion.

Agnes heard the whisper. She turned instantly, and was conscious in the same instant that she was the subject of the whisper, also who it was that whispered.

Again she turned and looked upon her husband. She knew now, to whom, and for whom he spoke. Cyril saw both women in the front seat of the gallery with almost preternatural distinctness. His words were not the spontaneous outburst of the moment. They had been pre-considered, weighed in the finest balance, their utmost cost counted. He knew in advance how they would cut Agnes to the heart, and how she would look when she listened to them. It would not be an easy thing to do, to utter them in her presence that look which he knew meant sorrow, disappointment heart-pain, moral supremacy, was not an easy one for him to encounter and never would be; but he could confront it easier than he could its antipodes weighed against it in the opposite balance. It was the test speech of his opening congressional career. It was to decide for him much more than the mere approbation of his wife-his political and social status, his place in the favor of Circe Sutherland. The local great man finds in his home popularity no guarantee of his universal acceptance and high position in Congress. His pre-won reputation only challenges criticism, and commands exacting expectation from colleagues whose practical faculties have long been strengthened and sharpened by forensic training and the discipline of parliamentary rules and debate. Much was expected and not a little demanded of the talented, rising young man who had just taken his seat in the House. Had he the heart, the courage, to devote his powers to the despised minority? Had he mental insight to see that "in the nature of things minorities are always more intellectual than multitudes? that intellect is ever at work sapping numerical force?" Had he the spiritual prescience to foresee the final triumph of that minority through the inevitable cumulative force of the right? No one who knew his temperament dared hope these of him. It was public ban, the ignominious brand of "the abolitionist," social ostracism, the frown of the woman who enthralled him, set against the handshake of Horace Greeley and Joshua Giddings, the cool approbation of Adams, the Jove-like glance of Sumner, whom he disliked and wished to defy; the tender satisfaction of Agnes, which he had learned to live without. No phase of the great principles at issue stirred him with enthusiasm. He instinctively detested a "nigger;" believed that he was made to be a slave to just such men as himself. The eternal demands of justice he did not concern himself about in the slightest, not with any application to the enslaved race. "Not for all the niggers ever made," was he going to join the despised and frantic fanatics who were hopelessly trying to fight their battles; or to close against himself the luxurious abodes of the capital, whose illuminated doors opened to him at once, and whose hospitable and gracious inmates had hastened to call him "one of our own;" or to shut himself into the outer darkness where the light of one smile would reach him never more! Was Agnes mad, in her bigotry and fanaticism, that she could ask such sacrifice?

The debate was long. The tide of Southern members who crowded about Cyril King to congratulate and to claim him as their own, had receded; another member was sawing the air with his arms and making futile

66

efforts with a feeble voice to penetrate the pervading roar of the turbulent House, which was making up for the voluntary silence of a few moments before by turning the great legislative hall into a veritable pande monium.

Agnes slowly made her way out. of the gallery. turning her steps to the dearest resort which the be loved Capitol afforded her, the Congressional Library, Everything in it or about it seemed dear to her: the view from its veranda, the garden city beyond the Capitol grounds, the sinuous river flecked with sails the girdling hills with their umbrageous belts and crowns; Arlington House, its yellow walls peering from its park on the Virginia uplands; dim, dusty Alex. andria, Virginia's mart for slaves-all fed her sight and her thought. But the alcoves within had treas ures for her dearer still. She went straight to one of these now. Looking over the books might make her forget, at least it would help her to grow inwardly calm

She sat slowly turning over the leaves of various books as she took them from the shelf by her side, whe she heard the door of the next alcove open and a parts enter it. In the same instant she heard Cyril's voice saying: "Make yourselves at home, and any books you choose to select have charged to me. I think the House will adjourn shortly. If so, and I find you here, may I have the honor of escorting you to Wilard's?"

"We shall be but too happy," replied the child-voice of Circe Sutherland, and in a moment more the wicke of iron lace-work closed and Cyril returned to his seat in the House.

"Never mind the books! Do tell me about this man, a perfect god! and you say that dreadfully inferior looking woman in the gallery was his wife! Well, I am obliged to her for getting out of the way, so that I could have so good a chance to see him! but tell me, Circe, how she happens to be his wife?"

These were the words which, in a distinct whisper from the mouth of Circe Sutherland's companion, pene trated Agnes' ear from the adjoining alcove.

"Another one of those unfortunate cases," murmured Circe Sutherland, in whose vocabulary the oft-told tale was already stereotyped. "One of those very unfortu nate cases of which we see so many in public life. where the husband has gone on in mental development and left the wife far behind."

"This Mrs. King is a very inoffensive little thing," said Circe, with the intention of being intensely benevolent in her remarks. "There is no harm in her what ever, except the harm she does in being his wife. I've heard she is an abolitionist; but it doesn't matter in the slightest what she is in opinion, I mean mentally. She can't influence him an atom: you see that in his speech of this afternoon. But 'tis a pity that such a man has no one to entertain for him or to do the honors of his home as they should be done. Give me such a man, I'd steer him straight into the White House before another decade. Not that I would consider it any honor to go there myself. But he is the first American I ever saw whom I thought fit to be the

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And Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects metals in a mine. were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as

Oh no, he won't. Such little, chronic, ailing women never die. There should be a more agreeable mode of relief. I don't believe in any law that binds a man and woman together who don't belong to each other. But I've no doubt he will drag out his pilgrim-terest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but age of penance to the end."

66 Is he fond of her?"

"No doubt, in a way. She thinks the sun rises and sets in him. And she is perfectly devoted to their children, so he says. If he speaks of her at all, it is in the most devoted way, though it is hard enough for him to be personally devoted; any one with open eyes can see that. It's not what he says, but what he is, and what she is, that tells the story a sad one, you see, when you look at him."

"After all, I think it's sadder when you look at her," answered the friend. "Half a glance tells you that he has a thousand resources where she can have one. In losing him, she would lose all. If he were to lose many like her, the world would yet be before him full of other worlds-in the shape of women to conquer."

"Perhaps so," said Circe Sutherland.

(To be continued.)

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

CHAPTER XXIX. PARTICULARS OF A TWILIGHT WALK.

WE now see the element of folly distinctly mingling with the many varying particulars which made up the character of Bathsheba Everdene. It was almost foreign to her intrinsic nature. It was introduced as lymph on the dart of Eros, and eventually permeated and colored her whole constitution. Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage. Perhaps in no minor point does woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be falseexcept, indeed, in that of being utterly sceptical on strictures that she knows to be true.

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

Bathsheba was not conscious of guile in this matter. Though in one sense a woman of the world, it was, after all, that world of day-light coteries, and green carpets, wherein cattle form the passing crowd and winds the busy hum; where a quiet family of rabbits or hares lives on the other side of your party-wall, where your neighbor is everybody in the tything, and where calculation is confined to market-days. Of the fabricated tastes of good fashionable society she knew but little, and of the formulated self-indulgence of bad, nothing at all. Had her utmost thoughts in this direction been distinctly worded (and by herself they never were), they would only have amounted to such a matter as that she felt her impulses to be pleasanter guides than her discretion. Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring. Her culpability lay in her making no attempt to control feeling by subtle and careful inquiry into consequences. She could show others the steep and thorny way, but "reck'd not her own rede."

The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her in

she had only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.

All this infatuation Gabriel saw, and was troubled

thereby from the time of his daily journey a-field to the time of his return, and on to the small hours of many a night. That he was not beloved had hitherto been his great sorrow; that Bathsheba was getting into the toils was now a sorrow greater than the first, and one which nearly obscured it. It was a result which paralleled the oft-quoted observation of Hippocrates concerning physical pains.

which not even the fear of breeding aversion in the bosom That is a noble though perhaps an unpromising love of the one beloved can deter from combating his or her errors. Oak determined to speak to his mistress: he would base his appeal on what he considered her unfair treatment of Farmer Boldwood, now absent from home.

An opportunity occurred one evening when she had gone for a short walk by a path through the neighboring corn-fields. It was dusk when Oak, who had not been far a-field that day, took the same path and met her returning, quite pensively, as he thought.

The wheat was now tall, and the path was narrow; thus the way was quite a sunken groove between the imbrowning thicket on either side. Two persons could not walk abreast without damaging the crop, and Oak stood aside to let her pass.

"Oh, is it Gabriel?" she said; "you are taking a walk too. Good night."

"I thought I would come to meet you, as it is rather late," said Oak, turning and following at her heels when she had brushed somewhat quickly by him.

"Thank you, indeed, but I am not very fearful."
"Oh no; but there are bad characters about."
"I never meet them."

Now Oak, with marvellous ingenuity, had been going to introduce the gallant sergeant through the channel of "bad characters.' But all at once the scheme broke down, it suddenly occuring to him that this was rather a clumsy way, and too bare-faced to begin with. He tried another preamble.

“And as the man who would naturally come to meet you is away from home, too-I mean Farmer Boldwood why, thinks I, I'll go," he said.

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"Ah, yes." She walked on without turning her head, and for many steps nothing further was heard from her quarter than the rustle of her dress against the heavy cornears. Then she resumed rather tartly: :

"I don't quite understand what you meant by saying that Mr. Boldwood would naturally come to meet me.'

"I meant on account of the wedding which they say is likely to take place between you and him, miss. Forgive my speaking plainly."

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They say what is not true," she returned quickly. "No marriage is likely to take place between us. Gabriel now put forth his unobscured opinion, for the moment had come. 66 Well, Miss Everdene," he said, "putting aside what people say, I never in my life saw any courting if his is not a courting of you.”

Bathsheba would probably have terminated the conversation there and then by flatly forbidding the subject, had not her conscious weakness of position allured her to palter and argue in endeavors to better it.

"Since this subject has been mentioned," she said very emphatically, "I am glad of the opportunity of clearing up a mistake which is very common and very provoking. I didn't definitely promise Mr. Boldwood anything. I have never cared for him. I respect him, and he has urged me to marry him. But I have given him no distinct an

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