Chapter XVIII…

Chapter XVIII

One man has one way of talking, and another man has another, that's all the difference between them. GOOD-NATURED MAN.

Winthrop found he could go. So according to his promise he dressed himself, and was looking out a pockethandkerchief from the small store in his trunk, when the door opened.

"Rufus! --"

"Ah! -- you didn't expect to see me, did you?" said that gentleman, taking off his hat and coming in and closing the door with a face of great life and glee. -- "Here I am, Governor!"

"What brought you here?" said his brother shaking his hand.

"What brought me here? -- why, the stage-coach, to be sure; except five miles, that I rode on horseback. What should bring me?"

"Something of the nature of a centrifugal force, I should judge."

"Centrifugal! -- You are my centre, Governor, -- don't you know that? I tend to you as naturally as the poor earth does to the sun. That's why I am here -- I couldn't keep at a distance any longer."

"My dear sir, at that rate you are running to destruction."

"No, no," said Rufus laughing, -- "there's a certain degree of license in our moral planetary system -- I'm going away again as soon as I am rightly refreshed with the communication of your light and warmth."

"Well," said Winthrop untying his neckcloth, "it would seem but courtesy in the sun to stand still to receive his visitor -- I'm very glad to see you, Will."

"What's the matter?"

"The sun was going out to dinner -- that's all, -- but you are a sufficient excuse for me."

"Going to dinner? -- where?"

"No. 11, on the Parade."

"No. 11? -- Mr. Haye's? were you? I'll go too. I won't hinder you."

"I am not sorry to be hindered," said Winthrop.

"But I am! -- at least, I should be. We'll both go. How soon, Governor?"

"Presently."

"I'll be ready," said Rufus, -- "here's my valise -- but my shirt ruffles, I fear, are in a state of impoverished elegance. -- I speak not in respect of one or two holes, of which they are the worse, -- but solely in reference to the coercive power of narrow circumstances -- which nobody knows anything of that hasn't experienced it," said Rufus, looking up from his valise to his brother with an expression half earnest, half comical.

"You are not suffering under it at this moment," said Winthrop.

"Yes I am -- in the form of my frills. Look there! -- I'll tell you what I'll do -- I'll invoke the charities of my good friend, Mrs. Nettley. Is she down stairs? -- I'll be back in a moment, Winthrop."

Down stairs, shirt in hand, went Rufus, and tapped at Mrs. Nettley's door. That is, the door of the room where she usually lived, a sort of better class kitchen, which held the place of what in houses of more pretension is called the 'back parlour.' Mrs. Nettley's own hand opened the door at his tap.

She was a strong contrast to her brother, with her rather small person and a face all the lines of which were like a cobweb set to catch every care that was flying; but woven by no malevolent spider; it was a very nest of kindliness and good-will.

"How d'ye do, Mrs. Nettley," said Rufus softly.

"Why, Mr. Landholm! -- are you there? Come in -- how good it is to see you again! but I didn't expect it."

"Didn't expect to see me again?"

"No -- O yes, of course, Mr. William," said Mrs. Nettley laughing, -- "I expected to see you again; but not now -- I didn't expect to see you when I opened the door."

"I had the advantage, for I did expect to see you."

"How do you do, Mr. Landholm?"

"Why, as well as a man can do, in want of a shirt," said Rufus comically.

"Mr. Landholm? --"

"You see, Mrs. Nettley," Rufus went on, "I have come all the way from North Lyttleton to dine with a friend and my brother here; and now I am come, I find that without your good offices I haven't a ruffle to ruffle myself withal; or in other words, I am afraid people would think I had packed myself bodily into my valise, and thereby conclude I was a smaller affair than they had thought me."

"Mr. Landholm! -- how you do talk! --but can I do anything?"

"Why yes, ma'am, -- or your irons can, if you have any hot."

"O that's it!" exclaimed Mrs. Nettley as Rufus held out the crumpled frills, -- "It's to smooth them, -- yes sir, my fire is all out a'most, but I can iron them in the oven. I'll do it directly, Mr. Landholm."

"Well," said Rufus with a quizzical face, -- "any way -- if you'll ensure them against damages, Mrs. Nettley -- I don't understand all the possibilities of an oven."

"We are very glad to have your brother in your room, Mr. Landholm," the good lady went on, as she placed one of her irons in the oven's mouth, where a brilliant fire was at work.

"I should think you would, ma'am; he can fill it much better than I."

"Why Mr. Landholm! -- I should think -- I shouldn't think, to look at you, that your brother would weigh much more than you -- he's broader shouldered, something, but you're the tallest, I'm sure. But you didn't mean that."

"I won't dispute the palm of beauty with him, Mrs. Nettley, nor of ponderosity. I am willing he should exceed me in both."

"Why Mr. Landholm! -- dear, I wish this iron would get hot; but there's no hurrying it; -- I think it's the wood -- I told George I think this wood does not give out the heat it ought to do. It makes it very extravagant wood. One has to burn so much more, and then it doesn't do the work -- Why Mr. Landholm -- you must have patience, sir -- Your brother is excellent, every way, and he's very good looking, but you are the handsomest."

"Everybody don't think so," Rufus said, but with a play of lip and brow that was not on the whole unsatisfied. Mrs. Nettley's attention however was now fastened upon the frills. And then came in Mr. Inchbald; and they talked, a sort of whirlwind of talk, as his sister not unaptly described it; and then, the ruffles being in order Rufus put himself so, and Winthrop and he talked themselves all the way down to No. 11, on the Parade.

Their welcome was most hearty, though the company were already at table. Place was speedily made for them; and Rufus hardly waited to take his before he became the life and spirit of the party. He continued to be that through the whole entertainment, delighting everybody's eye and ear. Winthrop laughed at his brother and with him, but himself played a very quiet part; putting in now and then a word that told, but doing it rarely and carelessly; the flow and freshness of the conversation calling for no particular help from him.

Mr. Herder was there; also Mr. Satterthwaite, who sat next to Winthrop and addressed several confidential and very unimportant remarks to him, and seemed to look upon his brother as a sort of meteoric phenomenon. President Darcy, of Mr. Herder's College, was the only other guest. Elizabeth sat next to Winthrop, but after the first formal greeting vouchsafed not a single look his way; she was in a dignified mood for all the company generally, and Rose's were the only feminine words that mixed with the talk during dinner. Very feminine they were, if that word implies a want of strength; but coming from such rosy lips, set round about with such smiles of winningness, they won their way and made easy entrance into all the ears at table. With the trifling exception of a pair or two.

"What is the matter with you?" said Rose, when she and her cousin had left the gentlemen and were alone in the drawing- room.

"Nothing at all."

"You don't say a word."

"I will, when I have a word to say."

"I thought you always had words enough," said Rose.

"Not when I haven't time too."

"Time? what, for words?"

"Yes."

"What was the matter with the time?"

"It was filled up."

"Well, you might have helped fill it."

"Nothing can be more than full, very well," said Elizabeth contemptuously. "I never want my words to be lost on the outside of a conversation."

"You think a great deal of your words," said her cousin.

"I want other people should."

"You do! Well -- I never expect them to think much of mine."

"That's not true, Rose."

"It isn't?"

"No; and your smile when you said it spoke that it wasn't."

"Well, I don't care, they are thought enough of," said Rose, half crying.

Elizabeth walked to the window and stood within the curtain, looking out into the street; and Rose bestowed her pouting lips and brimful eyes upon the full view of the fire.

"What's made you so cross?" she said after a quarter of an hour, when the tears were dried.

"I am not cross."

"Did you ever see anybody so amusing as Rufus Landholm?"

"Yes, he's amusing. -- I don't like people that are too amusing."

"How can anybody be too amusing?"

"He can make it too much of his business."

"Who? -- Rufus?"

"No, anybody. You asked how anybody could."

"Well I dont see how you can think he is too amusing."

"Why, that is all you care for in a man."

"It isn't! I care for a great deal else. What do you care for?"

"I don't know, I am sure," said Elizabeth; "but I should say, everything else."

"Well, I think people are very stupid that aren't amusing," said Rose.

Which proposition the ladies illustrated for another quarter of an hour.

The gentlemen came in then, one after another, but Elizabeth did not move from her window.

"I have something of yours in my possession, Miss Haye," said Rufus, coming to the outside of the curtain within which she stood.

"What?" said Elizabeth unceremoniously.

"Your father."

"What are you going to do with him?"

Rufus laughed a little; and Winthrop remarked there was nothing like straightforward dealing to confound a manoeuvrer.

"I have a desire to put him out of my hands, into yours," said Rufus; -- "but then, I have also a desire to make him fast there."

"My bracelet!" said Elizabeth.

It had a likeness of Mr. Haye in cameo.

"Where did you get it?"

"Where you left it."

"Where was that?"

"On the table, at the left hand of your plate, covered by your napkin."

Elizabeth stretched out her hand for it.

"Not so fast -- I have it in my possession, as I told you, and I claim a reward for recovering it from its ignoble condition."

"I shall set my own conditions then," said Elizabeth. "I will let anybody put it on, who will do me the pleasure to explain it first."

"Explain?" said Rufus, looking in a sort of comical doubt at the cameo; -- "I see the features of Mr. Haye, which never need explanation to me."

"Not in nature; but do you understand them when they look so brown on a white ground?"

"They look very natural!" said Rufus eyeing the cameo.

"That is to say, you do not understand them?"

"Pardon me, you are the person most difficult to understand."

"I don't ask that of you," said Elizabeth. "I want to know about this cameo, for I confess I don't."

"And I confess I don't," said Rufus. "I didn't even know it had any other name but Mr. Haye."

"What's all this?" said Rose, -- "what are you talking about here?"

"We are talking about, we don't know what," said Rufus.

"What is it?"

"That's the question; -- nobody knows."

"What is the question?"

"Who shall put on Miss Elizabeth's bracelet."

"Give it to me -- I'll do it."

"Pardon me -- there is said to be reason in the roasting of eggs, and there must be a good deal of reason before this bracelet goes on."

"I want somebody to tell me about the cameo," said Elizabeth.

"Well, won't somebody do it?"

"Mr. Landholm can't -- I haven't asked Mr. Winthrop."

"Will you?" said Rose turning to him.

"I wasn't asked," said Winthrop.

"But I asked you."

"Do you wish to know, Miss Cadwallader?"

"No I don't. What's the use of knowing about everything? Do leave the cameos, and come over here and sit down and talk and be comfortable!"

"It's impossible for me to be comfortable," said Rufus. "I've got Mr. Haye on my hands and I don't know what to do with him."

"Mr. Herder!" -- Rose called out to him, -- "do come here and tell us about cameos, that we can sit down and be comfortable."

Very good-humouredly the naturalist left Mr. Haye and came to them, and presently was deep in quartz and silica, and onyx and chalcedony, and all manner of stones that are precious. He told all that Elizabeth wanted to know, and much more than she had dreamed of knowing. Even Rose listened; and Rufus was eagerly attentive; and Elizabeth after she had asked questions as far as her knowledge allowed her to push them, sighed and wished she knew everything.

"Then you would be more wise than anybody, Miss Elisabet' -- you would be too wise. The man who knows the most, knows that he knows little."

"Is that your opinion of yourself, Mr. Herder?" said Rufus.

"Certainly. I do know very little; -- I will know more, I hope."

"O Mr. Herder, you know enough," said Rose. "I shouldn't think you would want to study any more."

"If I was to say, I know enough, -- that would be to say that I do not know nozing at all."

"Mr. Winthrop, you don't seem as interested as the rest of us," said Elizabeth, perhaps with a little curiosity; for he had stood quietly by, letting even Mr. Satterthwaite push himself in between.

"O he," said the naturalist, -- "he knows it all before."

"Then why didn't you tell me!" said Elizabeth.

"I wasn't asked," said Winthrop smiling.

"Wint'rop comes to my room the nights," Mr. Herder went on, -- "and he knows pretty well all what is in it, by this time. When he is tired himself wiz work at his books and his writings, he comes and gets rested wiz my stones and my preparations. If you will come there, Miss Elisabet', I will shew you crystals of quartz, and onyx, and all the kinds of chalcedony, and ozer things."

"And I too, Mr. Herder?" said Rose.

"Wiz pleasure, Miss Rose, -- if you like."

"Mr. Herder," said the young lady, "don't you love everything very much?"

"I love you very much, Miss Rose," said the naturalist, turning his good-humoured handsome face full upon her, -- "I do not know about everyzing."

"No, but I mean all animals and insects, and everything that lives?"

"I do not love everyzing that lives," said the naturalist smiling. "I do not love Mr. Heinfelt."

"Who is Mr. Heinfelt?" said Rose.

"He is a man what I do not love."

"No, but Mr. Herder, I mean, don't you love other things very much -- animals, and such things? You have so much to do with them."

"No -- I have no love to spare for animals," he said with a grave face.

"Don't you love birds and animals, that you are always after and busy with?"

"No," said the naturalist, -- "I do not love them -- I love what is back of all that -- not the animals. I keep my love for men."

"Do you think you have any more in that direction, for keeping it from the others?" said Elizabeth.

"I do not understand --"

"Do you think you love men any better because you don't give animals any love at all?"

"I do love some animals," said Mr. Herder. "I had a horse once, when I lived in Germany, that I did love. I loved him so well, that when a man did insult my horse, I made him fight me."

Rose exclaimed; Elizabeth smiled significantly; and Winthrop remarked,

"So that's the way your love for men shews itself!"

"No," said the naturalist, -- "no, -- I never did ask a man to meet me more than that one time. And I did not hurt him much. I only want to punish him a little."

"Why, Mr. Herder!" Rose repeated. "I didn't think you would do such a thing."

"Everybody fight in Germany," said the naturalist; "they all fight at the Universités -- they must fight. I found the only way was to make myself so good swordsman that I should be safe."

"And have you fought many duels?" said Elizabeth.

"Yes -- I have fought -- I have been obliged by circumstances to fight a good many. -- I have seen two hundred."

"Two hundred duels, Mr. Herder!"

"Yes. -- I have seen four men killed."

"Were you ever hurt, Mr. Herder?" said Rose.

"No -- I never was wounded. I saw how it was -- that the only thing to do was to excel ozers; so as in ozer things, I did in this."

"But how came you, who love men so well, to have so much to do with hurting them, Mr. Herder?"

"You cannot help it, Miss Elisabet'," said the naturalist. "They fight for nozing -- they fight for nozing. I never asked one, but I have been oblige to fight a good many. The students make themselves into clubs; and the way is, when two students of different clubs, get in a quarrel, their presidents must fight it out; -- so they meet people in duels that they have never spoken to, nor seen. I will give you an instance. -- One of these fellows -- a great fighter -- he had fought perhaps forty times, -- he was bragging about it; 'he had fought such one and such one,' he said; -- 'perhaps he ought to have fought Herder, in order to say that he was the best man with the sword of all the German students, -- perhaps he ought to have met Herder, but he didn't care about it!' And a young fellow that heard him, that was by, he took it up; 'Sir,' said he, 'Herder is my friend -- you must fight him -- come to my room to-morrow morning at seven o'clock -- he will meet you;' -- 'very well,' they agree upon the matter togezer. The next morning he come bouncing into my room at a quarter after seven -- 'Herder! Herder! come on! -- Lessing is waiting to fight you in my room.' -- 'What is the matter?' -- 'O, Lessing said so and so, and I told him you would fight him at seven, and it is a quarter past' -- 'Well, you tell him I didn't know of this, I am not keeping him waiting; I will come directly.' -- I was not up. So I got myself dressed, and in ten minutes I was there. A duel is finished when they have given twelve blows" --

"Twelve on each side, Mr. Herder?"

"Yes -- when they have both of them given twelve blows apiece. Before we begun, Lessing and me, I whispered to somebody who stood there, that I would not touch him unless he touched me; and then I would give it to him in the ribs. I received ten blows on my arm, which is covered wiz a long glove; the eleven, he cut my waistcoat -- I had one blow left, and I gave it to him in the ribs so long --"

Mr. Herder's words were filled out by the position of his fore fingers, which at this juncture were held some seven or eight inches apart.

"O Mr. Herder! -- did you kill him!" exclaimed Rose.

"Not at all -- I did not kill him -- he was very good friend of mine, -- he was not angry wiz me. He said, 'when I get well, Herder, you come to breakfast wiz me in my room;' and I said, 'yes!'"

"Is that kind of thing permitted in the Universities, Mr. Herder?" said Elizabeth.

"Permit? -- No, it is not permitted. They would hinder it if they could."

"What would have been done to you if you had been found out?"

"Humph! -- They would have shut us up!" said Mr. Herder, shrugging his shoulders.

"In your rooms?"

"No -- not exactly; -- in the fortress. At Munich the punishment for being found out, is eight years in the fortress; -- at ozer places, four or five years; -- yet they will fight."

"How many Universities have you been in, Mr. Herder?" said Rose.

"I have been in seven, of Universités in Europe."

"Fighting duels in all of them!"

"Well, yes; -- no, there was one where I did fight no duel. I was not there long enough."

"Mr. Herder, I am shocked! I wouldn't have thought it of you."

"The bracelet, Mr. Herder, I believe is yours," said Rufus.

"Mine?" -- said the naturalist.

"Miss Elizabeth would allow no one to put it on her hand, but a philosopher."

"That is too great an honour for me, -- I am not young and gallant enough -- I shall depute you," -- said Mr. Herder putting the cameo in Winthrop's hand.

But Winthrop remarked that he could not take deputed honours; and quietly laid it in the hand of its owner. Elizabeth, with a face a little blank, clasped it on for herself. Rufus looked somewhat curious and somewhat amused.

"I am afraid you will say of my brother, Miss Haye, that though certainly young enough, he is not very gallant," he said.

Elizabeth gave no answer to this speech, nor sign of hearing, unless it might be gathered from the cool free air with which she made her way out of the group and left them at the window. She joined herself to President Darcy, at the other side of the fire, and engaged him in talk with her about different gems and the engraving of them, so earnestly that she had no eyes nor ears for anybody else. And when any of the gentlemen brought her refreshments, she took or refused them almost without acknowledgment, and always without lifting her eyes to see to whom it might be due.

The company were all gone, and a little pause, of rest or of musing, had followed the last spoken 'good night.' It was musing on Elizabeth's part; for she broke it with,

"Father, if you can give Mr. Landholm aid in any way, I hope you will."

"My dear," said her father, "I don't know what I can do. I did offer to set him a going in business, but he don't like my line; and I have nothing to do with his, away up in the North there among the mountains."

"O I don't mean that Mr. Landholm -- I mean the other."

"Winthrop," said Mr. Haye.

"Elizabeth likes him much the best," said Miss Cadwallader.

"I don't," said Mr. Haye.

"Neither do I!"

"I do," said Elizabeth. "I think he is worth at least ten of his brother."

"She likes him so well, that if you don't help him, dear Mr. Haye, there is every likelihood that somebody else will."

"I certainly would," said Elizabeth, "if there was any way that I could. But there is not."

"I don't know that he wants help," said Mr. Haye.

"Why, he must, father! -- he can't live upon nothing; how much means do you suppose he has?"

"I met him at the chop-house the other day," said Mr. Haye; -- "he was eating a very good slice of roast beef. I dare say he paid for it."

"But he is struggling to make his way up into his profession," said Elizabeth. "He must be."

"What must he be?" said Rose.

"Struggling."

"Perhaps he is," said Mr. Haye, "but he don't say so. If I see him struggling, I will try what I can do."

"Oh father! --"

"Why should Winthrop Landholm be helped," said Rose, "more than all the other young men who are studying in the city?"

"Because I know him," said Elizabeth, "and don't happen to know the others. And because I like him."

"I like him too," said her father yawning, "but I don't know anything very remarkable about him. I like his brother the best."

"He is honest, and good, and independent," said Elizabeth; "and those are the very people that ought to be helped."

"And those are the very people that it is difficult to help," said her father. "How do you suppose he would take it, if I were to offer him a fifty dollar note to-morrow?"

"I don't suppose he would take it at all," said Elizabeth. "You couldn't help him so. But there are other ways."

"You may give him all your business, when he gets into his profession," said Mr. Haye. "I don't know what else you can do. Or you can use your influence with Mr. Satterthwaite to get his father to employ him."

"You and he may both be very glad to do it yet," said Elizabeth. "I shouldn't wonder."

"Then I don't see why you are concerned about him," said Rose.

Elizabeth was silent, with a face that might be taken to say there was nobody within hearing worthy of her words.

Rufus went back to his work in the mountains, and Winthrop struggled on; if most diligent and unsparing toil, and patient denying himself of necessary and wished-for things, were struggling. It was all his spare time could do to make clear the way for the hours given to his profession. There was little leisure for rest, and he had no means to bestow on pleasure; and that is a very favourable stating of the case as far as regards the last item. Mr. Inchbald never asked for rent, and never had it; not in those days. That the time would come, Winthrop believed; and his kind host never troubled himself to inquire.

There were pleasures, however, that Winthrop could not buy and which were very freely his. Mr. Herder's friendship introduced him to society, some of the best worth to be found, and which opened itself circle after circle to let him in. He had the freedom of President Darcy's house, and of Mr. Haye's, where he met other sets; in all, covering the whole ground of Mannahatta good society; and in all which Winthrop could not but know he was gladly seen. He had means and facilities for social enjoyment, more, by many, than he chose to avail himself of; facilities that did not lack temptation. In Mr. Herder's set, Winthrop often was found; other houses in the city saw him but rarely.

There was an exception, -- he was often at Mr. Haye's; why, it did not very plainly appear. He was certainly made welcome by the family, but so he was by plenty of other families; and the house had not a more pleasant set of familiars than several other houses could boast. Mr. Haye had no sort of objection to giving him so much countenance and encouragement; and Rose kept all her coldness and doubtful speeches for other times than those when he was near. Elizabeth held very much her old manner; in general chose to have little to do with him; either haughtily or carelessly distant, it might be taken for one or the other. Though which it might be taken for, seemed to give no more concern to the gentleman in question than it did to herself.

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Chapter XIX

A man may hear this shower sing in the wind. MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

One summer's afternoon, -- this was the first summer of Winthrop's being in Mannahatta, -- he went to solace himself with a walk out of town. It was a long and grave and thoughtful walk; so that Mr. Landholm really had very little good of the bright summer light upon the grass and trees. Furthermore, he did not even find it out when this light was curtained in the west with a thick cloud, which straightway became gilt and silver-edged in a marvellous and splendid degree. The cloud of thought was thicker than that, if not quite so brilliant; and it was not until low growls of thunder began to salute his ear, that he looked up and found the silver edge fast mounting to the zenith and the curtain drawing its folds all around over the clear blue sky. His next look was earthward, for a shelter; for at the rate that chariot of the storm was travelling he knew he had not many minutes to seek one before the storm would be upon him. Happily a blacksmith's shop, that he would certainly have passed without seeing it, stood at a little distance; and Winthrop thankfully made for it. He found it deserted; and secure of a refuge, took his place at the door to watch the face of things; for though the edge of the town was near, the storm was nearer, and it would not do to run for it. The blackness covered everything now, changing to lurid light in the storm quarter, and big scattered drops began to come plashing down. This time Winthrop's mind was so much in the clouds that he did not know what was going on in the earth; for while he stood looking and gazing, two ladies almost ran over him. Winthrop's senses came back to the door of the blacksmith's shop, and the ladies recovered themselves.

"How do you do, Mr. Landholm," said the one, with a bow.

"O Mr. Winthrop!" cried the other, -- "what shall we do? we can't get home, and I'm so frightened! --"

Winthrop had not time to open his lips, for either civility or consolation, when a phaeton, coming at a furious rate, suddenly pulled up before them, and Mr. Satterthwaite jumped out of it and joined himself to the group. His business was to persuade Miss Haye to take the empty place in his carriage and escape with him to the shelter of her own house or his father's. Miss Haye however preferred getting wet, and walking through the mud, and being blinded with the lightning, all of which alternatives Mr. Satterthwaite presented to her; at least no other conclusion could be drawn, for she very steadily and coolly refused to ride home with him.

"Mr. Landholm," said Mr. Satterthwaite in desperation, "don't you advise Miss Haye to agree to my proposition?"

"I never give advice, sir," said Winthrop, "after I see that people's minds are made up. Perhaps Miss Cadwallader may be less stubborn."

Mr. Satterthwaite could do no other than turn to Miss Cadwallader, who wanted very little urging.

"But Rose!" said her cousin, -- "you're not going to leave me alone?"

"No, I don't," said Rose. "I'm sure you've got somebody with you; and he's got an umbrella."

"Don't, Rose!" said Elizabeth, -- "stay and go home with me -- the storm will be over directly."

"It won't -- I can't," said Rose, -- "It won't be over this hour, and I'm afraid --"

And into Mr. Satterthwaite's phaeton she jumped, and away Mr. Satterthwaite's phaeton went, with him and her in it.

"You had better step under shelter, Miss Haye," said Winthrop; "it is beginning to sprinkle pretty fast."

"No," said Elizabeth, "I'll go home -- I don't mind it. I would rather go right home -- I don't care for the rain."

"But you can't go without the umbrella," said Winthrop, "and that belongs to me."

"Well, won't you go with me?" said Elizabeth, with a look half doubtful and half daunted.

"Yes, as soon as it is safe. This is a poor place, but it is better than nothing. You must come in here and have patience till then."

He went in and Elizabeth followed him, and she stood there looking very doubtful and very much annoyed; eyeing the fast falling drops as if her impatience could dry them up. The little smithy was black as such a place should be; nothing looked like a seat but the anvil, and that was hardly safe to take advantage of.

"I wish there was something here for you to sit down upon," said Winthrop peering about, -- "but everything is like Vulcan's premises. It is a pity I am not Sir Walter Raleigh for your behoof; for I suppose Sir Walter didn't mind walking home without his coat, and I do."

"He only threw off his cloak," said Elizabeth.

"I never thought of wearing mine this afternoon," said Winthrop, "though I brought an umbrella. But see here, Miss Elizabeth, -- here is a box, one end of which, I think, may be trusted. Will you sit down?"

Elizabeth took the box, seeming from some cause or other tongue-tied. She sat looking out through the open door at the storm in a mixture of feelings, the uppermost of which was vexation.

"I hope more than one end of this box may be trusted," she presently roused herself to say. "I have no idea of giving half trust to anything."

"Yet that is quite as much as it is safe to give to most things," said Winthrop.

"Is it?"

"I am afraid so."

"I wouldn't give a pin for anything I couldn't trust entirely," said Elizabeth.

"Which shews what a point of perfection the manufacture of pins has reached since the days of Anne Boleyn," said Winthrop.

"Of Anne Boleyn! -- What of them then?"

"Only that a statute was passed in that time, entitled, 'An act for the true making of pins;' so I suppose they were then articles of some importance. But the box may be trusted, Miss Haye, for strength, if not for agreeableness. A quarter of agreeableness with a remainder of strength, is a fair proportion, as things go."

"Do you mean to compare life with this dirty box?" said Elizabeth.

"They say an image should always elevate the subject," said Winthrop smiling.

"What was the matter with the making of pins," said Elizabeth, "that an act had to be made about it?"

"Why in those days," said Winthrop, "mechanics and tradespeople were in the habit occasionally of playing false, and it was necessary to look after them."

Elizabeth sat silently looking out again, wondering -- what she had often wondered before -- where ever her companion had got his cool self-possession; marvelling, with a little impatient wonder, how it was that he would just as lief talk to her in a blacksmith's shop in a thunder-storm, as in anybody's drawing- room with a band playing and fifty people about. She was no match for him, for she felt a little awkward. She, Miss Haye, the heiress in her own right, who had lived in good company ever since she had lived in company at all. Yet there he stood, more easily, she felt, than she sat. She sat looking straight out at the rain and thinking of it.

The open doorway and her vision were crossed a moment after by a figure which put these thoughts out of her head. It was the figure of a little black girl, going by through the rain, with an old basket at her back which probably held food or firing that she had been picking up along the streets of the city. She wore a wretched old garment which only half covered her, and that was already half wet; her feet and ancles were naked; and the rain came down on her thick curly head. No doubt she was accustomed to it; the road-worn feet must have cared little for wet or dry, and the round shock of wool perhaps never had a covering; yet it was bowed to the rain, and the little blackey went by with lagging step and a sort of slow crying. It touched Elizabeth with a disagreeable feeling of pain. The thought had hardly crossed her mind, that she was sorry for her, when to her great surprise she saw her companion go to the door and ask the little object of her pity to come in under the shed. The child stopped her slow step and her crying and looked up at him.

"Come in here till the rain's over," he repeated.

She gave her head a sort of matter-of-course shake, without moving a pair of intelligent black eyes which had fixed on his face.

"Come in," said Winthrop.

The child shook her head again, and said,

"Can't!"

"Why not?" said Winthrop.

"Mustn't!"

"Why mustn't you?"

"'Cause."

"Come in," said Winthrop, -- and to Elizabeth's exceeding astonishment he laid hold of the little black shoulder and drew the girl into the shop, -- "it is going to storm hard; -- why mustn't you?"

The little blackey immediately squatted herself down on the ground against the wall, and looking up at him repeated,

"'Cause."

"It's going to be a bad storm; -- you'll be better under here."

The child's eyes went out of the door for a moment, and then came back to his face, as if with a sort of fascination.

"How far have you to go?"

"Home."

"How far is that?"

"It's six miles, I guess," said the owner of the eyes.

"That's too far for you to go in the storm. The lightning might kill you."

"Kill me!"

"Yes. It might."

"I guess I'd be glad if it did," she said, with another glance at the storm.

"Glad if it did! -- why?"

"'Cause."

"'Cause what?" said Winthrop, entering more into the child's interests, Elizabeth thought, than he had done into hers.

"'Cause," repeated the blackey. -- "I don't want to get home."

"Who do you live with?"

"I live with my mother, when I'm to home."

"Where do you live when you are not at home?"

"Nowheres."

The gathered storm came down at this point with great fury. The rain fell, whole water; little streams even made their way under the walls of the shanty and ran across the floor. The darkness asked no help from black walls and smoky roof.

"Isn't this better than to be out?" said Winthrop, after his eyes had been for a moment drawn without by the tremendous pouring of the rain. But the little black girl looked at it and said doggedly,

"I don't care."

"Where have you been with that basket?"

"Down yonder -- where all the folks goes," she said with a slight motion of her head towards the built-up quarter of the country.

"Do you bring wood all the way from there on your back?"

"When I get some."

"Aren't you tired?"

The child looked at him steadily, and then in a strange somewhat softened manner which belied her words, answered,

"No."

"You don't bring that big basket full, do you?"

She kept her bright eyes on him and nodded.

"I should think it would break your back."

"If I don't break my back I get a lickin'."

"Was that what you were crying for as you went by?"

"I wa'n't a cryin'!" said the girl. "Nobody never see me a cryin' for nothin'!"

"You haven't filled your basket to-day."

She gave an askant look into it, and was silent.

"How came that?"

"'Cause! -- I was tired, and I hadn't had no dinner; and I don't care! That's why I wished the thunder would kill me. I can't live without eatin'."

"Have you had nothing since morning?"

"I don't get no mornin' -- I have to get my dinner."

"And you could get none to-day?"

"No. Everything was eat up."

"Everything isn't quite eaten up," said Winthrop, rummaging in his coat pocket; and he brought forth thence a paper of figs which he gave the girl. "He isn't so short of means as I feared, after all," thought Elizabeth, "since he can afford to carry figs about in his pocket." But she did not know that the young gentleman had made his own dinner off that paper of figs; and she could not guess it, ever when from his other coat pocket he produced some biscuits which were likewise given to eke out the figs in the little black girl's dinner. She was presently roused to very great marvelling again by seeing him apply his foot to another box, one without a clean side, and roll it over half the length of the shed for the child to sit upon.

"What do you think of life now, Miss Elizabeth?" he said, leaving his charge to eat her figs and coming again to the young lady's side.

"That isn't life," said Elizabeth.

"It seems without the one quarter of agreeableness," he said.

"But it's horrible, Mr. Winthrop! --"

He was silent, and looked at the girl, who sitting on her coal box was eating figs and biscuits with intense satisfaction.

"She is not a bad-looking child," said Elizabeth.

"She is a very good-looking child," said Winthrop; "at least her face has a great deal of intelligence; and I think, something more."

"What more?"

"Feeling, or capacity of feeling."

"I wish you had a seat, Mr. Landholm," said Elizabeth, looking round.

"Thank you -- I don't wish for one."

"It was very vexatious in Rose to go and leave me!"

"There isn't another box for her if she had stayed," said Winthrop.

"She would have me go out with her this afternoon to see her dressmaker, who lives just beyond here a little; and father had the horses. It was so pleasant an afternoon, I had no notion of a storm."

"There's a pretty good notion of a storm now," said Winthrop.

So there was, beyond a doubt; the rain was falling in floods, and the lightning and thunder, though not very near, were very unceasing. Elizabeth still felt awkward and uneasy, and did not know what to talk about. She never had talked much to Mr. Landholm; and his cool matter-of-fact way of answering her remarks, puzzled or baffled her.

"That child sitting there makes me very uncomfortable," she said presently.

"Why, Miss Elizabeth?"

Elizabeth hesitated, and then said she did not know.

"You don't like the verification of my setting forth of life," he said smiling.

"But that is not life, Mr. Winthrop."

"What is it?"

"It is the experience of one here and there -- not of people in general."

"What do you take to be the experience of people in general?"

"Not mine, to be sure," said Elizabeth after a little thought, -- "nor hers."

"Hers is a light shade of what rests upon many."

"Why Mr. Winthrop! do you think so?"

"Look at her," he said in a low voice; -- "she has forgotten her empty basket in a sweet fig."

"But she must take it up again."

"She won't lessen her burden, but she will her power of forgetting."

Elizabeth sat still, looking at her vis-à-vis of life, and feeling very uneasily what she had never felt before. She began therewith to ponder sundry extraordinary propositions about the inequalities of social condition and the relative duties of man to man.

"What right have I," she said suddenly, "to so much more than she has?"

"Very much the sort of right that I have to be an American, while somebody else is a Chinese."

"Chance," said Elizabeth.

"No, there is no such thing as chance," he said seriously.

"What then?"

"The fruit of industry, talent, and circumstance."

"Not mine."

"No, but your father's, who gives it to you."

"But why ought I to enjoy more than she does? -- in the abstract, I mean."

"I don't know," said Winthrop. -- "I guess we had better walk on now, Miss Elizabeth."

"Walk on! -- it rains too hard."

"But we are in the shed, while other people are out?"

"No but, -- suppose that by going out I could bring them in?"

"Then I would certainly act as your messenger," he said smiling. "But you can't reach all the people who are so careless as to go out without umbrellas."

Elizabeth was betrayed into a laugh --a genuine hearty laugh of surprise, in which her awkwardness was for a moment forgotten.

"How came you to bring one, such a day?"

"I thought the sun was going to shine."

"But seriously, Mr. Landholm, my question," -- said Elizabeth.

"What was it?"

"How ought I to enjoy so much more than she has?"

"Modestly, I should think."

"What do you mean?"

"If you were to give the half of your fortune to one such, for instance," he said with a slight smile, "do you fancy you would have adjusted two scales of the social balance to hang even?"

"No," said Elizabeth, -- "I suppose not."

"You would have given away what she could not keep; you would have put out of your power what would not be in hers; and on the whole, she would be scantly a gainer and the world would be a loser."

"Yet surely," said Elizabeth, "something is due from my hand to hers."

Her companion was quite silent, rather oddly, she thought; and her meditations came back for a moment from social to individual distinctions and differences. Then, really in a puzzle as to the former matter, she repeated her question.

"But what can one do to them, then, Mr. Winthrop? -- or what should be one's aim?"

"Put them in the way of exercising the talent and industry and circumstance which have done such great things for us."

"So that by the time they have the means they will be ready for them? -- But dear me! that is a difficult matter!" said Elizabeth.

Her companion smiled a little.

"But they haven't any talent, Mr. Landholm, -- nor industry nor circumstance either. To be sure those latter wants might be made up."

"Most people have talent, of one sort or another," said Winthrop. "There's a little specimen pretty well stocked."

"Do you think so?"

"Try her."

"I don't know how to try her!" said Elizabeth. "I wish you would."

"I don't know how, either," said Winthrop. "Circumstances have been doing it this some time."

"I wish she hadn't come in," said Elizabeth. "She has unsettled all my ideas."

"They will rest the better for being unsettled."

Elizabeth looked at him, but he did not acknowledge the look. Presently, whether to try how benevolence worked, or to run away from her feeling of awkwardness, she got up and moved a few steps towards the place where the little blackey sat.

"Have you had dinner enough?" she said, standing and looking down upon her as a very disagreeable social curiosity.

"There aint no more, if I hain't," said the curiosity, with very dauntless eyes.

"Where do you get your dinner every day?"

"'Long street," said the girl, turning her eyes away from Elizabeth and looking out into the storm.

"Do you often go without any?"

"When the folks don't give me none."

"Does that happen often?"

"They didn't give me none to-day."

"What do you do then?"

The eyes came back from the door to Elizabeth, and then went to Winthrop.

"What do you do then?" Elizabeth repeated.

"I gets 'em."

"You didn't get any to-day?" said Winthrop.

She shook her head.

"You mustn't any more."

"Nobody ha'n't no business to let me starve," said the blackey stoutly.

"No, but I'll tell you where to go the next time you can't get a dinner, and you shall have it without stealing."

"I ha'n't stole it -- nobody never see me steal -- I only tuk it," -- said the girl with a little lowering of her voice and air.

"What's your name?"

"Clam."

"Clam!" said Elizabeth, -- "where did you get such an odd name?"

"'Long street," said the girl, her black eyes twinkling.

"Where did you get it?" said Winthrop gravely.

"I didn't get it nowheres -- it was guv to me."

"What's your other name?"

"I ha'n't got no more names -- my name's Clam."

"What's your mother's name?"

"She's Sukey Beckinson."

"Is she kind to you?" asked Elizabeth.

"I don' know!"

"Did you have dinner enough?" said Winthrop with a smile.

Clam jumped up, and crossing her hands on her breast dropped a brisk little courtsey to her benefactor. She made no other answer, and then sat down again.

"Are you afraid to go home with your empty basket when the storm's over?" said he kindly.

"No," she said; but it was with a singular expression of cold and careless necessity.

"The rest of the basketful wouldn't be worth more than that, would it?" said he giving her a sixpence.

Clam took it and clasped it very tight in her fist, for other place of security she had none; and looked at him, but made no more answer than that.

"You won't forget where to come the next time you can't get an honest dinner," said he. "The corner of Beaver and Little South Streets. You know where it is? That is where I live. Ask for Mr. Landholm."

Clam nodded and said, "I know!"

"I hope you'll get some supper to-night," said he.

"I will!" said Clam determinately.

"How will you?" said Elizabeth.

"I'll make mammy give me some," said the girl flourishing her clasped fist.

"Wouldn't you like to leave picking things out of the street, and go to live with somebody who would take care of you and teach you to be a good girl?" said Elizabeth.

Clam tossed her sixpence up and down in her hand, and finally brought her eyes to bear upon Elizabeth and said,

"I don't want nobody to take care of me."

"If she could be taught, and would, I'd take care of her afterwards," said Elizabeth to Winthrop.

"If he'd say so, I would," said Clam.

"Look here," said Winthrop. "Would you like to come into some kind house -- if I can find you one -- and learn to do clean work?"

"It don't make no odds," said Clam looking at her basket.

"What do you say?"

"I guess no one don't want me."

"Perhaps not; but if somebody would have you, would you be a good girl?"

"I s'pose I'd get dinner reglar," said the little black girl, still fingering the edge of her basket.

"Certainly! --and something better than figs."

"Be them figs?" said Clam, suddenly looking up at him.

"Yes -- the sweet ones."

"Goody! -- I didn't know that before."

"Well -- you haven't answered me yet."

"I don't care much," -- said Clam. "Is it your house?"

"Maybe."

"I'll come!" said she clapping her hands. "I'll clear out, and mother won't never give it to me no more. -- Nor nobody else sha'n't?" said she looking up at Winthrop.

"If you behave yourself."

"I'll go now right off!" said Clam, jumping up in great spirits. Then with a changing and doubtful tone she added, looking to Winthrop, "Will you take me?"

"Yes," he said smiling, "but not this evening. You must go home now, when the storm is over, for to-night; and I'll come and see your mother about it."

"What for?" was the very earnest and prompt answer.

"If you agree to come, I must get her to bind you out."

"I aint goin' to be bound," said Clam shaking her head; -- "if you bind me, I'll run."

"Run as fast as you please," said Winthrop; -- "run whenever you want to; -- but I can't take you unless you be bound, for I won't have your mother coming after you."

"Can't she do nothin' to me if I'm bound?" said Clam.

"Nothing at all, till you grow up to be a woman; and then you can take care of yourself."

"I'll take care of myself all along," said Clam. "Nobody else aint a goin' to."

"But somebody must give you clothes to wear, and a bed to sleep in, and your dinner, you know; and you must do work for somebody, to pay for it."

"To pay for my dinner?"

"Yes."

"Very good!" said Clam. "I guess I'll stand it. Will it be for you?"

"No, I think not."

"Won't you?" said Clam wishingly. "I'll do work for you."

"Thank you. Maybe you shall."

"I'm goin' home now," said Clam, getting up and shouldering her basket.

"The storm's too bad yet," said Winthrop.

"Crackey! what do you think I care for that! The rain won't wet me much."

"Come to my house to-morrow, if you want to see me again," said Winthrop, -- "about dinner-time."

Clam nodded, and fixing her bright eyes very intently first on one and then on the other of the friends she was leaving, she ended with a long parting look at Winthrop which lasted till she had passed from sight out of the door of the shed.

The violence of the storm was gone over; but though the thunder sounded now in the distance and the lightning played fainter, the rain fell yet all around them, in a gentle and very full shower.

"Do you suppose she has six miles to go?" said Elizabeth.

"No."

"I thought you answered as if you believed her when she said so."

"It isn't best to tell all one's thoughts," said Winthrop smiling.

Elizabeth went back to her box seat.

"I wish the rain would let us go home too," she said.

"Your wishes are so accustomed to smooth travelling, they don't know what to make of a hindrance," said her companion.

Elizabeth knew it was true, and it vexed her. It seemed to imply that she had not been tried by life, and that nobody knew what she would be till she was tried. That was a very disagreeable thought. There again he had the advantage of her. Nothing is reliable that is not tried. "And yet," she said to herself, "I am reliable. I know I am."

"What can anybody's wish make of a hindrance?" was her reply.

"Graff it in well, and anybody can make a pretty large thorn of it."

"Why Mr. Winthrop! -- but I mean, in the way of dealing with it pleasantly?"

"Pleasantly? -- I don't know," said he; "unless they could get my mother's recipe."

"What does her wish do with a hindrance?"

"It lies down and dies," he said, with a change of tone which shewed whither his thoughts had gone.

"I think I never wish mine to do that," said Elizabeth.

"What then? Remember you are speaking of hindrances absolute -- that cannot be removed."

"But Mr. Winthrop, do you think it is possible for one's wish to lie down and die so?"

"If I had not seen it, I might say that it was not."

"I don't understand it --I don't know what to make of it," said Elizabeth. "I don't think it is possible for mine."

Winthrop's thoughts went back a moment to the sweet calm brow, the rested face, that told of its truth and possibility in one instance.. He too did not understand it, but he guessed where the secret might lie.

"It must be a very happy faculty," said Elizabeth; -- "but it seems to me -- of course it is not so in that instance, -- but in the abstract, it seems to me rather tame; -- I don't like it. I have no idea of giving up!"

"There is no need of your giving up, in this case," said Winthrop. "Do you see that sunshine?"

"And the rainbow!" said Elizabeth.

She sprang to the door; and they both stood looking, while the parting gifts of the clouds were gently reaching the ground, and the sun taking a cleared place in the western heaven, painted over against them, broad and bright, the promissory token that the earth should be overwhelmed with the waters no more. The rain-drops glittered as they fell; the grass looked up in refreshed green where the sun touched it; the clouds were driving over from the west, leaving broken fragments behind them upon the blue; and the bright and sweet colours of the rainbow swept their circle in the east and almost finished it in the grass at the door of the blacksmith's shop. It was a lovely show of beauty that is as fresh the hundredth time as the first. But though Elizabeth looked at it and admired it, she was thinking of something else.

"You have no overshoes," said Winthrop, when they had set out on their way; -- "I am afraid you are not countrywoman enough to bear this."

"O yes I am," said Elizabeth, -- "I don't mind it -- I don't care for it. But Mr. Winthrop --"

"What were you going to say?" he asked, when he had waited half a minute to find out.

"You understood that I did not mean to speak of your mother, when I said that, about thinking it seemed tame to let one's wishes die out? -- I excepted her entirely in my thought -- I was speaking quite in the abstract."

"I know that, Miss Elizabeth."

She was quite satisfied with the smile with which he said it.

"How much better that odd little black child liked you than she did me," she went on with a change of subject and tone together.

"You were a little further off," said Winthrop.

"Further off?" said Elizabeth.

"I suppose she thought so."

"Then one must come near people in order to do them good?"

"One mustn't be too far off," said Winthrop, "to have one's words reach them."

"But I didn't mean to be far off," said Elizabeth.

"I didn't mean to be near."

Elizabeth looked at him, but he was grave; and then she smiled, and then laughed.

"You've hit it!" she exclaimed. "I shall remember that."

"Take care, Miss Elizabeth," said Winthrop, as her foot slipped in the muddy way, -- "or you will have more to remember than would be convenient. You had better take my arm."

So she did; musing a little curiously at herself and that arm, which she had seen in a shirt-sleeve, carrying a pickaxe on shoulder; and making up her mind in spite of it all that she didn't care! So the walk home was not otherwise than comfortable. Indeed the beauty of it was more than once remarked on by both parties.

"Well!" said Rose, when at last Elizabeth came into the room where she was sitting, -- "have you got home?"

"Yes."

"What have you been doing all this while?"

"Getting very angry at you in the first place; and then cooling down as usual into the reflection that it was not worth while."

"Well, I hope Winthrop made good use of his opportunity?"

"Yes, he did," said Elizabeth coolly, taking off her things.

"And you have engaged him at last as your admirer?"

"Not at all; -- I have only engaged a little black girl to be my servant."

"A servant! What?"

"What do you mean by 'what'?" said Elizabeth contemptuously.

"I mean, what sort of a servant?"

"I am sure I don't know -- a black servant."

"But what for?"

"To do my bidding."

"But what is she? and where did you pick her up?"

"She is an odd little fish called Clam; and I didn't pick her up at all; -- Mr. Landholm did that."

"O ho!" said Rose, -- "it's a joint concern! -- that's it. But I think you are beginning to make up your household very early."

Elizabeth flung down her shoe and lifted her head, and Miss Cadwallader shrunk; even before her companion said with imperious emphasis, "Rose, how dare you! --"

Rose did not dare, against the flushed face and eye of fire which confronted her. She fell back into her chair and her book and was dumb.

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Chapter XX

Ford. They do say, if money go before, all ways do lie open. Fal. Money is a good soldier, sir, and will on. MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

Somewhat to Winthrop's surprise, Clam came the next day to remind him of his promise; very much in earnest to wear a clean frock and have her dinner regular. She was duly bound, and entered into clean service accordingly. The indentures were made out to Miss Haye; but for the present Clam was put to learn her business under somebody that knew it; and for that end was finally sent to Mrs. Landholm. A week or two with Mrs. Nettley proved to the satisfaction of both parties that neither would much advantage the other. At Shahweetah, Clam, as Mrs. Landholm expressed it, "took a new start," and got on admirably. What much favoured this, was the fact that she speedily became very much attached to the whole family; with the single exception of Karen, between whom and herself there was an unallayed state of friction; a friction that probably served only to better Clam's relish of her dinner, while poor Karen declared "she didn't leave her no rest day nor night."

"She's not a bad child, Karen," said her mistress.

"Which part of her 's good?" said Karen. "'Taint her eyes, nor her fingers; and if the Bible didn't say there wa'n't no such a fountain, I should think her tongue was one o' them fountains that sent out at the same place both salt water and fresh."

"Her fingers are pretty good, Karen."

"There's a two-sided will in 'em, Mrs. Landholm."

There was no two-sided will in Clam's first friend, nor in the energies which were steadily bearing him on towards his aim. Steadily and surely, as he knew. But his life in those days had almost as little to tell of, as it had much to do. From early morning till -- almost till early morning again, or till a new day had begun to count the hours, -- every minute had its work; yet the record of the whole could be given in very few words, and those would not be interesting. How should the record be, when the reality was not, even to himself. It was all preparatory work; it must be done; but the interest of the matter lay beyond, at that point whither all these efforts tended. Meanwhile work and have patience, and work, -- was the epitome of his life.

There were some breaks, but not many. Now and then a swift and sweet run home, to live for a moment in the midst of all this preparing to live; to rest among the home hearts; to breathe a few breaths in absolute freedom; to exchange Mr. De Wort's dusty office for the bright little keeping-room of the farmhouse, and forget the business of the hard brick and stone city under the shadow or the sunshine that rested on Wut-a- qut-o. Then Winthrop threw off his broadcloth coat and was a farmer again. Then Mrs. Landholm's brow laid down its care, and shewed to her son only her happy face. Then poor Winifred was strong and well and joyous, in the spite of sickness and weakness and nervous ail. And then also, Clam sprang round with great energy, and was as Karen averred, "fifty times worse and better than ever."

But all faded and died away, save the sweet memory and refreshment; that staid yet a little while. Winthrop went back to his musty parchments and lonely attic; and the little family at home gathered itself together for a new season of duty-doing, and hope, and looking forward. The sunshine and the shadow slept upon Wut-a-qut-o, as it did a little while ago; but neither sunshine nor shadow was the same thing now, for Winthrop was away.

He had lost perhaps less than they; though the balance was struck pretty fair. But he was actively bending every energy to the accomplishment of a great object. The intensity of effort might swallow up some other things, and the consciousness of sure and growing success might make amends for them. Besides, he had been long fighting the battle of life away from home, and was accustomed to it; they never got accustomed to it. Every fresh coming home was the pledge of a fresh parting, the pleasure of the one not more sure than the pain of the other. If Winthrop had changed, in all these years and goings and comings, it might have been different; if they could have found that their lost treasure was less true or strong or fair, than when they first let it go. But he was so exactly the same Winthrop that they had been sorry for that first time, that they could only be sorry again with the same sorrow; -- the same, but for the lost novelty of that first time, and the added habit of patience, and the nearer hope of his and their reward.

So through the first winter and the first summer, and the second winter and the second summer, of his city apprenticeship, Winthrop wrought on; now with a cold room and little fire in his chimney, and now with the sun beating upon the roof, and the only hope of night's sea-breeze. But the farmer's boy had known cold and heat a great while ago, and he could bear both. He could partly forget both, sometimes in literary unbending with Mr. Herder and his friends; and at other times in a solitary walk on the Green overlooking the bay, to catch the sea-breeze more fresh and soon, and look up the river channel towards where the shadows lay upon Wut-a- qut-o. And sometimes in a visit at Mr. Haye's.

Of late, in the second summer, this last sort of pleasure- taking grew to be more frequent. Mr. Herder was less visited, and Mr. Haye more. Winthrop was always welcome, but there was no change in the manner of his being received. Unless perhaps a little more graciousness on Elizabeth's part, and a trifle less on Rose's, might be quoted.

So the sea-breezes blew through the dog-days; and September ushered in and ushered out its storms; and October came, clear and fair, with strength and health for body and mind. With October came Rufus, having just made an end of his work in the North country. He came but for a few days' stay in passing from one scene of labours to another. For those few days he abode with his brother, sharing his room and bed.

"Well, Winthrop, I've stuck to my choice," he remarked, the second evening of his being there. The tone indicated the opening of a great budget of thoughts. Winthrop was bending over a parchment-coloured volume, and Rufus pacing up and down the longest stretch of the little room.

"I am glad of it," said Winthrop, without looking up.

"I am not sure that I am."

"What's the matter?"

"I don't see that I gain much by it, and I certainly lose."

"What do you expect to gain?"

"Nothing but money, -- and I don't get that."

"It's safe, isn't it?"

"Yes, and so are winter's snows, in their treasury; -- and I could as soon get it by asking for it."

"Let us hope it will come with the snows," said Winthrop, his head still bent down over his book.

"You may talk; -- it is easy waiting for you."

"Query, how that would give me a right to talk," said Winthrop turning over a leaf; -- "supposing it to be a fact; of which I have some doubts."

"What have you been doing all to-day?"

"The usual routine -- which after all is but preparing to do."

"What has been the routine to-day?"

"You saw my breakfast and saw me get it. -- Then I went out. -- Then I read, according to custom."

"What?"

"Classics."

"Do you!"

"For awhile. The rest of the morning between engrossing deeds and the Record Office. First half of the afternoon, or rather a larger proportion, ditto; the rest to meet my friends Messrs. Jones and Satterthwaite."

"Satterthwaite! -- what does he want?"

"To read Greek with me."

"Greek! What has put that into his head? Bob. Satterthwaite!" -- and Rufus threw back his head and laughed in a great state of amusement. "What has put that into his head? -- eh, Winthrop?"

"I don't inquire. It puts money in my pocket."

"Not much," said Rufus.

"No, not much."

"What's the reason, do you think? What moves him to woo the Muses? -- I'm afraid it's because he thinks it is a preliminary wooing he must go through before he can be successful in another quarter."

And again Rufus laughed, in high delight.

"I have no business with that," said Winthrop.

"What are you doing now?"

"Studying law."

"Stop."

"What for?"

"To talk to me."

"It seems to me I have been doing that for some time," said Winthrop, without looking off his book.

"But I haven't begun. Winthrop, -- I have a great mind to give up this engineering business."

"To do what instead?"

"Why -- you know I shall have some money coming to me -- quite a little sum; -- Mr. Haye has very kindly offered to put me in the way of laying it out to good advantage, and eventually of getting into another line of occupation which would at the same time be more lucrative, less laborious, and would keep me in the regions of civilization. -- And perhaps -- Winthrop -- something might follow thereupon, --"

"What?" said his brother looking up.

"Something --"

"More definite in your purpose than in your speech."

"Not my purpose, exactly," said Rufus, -- "but in possibility."

"There is no peg in possibility for a wise man to hang his cap on."

"Perhaps I am not a wise man," said Rufus, with a very queer face, as if his mind were giving an askance look at the subject.

"That's a supposititious case I shall leave you to deal with."

"Why it's the very sort of case it's your business to deal with," said Rufus. "If the world was full of wise men you'd stand a pretty fair chance of starving, Governor. But seriously, -- do you think it is unbecoming a wise man to take any lawful means of keeping out of the way of that same devil of starvation?"

"Do you mean to say that you are in any danger of it?" said Winthrop looking up again.

"Why no, -- not exactly; taking the words literally. But one may starve and yet have enough to eat."

"If one refuses one's food."

"If one don't! I tell you, I have been starving for these two years past. It is not living, to make to-day only feed to- morrow. Besides -- I don't see any harm in purchasing, if one can, an exemption from the universal doom of eating one's bread in the sweat of one's brow."

"I think it depends entirely on what one pays for the purchase," said Winthrop.

"Suppose one pays nothing."

"One executes a most unaccountable business transaction."

Rufus stopped and looked at him, and then took up his walk, and half laughing went on.

"Suppose we leave talking in the dark, and understand one another. Do you know what I am driving at?"

"Have you set off?" said Winthrop, with again a glance which seemed to add to Rufus's amusement.

"No," he said, -- "I am just waiting for you to give me leave."

"The reins are not in my hands."

"Yes they are. Seriously, Winthrop, do you know what we are talking about? -- What do you think of my making suit to one of these ladies?"

"I do not think about it."

"You do not conceive it would be any disfavour to either of them to induce her to accept me, I suppose. -- What do you say?"

"You are indifferent towards which of them the suit should incline?" said Winthrop.

"Why, that's as it may be -- I haven't thought enough about it to know. They're a pretty fair pair to choose from --"

"Supposing that you have the choice," said Winthrop.

"Do you know anything to the contrary? --Has anybody else a fairer entrance than myself?"

"I am not on sufficiently near terms with the family to be able to inform you."

"Do you think of entering your plough, Governor?"

"Not in your field."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I am not in your way."

"Shall I be in yours?"

"No," said his brother coolly.

"In whose way then?"

"I am afraid in your own, Will."

"How do you mean?" asked the other a little fiercely.

"If you are so intent upon marrying money-bags, you may chance to get a wife that will not suit you."

"You must explain yourself!" said Rufus haughtily. "In what respect would either of these two not suit me?"

"Of two so different, it may safely be affirmed that if one would the other would not."

"Two so different!" said Rufus. "What's the matter with either of them?"

"There is this the matter with both --that you do not know them."

"I do know them!"

"From the rest of the world; but not from each other."

"Why not from each other?"

"Not enough for your liking or your judgment to tell which would suit you."

"Why would not either suit?" said Rufus.

"I think -- if you ask me -- that one would not make you happy, in the long run; and the other, with your present views and aims, you could not make happy."

"Which is which?" said Rufus, laughing and drawing up a chair opposite his brother.

"Either of them is which," said Winthrop. "Such being the case, I don't know that it is material to inquire."

"It is very material! for I cannot be satisfied without the answer. I am in earnest in the whole matter, Winthrop."

"So am I, very much in earnest."

"Which of them should I not make happy?" -- Rufus went on. -- "Rose? -- She is easily made happy."

"So easily, that you would be much more than enough for it."

"Then it is the other one whose happiness you are afraid for?"

"I don't think it is in much danger from you."

"Why? --what then?" said Rufus quickly.

"I doubt whether any one could succeed with her whose first object was something else."

Rufus drew his fingers through his hair, in silence, for about a minute and a half; with a face of thoughtful and somewhat disagreeable consideration.

"And with the other one you think he could?"

"What?"

"Succeed? -- one whose first object, as you say, was something else?"

"With the other I think anybody could."

"I don't know but I like that," said Rufus; -- "it is amiable. She has more simplicity. She is a lovely creature!"

"If you ask your eye."

"If I ask yours!" --

"Every man must see with his own eyes," said Winthrop.

"Don't yours see her lovely?"

"They might, if they had not an inward counsellor that taught them better."

"She is very sweet-tempered and sweet-mannered," said Rufus.

"Very."

"Don't you think so?"

"Certainly -- when it suits her."

"When it suits her!"

"Yes. She is naturally rude, and politically polite."

"And how's the other one? isn't she naturally rude too?"

"Not politically anything."

"And you think she wouldn't have me?"

"I am sure she would not, if she knew your motive."

"My motive! -- but my motive might change," said Rufus, pushing back his chair and beginning to walk the floor again. "It isn't necessary that my regards should be confined to her gracious adjunctive recommendations. --"

He walked for some time without reply, and again the leaves of Winthrop's book said softly now and then that Winthrop's head was busy with them.

"Governor, you are very unsatisfactory!" said his brother at length, standing now in front of him.

Winthrop looked up and smiled and said, "What would you have?"

"Your approbation!" -- was the strong and somewhat bitter thought in Rufus's mind. He paused before he spoke.

"But Governor, really I am tired of this life -- it isn't what I am fit for; -- and why not escape from it, if I can, by some agreeable road that will do nobody any harm?"

"With all my heart," said Winthrop. "I'll help you."

"Well? --"

"Well --"

"You think this is not such a one?"

"The first step in it being a stumble."

"To whom would it bring harm, Governor?"

"The head must lower when the foot stumbles," said Winthrop. "That is one harm."

"But you are begging the question!" said Rufus a little impatiently.

"And you have granted it."

"I haven't!" said Rufus. "I don't see it. I don't see the stumbling or the lowering. I should not feel myself lowered by marrying a fine woman, and I hope she would not feel her own self-respect injured by marrying me."

"You will not stand so high upon her money-bags as upon your own feet."

"Why not have the advantage of both?"

"You cannot. People always sit down upon money-bags. The only exception is in the case of money-bags they have filled themselves."

Rufus looked at Winthrop's book for three minutes in silence.

"Well, why not then take at once the ease, for which the alternative is a long striving?"

"If you can. But the long striving is not the whole of the alternative; with that you lose the fruits of the striving -- all that makes ease worth having."

"But I should not relinquish them," said Rufus. "I shall not sit down upon my money-bags."

"They are not your money-bags."

"They will be -- if I prove successful."

"And how will you prove successful?"

"Why!" -- said Rufus, -- "what a question! --"

"I wish you would answer it nevertheless -- not to me, but to yourself."

Whether Rufus did or not, the answer never came out. He paced the floor again; several times made ready to speak, and then checked himself.

"So you are entirely against me, --" he said at length.

"I am not against you, Will; -- I am for you."

"You don't approve of my plan."

"No --I do not."

"I wish you would say why."

"I hardly need," said Winthrop with a smile. "You have said it all to yourself."

"Notwithstanding which assumption, I should like to hear you say it."

"For the greater ease of attack and defence?"

"If you please. For anything."

"What do you want me to do, Will?" said Winthrop looking up.

"To tell me why I should not marry Miss Haye or Miss Cadwallader."

"You not knowing, yourself."

"Yes -- I don't," said Rufus.

Winthrop turned over a few leaves of his book and then spoke.

"You are stronger, not to lean on somebody else's strength. You are more independent, not to lean at all. You are honester, not to gain anything under false pretences. And you are better to be yourself, Will Landholm, than the husband of any heiress the sun shines upon, at such terms."

"What terms?"

"False pretences."

"What false pretences?"

"Asking the hand, when you only want the key that is in it. Professing to give yourself, when in truth your purpose is to give nothing that is not bought and paid for."

Rufus looked very grave and somewhat disturbed.

"That's a very hard characterizing of the matter, Governor," said he. "I don't think I deserve it."

"I hope you don't," said his brother.

Rufus began again to measure the little apartment with his long steps.

"But this kind of thing is done every day, Winthrop."

"By whom?" said Winthrop.

"Why! -- by very good men; -- by everybody."

"Not by everybody."

"By what sort of people is it not done?"

"By you and me," said Winthrop smiling.

"You think then that a poor man should never marry a rich woman?"

"Never, -- unless he can forget that she is rich and he poor."

Rufus walked for some time in silence.

"Well," he said, in a tone between dry and injured, -- "I am going off to the West again, luckily; and I shall have no opportunity for the present to disturb you by making false pretences, of any sort."

"Is opportunity all that you lack?" said Winthrop looking up, and with so simple an expression that Rufus quitted his walk and his look together.

"Why did you never make trial for yourself, Winthrop?" he said. "You have a remarkably fine chance; and fine opening too, I should think. You are evidently very well received down yonder."

"I have a theory of my own too, on the subject," said Winthrop, -- "somewhat different from yours, but still enough to work by."

"What's that?"

"I have no mind to marry any woman who is unwilling to be obliged to me."

Rufus looked at his brother and at the fireplace awhile in gravity.

"You are proud," he said at length.

"I must have come to it by living so high in the world," said Winthrop.

"So high?" -- said Rufus.

"As near the sun as I can get. I thought it was very near, some time in August last."

Winthrop laid by his book; and the two young men stood several minutes, quite silent, on opposite sides of the hearth, with folded hands and meditative countenances; but the face of the one looked like the muddy waters of the Shatemuc tossed and tumbled under a fierce wind; the other's was calm and steady as Wut-a-qut-o's brow.

"So you won't have any woman that you don't oblige to marry you!" Rufus burst out. "Ha, ha, ha! -- ho, ho, ho! --"

Winthrop's mouth gave the slightest good-humoured token of understanding him, -- it could not be called a smile. Rufus had his laugh out, and cooled down into deeper gravity than before.

"Well!" -- said he, -- "I'll go off to my fate, at the limitless wild of the West. It seems a rough sort of fate."

"Make your fate for yourself," said Winthrop.

"You will," said his brother. "And it will be what you will, and that's a fair one. And you will oblige anybody you have a mind to. And marry an heiress."

"Don't look much like it -- things at present," said Winthrop. "I don't see the way very clear."

"As for me, I don't know what ever I shall come to," Rufus added.

"Come to bed at present," said Winthrop. "That is one step."

"One step towards what?"

"Sleep in the first place; and after that, anything."

"What a strange creature you are, Governor! and how doubtlessly and dauntlessly you pursue your way," Rufus said sighing.

"Sighs never filled anybody's sails yet," said Winthrop. "They are the very airs of a calm."

"Calm!" said Rufus.

"A dead calm," said his brother laughing.

"I wish I had your calm," said Rufus. And with that the evening ended.

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Chapter XXI

O what men dare do! what men may do! what men daily do! not knowing what they do! MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

One morning, about these days, Mr. and Miss Haye were seated at the opposite ends of the breakfast-table. They had been there for some time, silently buttering rolls and sipping coffee, in a leisurely way on Mr. Haye's part, and an ungratified one on the part of his daughter. He was considering, also in a leisurely sort of way, the columns of the morning paper; she considering him and the paper, and at intervals knocking with her knife against the edge of her plate, -- a meditative and discontented knife, and an impassive and unimpressed plate. So breakfast went on till Elizabeth's cup was nearly emptied.

"Father," said she, "it is very unsociable and stupid for you to read the paper, and me to eat my breakfast alone. You might read aloud, if you must read."

Mr. Haye brought his head round from the paper long enough to swallow half a cupful of coffee.

"Where's Rose?"

"In bed, for aught I know. There is no moving her till she has a mind."

"'Seems to me, it is quite as difficult to move you," said her father.

"Ay, but then I have a mind -- which makes all the difference."

Mr. Haye went back to his paper and considered it till the rest of his cup of coffee was thoroughly cold. Elizabeth finished her breakfast, and sat, drawn back into herself, with arms folded, looking into the fireplace. Finding his coffee cold, Mr. Haye's attention came at length back upon his daughter.

"What do you want me to talk about?" he said.

"It don't signify, your talking about anything now," said Elizabeth. "Everything is cold -- mind and matter together. I don't know how you'll find the coffee, father."

Mr. Haye stirred it, with a discontented look.

"Rose is late," he remarked again.

"That's nothing new," said Elizabeth. "Late is her time."

Mr. Haye drunk his cold cupful.

"You're very fond of her, Lizzie, aren't you?"

"No," said Elizabeth. "I don't think I am."

"Not fond of her!" said Mr. Haye in a very surprised tone.

"No," said Elizabeth, -- "I don't think I am."

"I thought you were," said her father, in a voice that spoke both chagrin and displeasure.

"What made you think so?"

"You always seemed fond of her," said Mr. Haye.

"I can't have seemed so, for I never was so. There isn't enough of her to be fond of. I talk to her, and like her after a fashion, because she is the only person near me that I can talk to -- that's all."

"I am fond of her," said Mr. Haye.

"It takes more to make me fond of anybody," said his daughter. "I know you are."

"What does Rose want, to have the honour of your good opinion?"

"O don't talk in that tone!" said Elizabeth. "I had rather you would not talk at all. You have chosen an unhappy subject. It takes a good deal to make me like anybody much, father."

"What does Rose want?"

"As near as possible, everything," said Elizabeth, -- "if you will have the answer."

"What?"

"Why father, she has nothing in the world but a very pretty face."

"You grant her that," said Mr. Haye.

"Yes, I grant her that, though it is a great while since I saw it pretty. Father, I care nothing at all for any face which has nothing beneath the outside. It's a barren prospect to me, however fair the outside may be -- I don't care to let my eye dwell on it."

"How do you like the prospect of your own, in the glass?"

"I should be very sorry if I didn't think it had infinitely more in it than the face we have been speaking of. It is not so beautifully tinted, nor so regularly cut; but I like it better."

"I am afraid few people will agree with you," said her father dryly.

"There's one thing," said Elizabeth, -- "I sha'n't know it if they don't. But then I see my face at a disadvantage, looking stupidly at itself in the glass -- I hope it does better to other people."

"I didn't know you thought quite so much of yourself," said Mr. Haye.

"I haven't told you the half," said Elizabeth, looking at him. "I am afraid I think more of myself than anybody else does, or ever will."

"If you do it so well for yourself, I'm afraid other people won't save you the trouble," said her father.

"I'm afraid you will not, by the tone in which you speak, father."

"What has set you against Rose?"

"Nothing in the world! I am not set against her. Nothing in the world but her own emptiness and impossibility of being anything like a companion to me."

"Elizabeth! --"

"Father! -- What's the matter?"

"How dare you talk in that manner?"

"Why father," said Elizabeth, her tone somewhat quieting as his was roused, -- "I never saw the thing yet I didn't dare say, if I thought it. Why shouldn't I?"

"Because it is not true -- a word of it."

"I'm sure I wish it wasn't true," said Elizabeth. "What I said was true. It's a sorrowful truth to me, too, for I haven't a soul to talk to that can understand me -- not even you, father, it seems."

"I wish I didn't understand you," said Mr. Haye.

"It's nothing very dreadful to understand," said Elizabeth, -- "what I have been saying now. I wonder how you can think so much of it. I know you love Rose better than I do."

"I love her so well --" said Mr. Haye, and stopped.

"So well that what?"

"That I can hardly talk to you with temper."

"Then don't let us talk about it at all," said Elizabeth, whose own heightened colour shewed that her temper was moving.

"Unhappily it is necessary," said Mr. Haye dryly.

"Why in the world is it necessary? You can't alter the matter, father, by talking; -- it must stand so."

"Stand how?"

"Why, as it does stand -- Rose and I as near as possible nothing to each other."

"Things can hardly stand so," said Mr. Haye. "You must be either less or more."

Elizabeth sat silent and looked at him. He looked at nothing but what was on his plate.

"How would you like to have Rose take your place?"

"My place?" said Elizabeth.

"Yes," said Mr. Haye laconically.

"No place that I fill, could be filled by Rose," said Elizabeth, with the slightest perceptible lifting of her head and raising of her brow.

"We will try that," said Mr. Haye bitterly; "for I will put her over your head, and we will see."

"Put her where?" said Elizabeth.

"Over this house -- over my establishment -- at this table -- in your place as the head of this family."

"You will take her for your daughter, and discard me?" said Elizabeth.

"No -- I will not, --" said Mr. Haye, cutting a piece of beefsteak in a way that shewed him indifferent to its fate. "I will not! -- I will make her my wife! --"

Elizabeth had risen from the table and now she stood on the rug before the fire, with her arms behind her, looking down at the breakfast-table and her father. Literally, looking down upon them. Her cheeks were very pale, but fires that were not heaven-lit were burning somewhere within her, shining out at her eye and now and then colouring her face with a sudden flare. There was a pause. Mr. Haye tried what he could do with his beefsteak; and his daughter's countenance shewed the cloud and the flame of the volcano by turns. For awhile the father and daughter held off from each other. But Mr. Haye's breakfast gave symptoms of coming to an end.

"Father," said Elizabeth, bringing her hands in front of her and clasping them, -- "say you did not mean that!"

"Ha! --" said Mr. Haye without looking at her, and brushing the crumbs from his pantaloons.

Elizabeth waited.

"What did you mean?"

"I spoke plain enough," said he.

"Do you mean to say that you meant that?" said Elizabeth, the volcanic fires leaping up bright.

"Meant it?" said Mr. Haye, looking at her. "Yes, I meant it."

"Father, you did not! --"

Mr. Haye looked again at her hands and her face, and answered coolly.

"Ask Rose whether I meant it, --"

And left the room.

Elizabeth neither saw nor heard, for some minutes; they might have been many or few. Then she became aware that the servant was asking her if he should leave the breakfast-table still for Miss Cadwallader; and her answer, "No -- take it away!" -- was given with startling decision. The man had known his young mistress before to speak with lips that were supreme in their expression. He only obeyed, without even wondering. Elizabeth in a whirl of feeling that like the smoke of the volcano hid everything but itself, went and stood in the window; present to nothing but herself; seeing neither the street without nor the house within. Wrapped in that smoke, she did not know when the servant went out, nor whether anybody else came in. She stood there pale, with lips set, her hands folded against her waist, and pressing there with a force the muscles never relaxed. How long she did not know. Something aroused her, and she discerned, through the smoke, another figure in the room and coming towards her. Elizabeth stepped out from the window, without altering anything but her place, and stood opposite to Winthrop Landholm. If it had been Queen Elizabeth of old and one of her courtiers, it would have been all one; the young man's respectful greeting could not have been met with more superb regality of head and brow.

"I have a letter for Mr. Haye," said Winthrop, "which my brother left in my charge. That brought me here this morning, and I ventured to make business an excuse for pleasure."

"It may lie on the table till he comes," said Elizabeth with the slightest bend of her stately little head. She might have meant the letter or the pleasure or the business, or all three.

"You are well, Miss Haye?" said Winthrop doubtfully.

"No -- I am well enough," said Elizabeth. A revulsion of feeling had very nearly brought down her head in a flood of tears; but she kept that back carefully and perfectly; and the next instant she started with another change, for Rose came in. She gave Winthrop a very smiling and bright salutation; which he acknowledged silently, gravely, and even distantly.

"Aren't you well, Mr. Landholm?" was Rose's next instant question, most sweetly given.

"Very well," he said with another bow.

"What have you been talking about, to get so melancholy? Lizzie --"

But Rose caught sight of the gathered blackness of that face, and stopped short. Elizabeth bestowed one glance upon her; and as she then turned to the other person of the party the revulsion came over her again, so strong that it was overcoming. For a minute her hands went to her face, and it was with extreme difficulty that the rising heart was kept down. Will had the mastery, however, and her face looked up again more dark than ever.

"We have talked of nothing at all," she said. "Mr. Landholm only came to bring a letter."

Mr. Landholm could not stay after that, for anything. He bowed himself out; and left Elizabeth standing in the middle of the floor, looking as if the crust of the earth had given way under her and 'chaos was come again.' She stood there as she had stood in the window, still and cold; and Rose afar off by the chimney corner stood watching her, as one would a wild beast or a venomous creature in the room, not a little fear mingled with a shadow of something else in her face.

Elizabeth's first movement was to walk a few steps up and down, swinging one clenched hand, but half the breadth of the room was all she went. She sunk down there beside a chair and hid her face, exclaiming or rather groaning out, one after the other, -- "Oh! -- oh!" -- in such tones as are dragged from very far down in the heart; careless of Rose's hearing her.

"What is the matter, Lizzie?" -- her companion ventured timidly. But Elizabeth gave no answer; and neither of them stirred for many minutes, an occasional uneasy flutter of Rose's being the exception. The question at last was asked over again, and responded to.

"That my father has disgraced himself, and that you are the cause!"

"There's no disgrace," said Rose.

"Don't say he has not!" said Elizabeth, looking up with an eye that glared upon her adversary. "And before he had done it, I wish you had never been born, -- or I."

"It's no harm, --" said Rose confusedly.

"Harm! -- harm, --" repeated Elizabeth; then putting her face down again; "Oh! -- what's the use of living, in such a world!"

"I don't see what harm it does to you," said Rose, muttering her words.

"Harm?" repeated Elizabeth. "If it was right to wish it, -- which I believe it isn't, -- I could wish that I was dead. It almost seems to me I wish I were!"

"You're not sure about it," said Rose.

"No, I am not," said Elizabeth looking up at her again with eyes of fire and a face from which pain and passion had driven all but livid colour, -- but looking at her steadily, -- "because there is something after death; and I am not sure that I am ready for it. I dare not say I wish I was dead, Rose Cadwallader, or you would drive me to it!"

"I'm sure, I've done nothing," -- said Rose whimpering.

"Done nothing!" said Elizabeth with a concentrated power of expression. "Oh I wish you had done anything, before my father had lowered himself in my eyes and you had been the cause! --"

"I'm not the cause of anything," said Rose.

Elizabeth did not answer; she was crouching by the side of the chair in an uneasy position that said how far from ease the spirit was.

"And he hasn't lowered himself," Rose went on pouting.

"It is done!" -- said Elizabeth, getting up from the floor and standing, not unlike a lightning-struck tree. -- "I wonder what will become of me! --"

"What are you going to do?"

"I would find a way out of this house, if I knew how."

"That's easy enough," said Rose with a slight sneer. "There are plenty of ways."

"Easy enough, --if one could find the right one."

"Why you've had me in the house a great while, already," said Rose.

"I have had --" said Elizabeth. -- "I wonder if I shall ever have anything again!"

"Why what have you lost?"

"Everything -- except myself."

"You have a great respect for Mr. Haye," said Rose.

"I had."

Rose at this point thought fit to burst into a great fit of tears. Elizabeth stood by the table, taking up and putting down one book after another, as if the touch of them gave her fingers pain; and looking as if, as she said, she had lost everything. Then stood with folded arms eyeing something that was not before her; and then slowly walked out of the room.

"Lizzie --" said Rose.

"What?" said Elizabeth stopping at the door.

"What's the use of taking things so?"

"The use of necessity."

"But we can be just as we were before."

Elizabeth went on and gained her own room; and there she and pain had a fight that lasted the rest of the day.

The fight was not over, and weary traces of it were upon her face, when late in the afternoon she went out to try the change of a walk. The walk made no change whatever. As she was coming up the Parade, she was met by Winthrop going down. If he had seen only the gravity and reserve of the morning, it is probable he would not have stopped to speak to her; but though those were in her face still, there was beside a weary set of the brow and sorrowful line of the lips, very unwonted there, and the cheeks were pale; and instead of passing with a mere bow he came up and offered his hand. Elizabeth took it, but without the least brightening of face.

"Are you out for a walk?" said he.

"No -- I am for home -- I have had a walk."

"It is a very fine afternoon," said he, turning and beginning to walk along slowly with her.

"Is it?"

"Haven't you found out that it is?"

"No."

"Where have you been, not to know it?"

"Hum --" said Elizabeth, -- "if you mean where my mind has been, that is one question; as for my bodily self, I have been on the Castle Green."

"You have lost your walk," said he. "Don't you feel inclined to turn about with me and try to pick up what you came out for?"

"Better there than at home," thought Elizabeth, and she turned about accordingly.

"People come out for a variety of things," she remarked however.

"That is true," said Winthrop smiling. "I am afraid I was hasty in presuming I could help you to find your object. I was thinking only of mine."

"I don't know but you could, as well as anybody," said Elizabeth. "If you could give me your mother's secret for not minding disagreeable things."

"I am afraid I cannot say she does not mind them," he answered.

"What then? -- I thought you said so."

"I do not remember what I said. I might have said that she does not struggle with them -- those at least which cannot be removed by struggling."

"Not struggle with them?" said Elizabeth. "Sit down quietly with them!"

"Yes," he said gravely. "Not at first, but at last."

"I don't believe in it," said Elizabeth. "That is, I don't believe in it as a general thing. It may be possible for her. I am sure it never could be for me."

Winthrop was silent, and they walked so for the space of half a block.

"Would she say that it is possible for everybody?" inquired Elizabeth then.

"I believe she would say that it is not temperament, nor circumstance, nor stoical philosophy."

"What then?"

"A drop of some pacifying oil out of a heaven-wrought chalice."

"I don't think figures are the easiest mode of getting at things, Mr. Landholm. You don't make this clear."

He smiled a little, as he pushed open the little wicket gate of the Green, and without saying anything more they sauntered in, along the broad gravel walk sweeping round the enclosure; slowly, till they had passed the fortifications and stood looking upon the bay over towards Blue Point. The sun was almost on the low ruddied horizon; a stirring north breeze came down from the up country, roughening the bay, and the sunbeams leapt across from the opposite western shore giving a touch of light to every wave. The air was very fine; the sky without a cloud, except some waiting flecks of vapour around the sun. The two friends stood still some little time, to look or to think; looking especially at the fair glowing western heaven, and the tossing water between, every roll of which was with a dance and a sparkle.

"Does this make anything clear?" asked Winthrop, when some time had gone by without speech or movement from either of them.

He spoke lightly enough; but the answer was given in a tone that bespoke its truth.

"Oh no! --"

And Elizabeth's face was turned away so that he could see nothing but her bonnet, beside the tremulous swell of the throat; that he did see.

"It has very often such an effect for me," -- he went on in the same tone. "And I often come here for the very purpose of trying it; when my head gets thick over law-papers."

"That may do for some things," said Elizabeth. "It won't for others."

"This would work well along with my mother's recipe," he said.

"What is that?" said Elizabeth harshly. "You didn't tell me."

"I am hardly fit to tell you," he answered, "for I do not thoroughly know it myself. But I know she would send you to the Bible, --and tell you of a hand that she trusts to do everything for her, and that she knows will do all things well, and kindly."

"But does that hinder disagreeables from being disagreeables?" said Elizabeth with some impatience of tone. "Does that hinder aches from being pain?"

"Hardly. But I believe it stops or soothes the aching. I believe it, because I have seen it."

Elizabeth stood still, her bosom swelling, and that fluttering of her throat growing more fluttering. It got beyond her command. The mixed passions and vexations, and with them a certain softer and more undefined regret, reached a point where she had no control over them. The tears would come, and once arrived at that, they took their own way; with such a rush of passionate indulgence, that a thought of the time and the place and the witness, made nothing, or came in only to swell the rush. The flood poured over the barrier with such joy at being set free, that it carried all before it. Elizabeth was just conscious of being placed on a seat, near to which it happened that she was standing; and she knew nothing more. She did not even know how completely she was left to herself. Not till the fever of passion was brought a little down, and recollection and shame began to take their turn, and she checked her tears and stole a secret glance around to see what part of the gravel walk supported a certain pair of feet, for higher than the ground she dared not look. Her surprise was a good deal to find that her glance must take quite a wide range to meet with them; and then venturing a single upward look, she saw that her companion standing at a little distance was not watching her, nor apparently had been; his attitude bespoke him quietly fixed upon something else and awaiting her leisure. Elizabeth brought her eyes home again.

"What a strange young man!" was her quick thought; -- "to have been brought up a farmer's boy, and to know enough and to dare enough to put me on this seat, and then to have the wit to go off and stand there in that manner!"

But this tribute of respect to Winthrop was instantly followed by an endeavour to do herself honour, in the way of gaining self-possession and her ordinary looks as speedily as possible. She commanded herself well after once she got the reins in hand; yet however it was with a grave consciousness of swollen eyes and flushed cheeks that she presently rose from her place and went forward to the side of the quiet figure that stood there with folded arms watching the rolling waters of the bay. Elizabeth stood at his elbow a minute in hesitation.

"I am ready now, Mr. Landholm. I am sorry I have kept you by my ridiculousness."

"I have not been kept beyond my pleasure," he said.

"I lost command of myself," Elizabeth went on. "That happens to me once in a while."

"You will feel better for it," he said, as they turned and began to walk homewards.

"He takes things coolly!" thought Elizabeth.

"Do you men ever lose command of yourselves?"

"Sometimes -- I am afraid," he said with a smile.

"I suppose your greater power of nerve and of guarding appearances, is one secret of the triumphant sort of pride you wear upon occasion. There --I see it in your face now."

"I hope not," said Winthrop laughing. "The best instance of self-control that I ever saw, was most unaccompanied with any arrogance of merit or power."

"He means his mother again," thought Elizabeth.

"Was that instance in a man or a woman, Mr. Landholm?"

"It was in a woman -- unfortunately for your ground."

"Not at all," said Elizabeth. "Exceptions prove nothing."

Winthrop said nothing, for his thoughts were busy with that image of sweet self-guidance which he had never known to be unsteady or fail; and which, he knew, referred all its strength and all its stableness to the keeping of another hand. Most feminine, most humble, and most sure.

"Mr. Winthrop, your mother puzzles me," said Elizabeth. "I wish I knew some of her secrets."

"I wish I did," he answered with half a sigh.

"Why, don't you!"

"No."

"I thought you did."

"No; for she says they can only be arrived at through a certain initiation which I have not had -- after certain preliminary steps, which I have not yet taken."

Elizabeth looked at him, both surprised and curious.

"What are they?"

Winthrop's face was graver than usual, as he said,

"I wish my mother were here to answer you."

"Why, cannot you?"

"No."

"Don't you know the preliminary steps, Mr. Landholm?"

He looked very grave again.

"Not clearly enough to tell you. In general, I know she would say there is a narrow way to be passed through before the treasures of truth, or its fair prospects, can be arrived at; but I have never gone that way myself and I cannot point out the way-marks."

"Are you referring to the narrow gate spoken of in the Bible?"

"To the same."

"Then you are getting upon what I do not understand," said Elizabeth.

They had mounted the steps of No. 11, and were waiting for the door to be opened. They waited silently till it was done, and then parted with only a 'good night.' Elizabeth did not ask him in, and it hardly occurred to Winthrop to wonder that she did not.

Mr. Landholm read no classics that night. Neither law. Neither, which may seem more strange, did he consult his Book of books at all. He busied himself, not exactly with the study of the human mind, but of two human minds, -- which, though at first sight it may seem an enlargement of the subject, is in fact rather a contracted view of the same.

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Chapter XXII

Sir Toby. Do not our lives consist of the four elements? Sir And. 'Faith, so they say, but, I think, it rather consists of eating and drinking. TWELFTH NIGHT.

"Dear, Mr. Winthrop, -- what makes all this smoke here?" exclaimed Mrs. Nettley one morning, as she opened the door of his attic.

"I suppose, the wind, Mrs. Nettley," said Winthrop looking up from the book he was studying.

"O dear! -- how do you manage?"

"I can't manage the smoke, Mrs. Nettley -- Its resources exceed mine."

"It's that chimney!" exclaimed the good lady, standing and eyeing it in a sort of desperate concern, as if she would willingly have gone up the flue herself, so that only she could thereby have secured the smoke's doing the same. "I always knew that chimney was bad -- I had it once a while myself -- I'm sorry you've got it now. What do you do, Mr. Winthrop?"

"The smoke and I take turns in going out, Mrs. Nettley."

"Eh? -- Does it often come in so? Can't you help it?"

"It generally takes advice with the wind, not with me, ma'am."

"But the chimney might have better advice. I'll get George to fetch a doctor -- I had forgotten it was so bad, I had quite forgotten it, and you never say a word -- Mr. Landholm, you never come to see us."

"I have so much else to see," he said, glancing at his book.

"Yes, and that reminds me -- Have you heard the news?"

"I have heard none to-day."

"Then you heard it yesterday, -- of course you did; but I hear so little, when anything comes to me that's new I always think it must be new to everybody else. But of course you must know it, as it is about friends of yours; I dare say you knew it long ago; -- though such things are kept close sometimes, even from friends; and I somehow was surprised to hear this, though I had no right to be, for I suppose I had no reason for my fancy. I think a good many things I have no reason for, George thinks. Maybe I do. I cant help it."

"But what is the thing in this case, Mrs. Nettley?" said Winthrop smiling.

"Why George told me -- don't you know? I was a little disappointed, Mr. Winthrop."

"Why?"

"Why, I had a fancy things were going another way."

"I don't know what you are talking about."

"That's because I talk so ill -- It's this piece of news George brought home yesterday -- he was dining out, for a wonder, with this gentleman who is going to sit to him; I forget his name, -- Mr. -- I don't know what it is! -- but I am foolish to talk about it. Won't you come down and take a cup of tea with us to-night, Mr. Landholm? that's what I came up to ask, and not to stand interrupting you. But you've quite forgotten us lately."

"Thank you, Mrs. Nettley, I'll come with great pleasure -- on condition that you tell me your news."

"The news? O it's no news to you -- it's only this about Miss Haye."

"What about Miss Haye?"

"They say that she is going to get married, to a Mr. Cadwallader, George said. Her cousin I suppose; there is a cousinship of that name, isn't there, Mr. Landholm?"

Mr. Landholm bowed.

"And had you heard of it before?"

"No, I had not."

"And is it a good match? She is a fine girl, isn't she?"

"I know really nothing of the matter, Mrs. Nettley -- I have never seen the gentleman."

"Really! Haven't you? -- then it was news," said the lady. "I thought you were accustomed to see them so often -- I didn't think I was telling you anything. George and I -- you must forgive us, Mr. Winthrop, people will have such thoughts; they will come in, and you cannot help it -- I don't know what's to keep 'em out, unless one could put bars and gates upon one's minds, and you can't well do that; -- but George and I used to have suspicions of you, Mr. Landholm. Well, I have interrupted you long enough. Dear! what windows! I'm ashamed. I'll send the girl up, the first chance you are out of the house. I told her to come up too; but she is heedless. I haven't been to see 'em myself in I don't know how many days; but you're always so terribly busy -- and now I've staid twice too long!" --

And away she hurried, softly closing the door after her.

Mr. Landholm's quiet study was remarkably quiet for a good while after she went out. No leaf of his book rustled over; not a foot of his chair grated on the floor, -- for though the floor did boast a bit of carpet, it lay not where he sat, by the window; and the coals and firebrands fell noiselessly down into the ashes and nobody was reminded that the fire would burn itself out in time if it was let alone. The morning light grew stronger, and the sunbeams that never got there till between nine and ten o'clock, walked into the room; and they found Winthrop Landholm with his elbow on the table and his head in his hand, where they often were; but with his eyes where they not often were -- on the floor. The sunbeams said very softly that it was time to be at the office, but they said it very softly, and Winthrop did not hear them.

He heard however presently a footstep on the stair, in the next story at first, and then mounting the uppermost flight that led to the attic. A heavy brisk energetic footstep, -- not Mrs. Nettley's soft and slow tread, nor the more deliberate one of her brother. Winthrop listened a moment, and then as the last impatient creak of the boot stopped at his threshold he knew who would open the door. It was Rufus.

"Here you are. Why I expected to find you at the office!" was the first cheery exclamation, after the brothers had clasped hands.

"What did you come here to find, then?" said Winthrop.

"Room for my carpet-bag, in the first place; and a pair of slippers, and comfort. It's stinging weather, Governor!"

"I know it. I came down the river the night before last."

"I shouldn't think you knew it, for you've let your fire go down confoundedly. Why Winthrop! there's hardly a spark here! What have you been thinking about?"

"I was kindling the fire, mentally," said Winthrop.

"Mentally! -- where's your kindling? -- I can tell you! -- if you had been out in this air you'd want some breath of material flame, before you could set any other agoing. And I am afraid this isn't enough -- or won't be, -- I want some fuel for another sort of internal combustion -- some of my Scotchman's haggis."

And Rufus stopped to laugh, with a very funny face, in the midst of his piling chips and brands together.

"Haggis?" said Winthrop.

"Yes. -- There was a good fellow of a Scotchman in the stage with me last night -- he had the seat just behind me -- and he and a brother Scotchman were discoursing valiantly of old world things; warming themselves up with the recollection. -- Winthrop, have you got a bit of paper here? -- And I heard the word 'haggis' over and over again, --'haggis' and 'parritch.' At last I turned round gravely -- 'Pray sir,' said I, 'what is a haggis?' 'Weel, sir,' said he good-humouredly, -- 'I don't just know the ingredients -- it's made of meal, -- and onions, I believe, --and other combustibles!!' -- Winthrop, have you got any breakfast in the house?"

"Not much in the combustible line, I am afraid," said Winthrop, putting up his books and going to the closet.

"Well if you can enact Mother Hubbard and 'give a poor dog a bone,' I shall be thankful, -- for anything."

"I am afraid hunger has perverted your memory," said Winthrop.

"How?"

"If the cupboard should play its part now, the dog would go without any."

"O you'll do better for me than that, I hope," said Rufus; "for I couldn't go on enacting the dog's part long; he took to laughing, if I remember, and I should be beyond that directly."

"Does that ever happen?" said Winthrop, as he brought out of the cupboard his bits of stores; a plate with the end of a loaf of bread, a little pitcher of milk, and another plate with some remains of cold beefsteak. For all reply, Rufus seized upon a piece of bread, to begin with, and thrusting a fork into the beefsteak, he held it in front of the just- burning firebrands. Winthrop stood looking on, while Rufus, the beefsteak, and the smoke, seemed mutually intent upon each other. It was a question of time, and patience; not to speak of fortitude.

"Winthrop," said Rufus changing hands with his fork, -- "have you any coffee?"

"No sir."

"Tea?"

"No."

"Out of both?"

"For some time."

"Do you live without it?"

"I live without it."

"Without either of them?"

"Without either of them."

"Then how in the world do you live?" said Rufus turning his beefsteak in a very gingerly manner and not daring to take his eyes from it.

"Without combustibles -- as I told you."

"I should think so!" exclaimed his brother. "You are the coolest, toughest, most stubborn and unimpressible piece of sensibility, that ever lived in a garret and deserved to live -- somewhere else."

"Doubtful strain of commendation," said Winthrop. "What has brought you to Mannahatta?"

"But Winthrop, this is a new fancy of yours?"

"No, not very."

"How long since?"

"Since what?"

"Since you gave up all the good things of this life?"

"A man can only give up what he has," said Winthrop. "Those I delivered into your hands some ten minutes ago."

"But tea and coffee -- You used to drink them?"

"Yes."

"Why don't you?"

"For a variety of reasons, satisfactory to my own mind."

"And have you abjured butter too?"

"I am sorry, Will," said Winthrop smiling a little, -- "I will try to have some butter for you to-morrow."

"Don't you eat it in ordinary?"

"Always, when I can get it. What has brought you to Mannahatta?"

"What do you think?"

"Some rash scheme or resolution."

"Why?"

"From my judgment of your character, which might be stated as the converse of that just now so happily applied to me."

"And do natures the opposite of that never act otherwise than rashly?"

"I hope so; for as the coolest are sometimes excited, so the hot may be sometimes cool."

"And don't I look cool?"

"You did when you came in," said Winthrop.

"I should think living on bread and milk might help that, in ordinary," said Rufus. "Just in my present condition it has rather a different effect. Well Governor, I've come to Mannahatta --"

"I see that," said Winthrop.

"I'll thank you not to interrupt me. I've come to Mannahatta -- on a piece of business."

Winthrop waited, and Rufus after another cut of the bread and meat, went on.

"Governor, I'm going to quit engineering and take to another mode of making money."

"Have you done with your last piece of work at the West?"

"No -- I'm going back there to finish it. O, I'm going back there -- I've only come here now to sign some papers and make some arrangements; I shall come finally, I suppose, about May, or April. I've been corresponding with Haye lately."

"About what?"

"About this! What should I correspond with him about? By the way, what an infernal piece of folly this marriage is!"

"Not mixed up with your business, is it?"

"No, of course; how should it? but I am tremendously surprised. Aren't you?"

"People of my temperament never are, you know."

"People of your temperament -- have a corner for their thoughts," said Rufus. "Well, there's one chance gone for you, Governor."

"Which it does not appear that I ever had."

"No indeed, that's very true. Well, about my business. -- Haye has advocated my leaving the country and coming here. And he knows what he is about, Winthrop; he is a capital man of business. He says he can put me in a way of doing well for myself in a very short time here, and he recommended my coming."

"What's his object?" said Winthrop.

"What's his object?"

"Yes."

"How should I know! He wants to serve me, I suppose; and I believe he has kindliness enough for me, to be not unwilling to get me in the same place of business with himself."

"What will he do for you?"

"This, to begin with. He has a quantity of cotton lying in his stores, which he offers to make over to me, upon a certain valuation. And I shall ship it to Liverpool, as he recommends."

"Have you got your money from the North Lyttleton company?"

"No, nor from anybody else; -- not yet; but it's coming."

"Is this purchase of cotton to be executed immediately?"

"Immediately. That's what I have come down for."

"How are you to pay Mr. Haye?"

"By bills upon the consignees."

"Does the purchase swallow up all your means?"

"None of them," said Rufus impatiently. "I tell you, it is to be consummated by drawing bills in Haye's favour upon the consignees -- Fleet, Norton & Co."

"Suppose the consignment don't pay?"

"It will pay, of course! Don't you suppose Haye knows what he is about?"

"Yes; but that don't satisfy me, unless I know it too."

"I do," said Rufus. "He takes an interest in me for my father's sake; and I think I may say without vanity, for my own; and he is willing to do me a kindness, which he can do without hurting himself. That is all; and very simple."

"Too simple," said Winthrop.

"What do you mean?"

"What are you going to do when you come here?"

"Look after my in-comings; and I shall probably go into Haye's office and rub up my arithmetic in the earlier branches. What are you going to do?"

"I am going to the office, -- Mr. De Wort's."

"What to do there, Governor?"

"Read, write, and record, law and lawpapers."

"Always at the same thing!"

"Always."

"Seems a slow way of getting ahead."

"It's sure," said Winthrop.

"You are sure, I believe, of whatever you undertake. By the way -- have you undertaken the other adventure yet?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"The adventure we were talking about. -- The heiress."

"I can adventure nothing upon speculation," said Winthrop.

"Then you have not had a chance to carry out your favourite idea of obligation. Do you know, I never should have suspected you of having such an idea."

"Shews how much we go upon speculation even with our nearest friends," said Winthrop.

"And how speculation fails there as elsewhere. What a fool Haye has made of himself!"

"In what?"

"Why, in this match."

"What has he done?"

"Done! why he has done it. Enough, I should think. I wish his folly stood alone."

"How do you know he has done it?"

"He told me so himself. I met him as I came along just now; and he told me he was to be married to-morrow and would attend to my business next day."

"Told you who would?"

"He. Himself. Haye."

"Told you he was to be married?"

"Yes. Who else?"

"To whom?"

"Why! -- to his niece -- ward -- what is she? Rose Cadwallader."

"Mr. Haye and Miss Cadwallader!" said Winthrop.

"To be sure. What are you thinking of? What have we been talking about?"

"You know best," said Winthrop. "My informant had brought another person upon the stage."

"Who?"

"A Mr. Cadwallader."

"There's no such thing as a Mr. Cadwallader. It's Haye himself; and it only shews how all a man's wisdom may be located in one quarter of his brain and leave the other empty."

"To-morrow?" said Winthrop.

"Yes; and you and I are invited to pay our respects at eleven. Haven't you had an invitation?"

"I don't know -- I have been out of town -- and for the present I must pay my respects in another direction. I must leave you, Will."

"Look here. What's the matter with you, Winthrop?"

"Nothing at all," said Winthrop facing round upon his brother.

"Well I believe there isn't," said Rufus, taking a prolonged look at him, -- "but somehow I was thinking -- You're a fine- looking fellow, Winthrop!"

"You'll find wood in the further end of the closet," said Winthrop smiling. "I am afraid Mother Hubbard's shelves are in classical order --that is, with nothing on them."

"I sha'n't want anything more till dinner," said Rufus. "Where do you dine?"

"At the chop-house to-day."

"I'll meet you there. Won't you be home till night?"

"I never am."

"Well --till dinner," said Rufus waving his hand. And his brother left him.

Turning away from the table and his emptied dishes and fragmentary beef-bone, Rufus sat before the little fireplace, gazing into it at the red coals, and taking casual and then wistful note of various things about his brother's apartment that told of the man that lived there.

"Spare!" -- said Rufus to himself, as his eye marked the scanty carpet, the unpainted few wooden chairs, the curtainless bed, the rough deal shelves of the closet which shewed at the open door, and the very economical chimney place, which now, the wind having gone down, did no longer smoke; -- "Spare! -- but he'll have a better place to live in, one of these days, and will furnish it." -- And visions of mahogany and of mirrors glanced across Rufus's imagination, how unlike the images around him and before his bodily eye. -- "Spare! -- poor fellow! -- he's working hard just now; but pay-time will come. And orderly, --just like him; his books piled in order on the window-sill -- his papers held down by one on the table, the clean floor, -- yes," -- and rising Rufus even went and looked into the closet. There was the little stack of wood and parcel of kindling, likewise in order; there stood Winthrop's broom in a corner; and there hung Winthrop's few clothes that were not folded away in his trunk. Mother Hubbard's department was in the same spare and thoroughly kept style; and Rufus came back thoughtfully to his seat before the fire.

"Like him, every bit of it, from the books to the broom. Like him; -- his own mind is just as free from dust or confusion; rather more richly furnished. What a mind it is! and what wealth he'll make out of it, for pocket and for name both. And I --"

Here Rufus's lucubrations left his brother and went off upon a sea of calculations, landing at Fleet, Norton & Co. and then coming back to Mannahatta and Mr. Haye's counting-room. He had plenty of time for them, as no business obviously could be done till the day after to-morrow.

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Chapter XXIII

Touch. All your writers do consent that ipso is he; now you are not ipse, for I am he. Well. Which he, sir? AS YOU LIKE IT.

In due course of time the morrow brought round eleven o'clock; and the two brothers took their way, whither all the world severally were taking theirs, to Mr. Haye's house. The wedding was over and the guests were pouring in.

For some reason or other the walk was taken in grave silence, by both parties, till they were mounting the steps to the hall door.

"How do you suppose Elizabeth will like this?" Rufus whispered.

Winthrop did not say, nor indeed answer at all; and his brother's attention was caught the next minute by Mr. Herder whom they encountered in the hall.

"How do you do?" said the naturalist grasping both his young friends' hands, -- "when did you come? and how is all wiz you? I hope you are not going to be married!"

"Why, Mr. Herder?" said Rufus laughing.

"It is very perplexing, and does not satisfy nobody," said the naturalist. "So quick as a man thinks of somebody else a leetle too hard, he forgets himself altogezer; and then, he does not be sure what he is doing. Now -- dis man --"

"Isn't he sure what he has done?" said Rufus much amused.

"No, he does not know," said Mr. Herder.

"What does his daughter think of it?"

"She looks black at it. I do not know what she is thinking. I do not want to know."

"Ha! What does she say?"

"She says nozing at all; she looks black," said the naturalist shrugging his shoulders. "Don't you go to get married. You will not satisfy nobody."

"Except myself," said Rufus.

"Maybe. I do not know," said the naturalist. "A man has not no right to satisfy himself wizout he can satisfy ozer people too. I am sorry for poor Miss Elisabet'."

"I wonder how many matches would be made upon that rule!" said Rufus, as they parted and Mr. Herder joined the company within.

"They would be all matches made by other people," said Winthrop.

"And on the principle that 'to-morrow never comes' -- the world would come to an end."

So they entered the drawing-rooms.

There were many people there, and certainly for the present there were few unsatisfied faces; for the bride was lovely enough and the bridegroom of consequence enough, to make compliments to them a matter of pleasure to the giver. The room was blooming with beauty and brightness. But Miss Haye was not there; and as soon as they could withdraw from the principal group the two brothers made their way to an inner room, where she stood, holding as it were a court of her own; and an unpropitious monarch she would have looked to her courtiers had they been real ones. Her face was as lowering as Mr. Herder had described it; settled in pain and pride; though now and then a quick change would pass over it, very like the play of lightning on a distant cloud; -- fitful, sharp, and traceless. Just as Rufus and Winthrop had made their bow, and before they had time to speak, another bow claimed Elizabeth's return, and the tongue that went therewith was beforehand with theirs. The speaker was a well dressed and easy mannered man of the world; but with a very javelin of an eye, as ready for a throw as a knight's lance of old, and as careless what it met in its passage through humanity.

"You have wandered out of your sphere, Miss Elizabeth."

"What do you mean, sir?" -- was given with sufficient keenness.

"The bright constellation of beauty and happiness is in the other room. Stars set off one another."

"I shine best alone," said Elizabeth.

"You disdain the effect of commingled and reflected light?"

"Yes I do, heartily, in this case. I wish for no glory that does not belong to me."

"But does not the glory of your father and mother belong to you?" said the gentleman. He spoke with the most smooth deference of manner, that all but covered his intent; but the flush and fire started into Elizabeth's face reminding one of the volcano again. Her eye watered with pain too, and she hesitated; she was evidently not ready with an answer. Perhaps for that reason it was given with added haughtiness.

"You need not trouble yourself to reckon what does or what does not belong to me. I know my belongings, and will take care of them."

"You are satisfied with them," said the gentleman, "and willing they should stand alone?"

"I am willing they should take their chance, sir."

"I know no one who can better say that," remarked Rufus.

"With better confidence, or better grounds do you mean?"

"I hope you do not need to be told!" said Rufus, his eye sparkling half with fun and half with admiration at the face and manner with which Elizabeth turned upon him.

"Which leaves the lady at liberty to suppose what she pleases," said the first speaker.

"It leaves her at liberty to suppose nothing of the kind!" Rufus rejoined, with a little dilating of the nostril.

"Nothing can constrain my liberty in that respect," said the lady in question.

"Except your knowledge of human nature?" said Rufus.

"I have no hindrance in that," said Elizabeth.

"To supposing what you please?"

"Or what pleases you, perhaps," said the first speaker.

"Anything but that, Mr. Archibald!"

"Then it was no surprise to you that your father should set a young and lovely Mrs. Haye at the head of his establishment, even though he found her in the person of your playmate?"

Elizabeth hesitated; she drew in her under lip, and her eye darkened and lightened; but she hesitated. Then she spoke, looking down.

"I was surprised."

"Not a pleasant surprise?" said Mr. Archibald.

The girl's face literally flashed at him; from her two eyes the fire flew, as if the one would confound the other.

"How dare you ask me the question, sir!"

"Pardon me -- I had no idea there was any harm in it," said the person at whom the fire flew.

"Your ideas want correcting, sir, sadly! -- and your tongue."

"I will never offend again!" said Mr. Archibald bowing, and smiling a little.

"You never shall, with my good leave."

Mr. Archibald bowed again.

"Good morning! You will forgive me; and when I think time enough has elapsed, and I may with safety, I will come again."

"To visit my father, sir! --"

Not Queen Elizabeth, with ruff and farthingale, could have said it with more consciousness of her own dignity, or more superb dismission of that of another. But probably Queen Elizabeth would not have cast upon her courtiers the look, half asking for sympathy and half for approval, with which Elizabeth Haye turned to her companions. Her eye fell first upon Winthrop. But his did not meet her, and the expression of his face was very grave. Elizabeth's look went from it to Rufus. His was beaming.

"Capital!" he said. "That was admirable!"

"No," said Elizabeth after a slight hesitation, -- "it was not."

"I thought it was," said Rufus, -- "admirably done. Why was it not, Miss Haye? -- if I am not as impertinent as another? -- I thought he richly deserved his punishment."

"Yes," said Elizabeth in a dissatisfied kind of way, -- "enough of that, -- but I deserved better of myself than to give it to him."

"You are too hard upon yourself."

"Circumstances are sometimes."

"Will it do to say that?" said Winthrop looking up.

"Why not?"

"Will it do to confess oneself -- one's freedom of mind --under the power of circumstance, and so not one's own?"

"I must confess it," said Elizabeth, "for it's true, of me. I suppose, not of every one."

"Then you cannot depend upon yourself."

"Well, -- I can't."

He smiled.

"On whom then?"

"On no one! --"

And the blood sprung to her cheeks and the water to her eyes, with a sudden rush. It seemed that circumstance was not the only thing too hard for her; feeling had so far the mastery, for the minute, that her head bent down and she could not at once raise it up. Rufus walked off to the window, where he gave his attention to some greenhouse plants; Winthrop stood still.

"I would give anything in the world," said Elizabeth, lifting her head and at first humbly and then proudly wiping her tears away, -- "if I could learn self-control -- to command myself. Can one do it, Mr. Landholm? -- one with whom it is not born?"

"I believe so."

"After all, you can't tell much about it," said Elizabeth, "for it belongs to your nature."

"No credit to him," said Rufus returning; -- "it comes of the stock. An inch of self-control in one not accustomed to it, is worth more honour than all Governor's, which he can't help."

"I wouldn't give a pin for self-control in one not accustomed to it!" said Elizabeth; "it is the habitual command over oneself, that I value."

"No let-up to it?" said Rufus.

"No; -- or only so much as to shew in what strength it exists. I am glad, for instance, that Washington for once forgot himself -- or no, he didn't forget himself; but I am glad that passion got the better of him once. I respect the rest of his life infinitely more."

"Than that instance?"

"No, no! -- for that instance."

"I am afraid you have a little tendency to hero-worship, Miss Elizabeth."

"A very safe tendency," said the young lady. "There aren't many heroes to call it out."

"Living heroes?"

"No, nor dead ones, -- if one could get at more than the great facts of their lives, which don't shew us the men."

"Then you are of opinion that 'trifles make the sum of human things?'"

"I don't know what are trifles," said Elizabeth.

"Dere is nozing is no trifle," said Mr. Herder, coming in from the other room. "Dere is no such thing as trifle. Miss Elisabet' hang her head a little one side and go softly, -- and people say, 'Miss Elisabet' is sad in her spirit -- what is the matter?' -- and you hold up your head straight and look bright out of your eyes, and they say, 'Miss Elisabet' is fière -- she feels herself goot; she do not fear nozing, she do not care for nozing.'"

"I am sure it is a trifle whether I look one way or another, Mr. Herder," said Elizabeth, laughing a little.

"Ozer people do not think so," said the naturalist.

"Besides, it is not true, that I fear nothing and care for nothing."

"But then you do not want to tell everybody what you do think," said the naturalist.

"I don't care much about it!" said Elizabeth. "I think that is a trifle, Mr. Herder."

"Which is?" -- said the naturalist.

"What people think about me."

"You do not think so?"

"I do."

"I am sorry," said the naturalist.

"Why?"

"It is not goot, for people to not care what ozer people thinks about them."

"Why isn't it good? I think it is. I am sure it is comfortable."

"It shews they have a mind to do something what ozer people will not like."

"Very well! --"

"Dat is not goot."

"Maybe it is good, Mr. Herder. People are not always right in their expectations."

"It is better to go smooth wiz people," said the naturalist shaking his head a little.

"Or without them," said Elizabeth.

"Question, can you do that?" said Rufus.

"What?" said his brother.

"Live smoothly, or live at all, without regard to other people."

"It is of the world at large I was speaking," said Elizabeth. "Of course there are some few, a very few, whose word -- and whose thought -- one would care for and strive for, -- that is not what I mean."

"And who are those few fine persons?" said Mr. Herder significantly.

"He is unhappy that doesn't know one or two," Elizabeth answered with infinite gravity.

"And the opinions of the rest of men you would despise?" said Rufus.

"Utterly! -- so far as they trenched upon my freedom of action."

"You can't live so," said Rufus shaking his head.

"I will live so, if I live at all."

"Wint'rop, you do not say nozing," said the naturalist.

"What need, sir?"

"Dere is always need for everybody to say what he thinks," said Mr. Herder. "Here we have all got ourselves in a puzzle, and we don't know which way we stand."

"I am afraid every man must get out of that puzzle for himself, sir."

"Is it a puzzle at all?" said Elizabeth facing round upon him.

"Not when you have got out of it."

"Well, what's the right road out of it?"

"Break through everything in the way," said Rufus. "That seems to be the method in favour."

"What do you think is the right way?" Elizabeth repeated without looking at the last speaker.

"If you set your face in the right quarter, there is always a straight road out in that direction," Winthrop answered with a little bit of a smile.

"Doesn't that come pretty near my rule?" said Elizabeth with a smile much broader.

"I think not. If I understood, your rule was to make a straight road out for yourself in any direction."

Elizabeth laughed and coloured a little, with no displeased expression. The laugh subsided and her face became very grave again as the gentlemen made their parting bows.

The brothers walked home in silence, till they had near reached their own door.

"How easily you make a straight way for yourself anywhere!" Rufus said suddenly and with half a breath of a sigh.

"What do you mean?" said Winthrop starting.

"You always did."

"What?"

"What you pleased."

"Well?" said Winthrop smiling.

"You may do it now. And will to the end of your life."

"Which seems to afford you somehow a gloomy prospect of contemplation," said his brother.

"Well -- it does -- and it should."

"I should like to hear you state your premises and draw your conclusion."

Rufus was silent and very sober for a little while. At last he said,

"Your success and mine have always been very different, in everything we undertook."

"Not in everything," said Winthrop.

"Well -- in almost everything."

"You say I do whatever I please. The difficulty with you sometimes, Will, is that you do not 'please' hard enough."

"It would be difficult for anybody to rival you in that," Rufus said with a mingling of expression, half ironical and half bitter. "You please so 'hard' that nobody else has a chance."

To which Winthrop made no answer.

"I am not sorry for it, Governor," Rufus said just as they reached their door, and with a very changed and quiet tone.

To which also Winthrop made no answer except by a look.

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Chapter XXIV

I watch thee from the quiet shore; Thy spirit up to mine can reach; But in dear words of human speech We two communicate no more. TENNYSON.

Mrs. Nettley was putting the finishing touches to her breakfast -- that is, to her breakfast in prospect. A dish of fish and the coffee-pot stood keeping each other cheerful on one side the hearth; and Mrs. Nettley was just, with some trouble, hanging a large round griddle over the blazing fire. Her brother stood by, with his hands on his sides, and a rather complacent face.

"What's that flap-jack going on for?"

"For something I like, if you don't," said his sister. "George --"

Mrs Nettley stopped while her iron ladle was carefully bestowing large spoonfuls of batter all round the griddle.

"What?" said Mr. Inchbald, when it was done.

"Somebody up-stairs likes 'em. Don't you suppose you could get Mr. Landholm to come down. He likes 'em, and he don't get 'em now-a-days -- nor too much of anything that's good. I don't know what he does live on, up there."

"Anything is better than those things," said her brother.

"Other people are more wise than you. Do go up and ask him, will you, George? I hope he gets good dinners somewhere, for it's very little of anything he cooks at that smoky little fireplace of his. Do you ever see him bring anything in?"

"Nothing. I don't see him bring himself in, you know. But he'll do. He'll have enough by and by, Dame Nettley. I know what stuff he's of."

"Yes, but no stuff'll last without help," said Mrs. Nettley, taking her cakes off the griddle and piling them up carefully. "Now I'm all ready, George, and you're standing there -- it's always the way -- and before you can mount those three pair of stairs and down again, these'll be cold. Do go, George; Mr. Landholm likes his cakes hot -- I'll have another plateful ready before you'll be here; and then they're good for nothing but to throw away."

"That's what I think," said Mr. Inchbald; "but I'll bring him down if I can, to do what you like with 'em -- only I must see first what this knocking wants at the front door."

"And left this one open too!" -- said Mrs. Nettley, -- "and now the whole house'll be full of smoke and everything -- Well! -- I might as well not ha' put this griddleful on." --

But the door having refused to latch, gave Mrs. Nettley a chance to hear what was going on. She stood, slice in hand, listening. Some unaccustomed tones came to her ear -- then Mr. Inchbald's round hearty voice, saying,

"Yes sir -- he is here -- he is at home."

"I'd like to see him --"

And then the sounds of scraping feet entering the house.

"I'd like to go somewheres that I could see a fire, too," said the strange voice. "Ben ridin' all night, and got to set off again, you see, directly."

And Mrs. Nettley turned her cakes in a great hurry, as her brother pushed open the door and let the intruder in.

He took off his hat as he came, shewing a head that had seen some sixty winters, thinly dressed with yellow hair but not at all grey. The face was strong and Yankee-marked with shrewdness and reserve. His hat was wet and his shoulders, which had no protection of an overcoat.

"Do you wish to see Mr. Landholm in his room?" said Mr. Inchbald. "He's just coming down to breakfast."

"That'll do as well," said the stranger nodding. "And stop -- you may give him this -- maybe he'd as lieve have it up there."

Mr. Inchbald looked at the letter handed him, the outside of which at least told no tales; but his sister with a woman's quick instinct had already asked,

"Is anything the matter?"

"Matter?" -- said the stranger, -- "well, yes. -- He's wanted to hum."

Both brother and sister stood now forgetting everything, both saying in a breath,

"Wanted, what for?"

"Well -- there's sickness --"

"His father?"

"No, his mother."

Mrs. Nettley threw down her slice and ran out of the room. Mr. Inchbald turned away slowly in the other direction. The stranger, left alone, took a knife from the table and dished the neglected cakes, and sat down to dry himself between them and the coffee.

Mr. Inchbald slowly mounted the stairs to Winthrop's door, met the pleasant face that met him there, and gave the letter.

"I was coming to ask you down to breakfast with us, Mr. Landholm; but somebody has just come with that for you, and wishes you to have it at once."

The pleasant face grew grave, and the seal was broken, and the letter unfolded. It was a folio half sheet, of coarse yellowish paper, near the upper end of which a very few lines were irregularly written.

"My dear son

"It is with great pain I write to tell you that you must leave all and hasten home if you would see your mother. Friend Underhill will take this to you, and your shortest way will be, probably, to hire a horse in M. and travel night and day; as the time of the boat is uncertain and the stage does not make very good time -- Her illness has been so short that we did not know it was necessary to alarm you before. My dear son, come without delay --

"Your father,

"W. Landholm."

Mr. Inchbald watched the face and manner of his friend as he read, and after he read, these few words, -- but the one expressed only gravity, the other, action. Mr. Inchbald felt he could do nothing, and slowly went down stairs again to Mr. Underhill. He found him still over the fire between the cakes and the coffee. But Mr. Inchbald totally forgot to be hospitable, and not a word was said till Winthrop came in and he and the letter-bringer had wrung each other's hand, with a brief 'how d' ye do.'

"How did you leave them, Mr. Underhill?"

"Well -- they were wantin' you pretty bad --"

"Did she send for me?"

"Well -- no -- I guess not," said the other with something of hesitancy, or of consideration, in his speech. Winthrop stood silent a moment.

"I shall take horse immediately. You will go -- how?"

"May as well ride along with you," said Mr. Underhill, settling his coat. "I'm wet -- a trifle -- but may as well ride it off as any way. Start now?"

"Have you breakfasted?"

"Well -- no, I hain't had time, you see -- I come straight to you."

"Mr. Inchbald, I must go to the office a few minutes -- will you give my friend a mouthful?"

"But yourself, Mr. Landholm?"

"I have had breakfast."

Mr. Inchbald did his duty as host then; but though his guest used despatch, the 'mouthful' was hardly a hungry man's breakfast when Winthrop was back again. In a few minutes more the two were mounted and on their way up the right bank of the river.

They rode silently. At least if Mr. Underhill's wonted talkativeness found vent at all, it was more than Winthrop was able ever to recollect. He could remember nothing of the ride but his own thoughts; and it seemed to him afterwards that they must have been stunning as well as deafening; so vague and so blended was the impression of them mixed up with the impression of everything else. It was what Mr. Underhill called 'falling weather'; the rain dropped lightly, or by turns changing to mist hung over the river and wreathed itself about the hills, and often stood across his path; as if to bid the eye turn inward, for space to range without it might not have. And passing all the other journeys he had made up and down that road, some of them on horseback as he was now, Winthrop's thoughts went back to that first one, when through ill weather and discouragement he had left the home he was now seeking, to enter upon his great-world career. Why did they so? He had been that road in the rain since; he had been there in all weathers; he had been there often with as desponding a heart as brought him down that first time; which indeed did not despond at all then, though it felt the weight of life's undertakings and drawbacks. And the warm rain, and yellow, sun-coloured mist of this April day, had no likeness to the cold, pitiless, pelting December storm. Yet passing all the times between, his mind went back constantly to that first one. He felt over again, though as in a dream, its steps of loneliness and heart-sinking -- its misty looking forward -- and most especially that Bible word 'Now' -- which his little sister's finger had pointed out to him. He remembered how constantly that day it came back to him in everything he looked at, -- from the hills, from the river, from the beat of the horses' hoofs, from the falling rain. 'Now' -- 'now' -- he remembered how he had felt it that day; he had almost forgotten it since; but now it came up again to his mind as if that day had been but yesterday. What brought it there? Was it the unrecognized, unallowed sense, that the one of all the world who most longed to have him obey that word, might be to- day beyond seeing him obey it -- for ever? Was it possibly, that passing over the bridge of Mirza's vision he suddenly saw himself by the side of one of the open trap-doors, and felt that some stay, some security he needed, before his own foot should open one for itself? He did not ask; he did not try to order the confused sweep of feeling which for the time passed over him; one dread idea for the time held mastery of all others, and kept that day's ride all on the edge of that open trap-door. Whose foot had gone down there? -- And under that thought, -- woven in with the various tapestry of shower and sunshine, meadow and hillside, that clothed his day's journey to the sense, -- were the images of that day in December -- that final leaving of home and his mother, that rainy cold ride on the stage-coach, Winnie's open Bible, and the 'Now,' to which her finger, his mother's prayers, and his own conscience, had pointed all the day long.

It made no difference, that as they went on, this April day changed from rain and mist to the most brilliant sunshine. The mists rolled away, down the river and along the gulleys of the mountains; the clouds scattered from off the blue sky, which looked down clear, fair, and soft, as if Mirza's bridge were never under it. The little puddles of water sparkled in the sunshine and reflected the blue; the roads made haste to dry; the softest of spring airs wafted down from the hill-sides a spicy remembrance of budding shoots and the drawn-out sweetness of pine and fir and hemlock and cedar. The day grew sultrily warm. But though sunlight and spring winds carried their tokens to memory's gates and left them there, they were taken no note of at the time, by one traveller, and the other had no mental apparatus fine enough to gather them up.

He had feeling or delicacy enough of another kind, however, to keep him quiet. He sometimes looked at Winthrop; never spoke to him. Almost never; if he spoke at all, it was in some aside or counsel-taking with himself about the weather, the way, or the prospect and management of the farming along the river. They stopped only to bait or to rest their horses; even at those times Mr. Underhill restrained himself not only from talking to Winthrop but from talking before him; and except when his companion was at a distance, kept as quiet as he. Winthrop asked no questions.

The road grew hilly, and in some places rough, trying to the horses; and by the time they were fairly among the mountain land that stood down far south from Wut-a-qut-o, the sun was nearing the fair broken horizon line of the western shore. The miles were long now, when they were no longer many; the road was more and more steep and difficult; the horses weary. The sun travelled faster than they did. A gentler sunlight never lay in spring-time upon those hills and river; it made the bitter turmoil and dread of the way seem the more harsh and ungentle. Their last stopping-place was at Cowslip's Mill -- on the spot where seven years before, Winthrop had met the stage- coach and its consignment of ladies.

"The horses must have a minute here -- and a bite," said Mr. Underhill letting himself slowly down from his beast; -- "lose no time by it."

For a change of posture Winthrop threw himself off, and stood leaning on the saddle, while his travelling companion and Mr. Cowslip came up the rise bringing water and food to the horses. No more than a grave nod was exchanged between Winthrop and his old neighbour; neither said one word; and as soon as the buckets were empty the travellers were on their way again.

It was but a little way now. The sun had gone behind the mountain, the wind had died, the perfect stillness and loveliness of evening light was over hill and river and the home land, as the riders came out from the woods upon the foot of the bay and saw it all before them. A cloudless sky, -- the white clear western light where the sun had been, -- the bright sleeping water, -- the sweet lights and shades on Wut-a-qut-o and its neighbour hills, the lower and darker promontory throwing itself across the landscape; and from one spot, that half-seen centre of the picture, the little brown speck on Shah-wee-tah, -- a thin, thin wreath of smoke slowly went up. Winthrop for one moment looked, and then rode on sharply and Mr. Underhill was fain to bear him company. They had rounded the bay -- they had ridden over the promontory neck -- they were within a little of home, -- when Winthrop suddenly drew bridle. Mr. Underhill stopped. Winthrop turned towards him, and asked the question not asked till then.

"How is it at home, Mr. Underhill?"

And Mr. Underhill without looking at him, answered in the same tones, a moment of pause between,

"She's gone."

Winthrop's horse carried him slowly forward; Mr. Underhill's was seen no more that night -- unless by Mr. Cowslip and his son.

Slowly Winthrop's horse carried him forward -- but little time then was needed to bring him round to the back of the house, at the kitchen door, whither the horse-path led. It was twilight now; the air was full of the perfume of cedars and pines, -- the clear white light shone in the west yet. Winthrop did not see it. He only saw that there was no light in the windows. And that curl of thin smoke was the only thing he had seen stirring about the house. He got off his horse and went into the kitchen.

There was light enough to see who met him there. It was his father. There was hardly light to see faces; but Mr. Landholm laid both hands on his son's shoulders, saying,

"My dear boy! -- it's all over! --"

And Winthrop laid his face on his father's breast, and for a few breaths, sobbed, as he had not done since -- since his childish eyes had found hiding-place on that other breast that could rest them no more.

It was but a few minutes; -- and manly sorrow had given way and taken again its quiet self-control; once and for ever. The father and son wrung each other's hands, the mute speech of hand to hand telling of mutual suffering and endurance, and affection, -- all that could be told; and then after the pause of a minute; Winthrop moved on towards the family room, asking softly, "Is she here?" -- But his father led him through, to the seldom-used east-room.

Asahel was there; but he neither spoke nor stirred. And old Karen was there, moving about on some trifling errand of duty; but her quick nature was under less government; it did not bear the sight of Winthrop. Dropping or forgetting what she was about, she came towards him with a bursting cry of feeling, half for herself, half sympathetic; and with the freedom of old acquaintance and affection and common grief, laid her shrivelled black hand on his shoulder and looked up into his face, saying, almost as his father had done, but with streaming eyes and quivering lips,

"My dear son! -- she has gone! --"

Winthrop took the hand in his and gave it a moment's pressure, and then saying very gently but in a way that was obeyed, "Be quiet Karen," -- he passed her and stood at his mother's bedside.

She was there -- lying quietly in her last sleep. Herself and not another. All of her that could write and leave its character on features of clay, was shewn there still -- in its beauty. The brow yet spoke the calm good sense which had always reigned beneath it; the lines of toil were on the cheek; the mouth had its old mingling of patience and hope and firm dignity -- the dignity of meek assurance which looked both to the present and the future. It was there now, unchanged, unlessened; Winthrop read it; that as she had lived, so she had died, in sure expectation of 'the rest that remaineth.' Herself and no other! -- ay! that came home too in another sense, with its hard stern reality, pressing home upon the heart and brain, till it would have seemed that nature could not bear it and must give way. But it did not. Winthrop stood and looked, fixedly and long, so fixedly that no one cared to interrupt him, but so calmly in his deep gravity that the standers-by were rather awed than distressed. And at last when he turned away and Asahel threw himself forward upon his neck, Winthrop's manner was as firm as it was kind; though he left them all then and forbade Asahel to follow him.

"The Lord bless him!" said Karen, loosing her tongue then and giving her tears leave at the same time. "And surely the Lord has blessed him, or he wouldn't ha' borne up so. She won't lose that one of her childr'n -- she won't, no she won't! -- I know she won't! --"

"Where is Winnie, Karen?" said Asahel suddenly.

"Poor soul! -- I dun know," said Karen; -- "she was afeard to see the Governor come home, and dursn't stop nowheres -- I dun know where she's hid. -- The Lord bless him! nobody needn't ha' feared him. He's her own boy -- aint he her own boy! --"

Asahel went out to seek for his little sister, but his search was in vain. She was not to be seen nor heard of. Neither did Winthrop come to the sorrowful gathering which the remnant of the family made round the supper-table. In the house he was not; and wherever he was out of the house, he was beyond reach.

"Could they have gone away together?" said Asahel.

"No!" said his father.

"They didn't," said Clam. "I see him go off by himself."

"Which way?"

"Off among the trees," said Clam.

"Which way?" said Mr. Landholm.

"His back was to the house, and he was goin' off towards the river some place -- I guess he didn't want no one to foller him."

"There aint no wet nor cold to hurt him," said Karen.

There was not; but they missed him.

And the house had been quiet, very quiet, for long after supper-time, when softly and cautiously one of the missing ones opened the door of the east-room and half came in. Only Karen sat there at the foot of the bed. Winnie came in and came up to her.

"He's not here, darlin'," said the old woman, -- "and ye needn't ha' started from him. -- O cold face, and white face! -- what ha' you done with yourself, Winnie, to run away from him so? Ye needn't ha' feared him. Poor lamb! -- poor white lamb! --"

The girl sat down on the floor and laid her face on Karen's lap, where the still tears ran very fast.

"Poor white lamb!" said the old woman, tenderly laying her wrinkled hand on Winnie's fair hair, -- "Ye haven't eat a crumb -- Karen'll fetch you a bit? -- ye'll faint by the way --"

Winnie shook her head. "No -- no."

"What did you run away for?" Karen went on. "Ye run away from your best comfort -- but the Lord's help, Winnie; -- he's the strongest of us all."

But something in that speech, Karen could not divine what, made Winnie sob convulsively; and she thought best to give up her attempts at counsel or comforting.

The wearied and weakened child must have needed both, for she wept unceasingly on Karen's knees till late in the night; and then in sheer weariness the heavy eyelids closed upon the tears that were yet ready to come. She slumbered, with her head still on Karen's lap.

"Poor lamb!" said Karen when she found it out, bending over to look at her, -- "poor lamb! -- she'll die of this if the Governor can't help her, -- and she the Lord's child too. -- Maybe best, poor child! -- maybe best! -- 'Little traveller Zion-ward' -- I wish we were all up at those gates, O Lord! --"

The last words were spoken with a heavy sigh, and then the old woman changed her tone.

"Winnie! -- Winnie! -- go to bed -- go to bed! Your mother'd say it if she was here."

Winnie raised her head and opened her eyes, and Karen repeating her admonition in the same key, the child got up and went mechanically out of the room, as if to obey it.

It was by this time very late in the night; the rest of the inmates of the house had long been asleep. No lights were burning except in the room she had left. But opening the door of the kitchen, through which her way lay to her own room, Winnie found there was a glimmer from the fire, which usually was covered up close; and coming further into the room, she saw some one stretched at full length upon the floor at the fireside. Another step, and Winnie knew it was Winthrop. He was asleep, his head resting on a rolled-up cloak against the jamb. Winnie's tears sprang forth again, but she would not waken him. She kneeled down by his side, to look at him, as well as the faint fireglow would let her, and to weep over him; but her strength was worn out. It refused even weeping; and after a few minutes, nestling down as close to him as she could get, she laid one arm and her head upon his breast and went to sleep too. More peacefully and quietly than she had slept for several nights.

The glimmer from the fire-light died quite away, and only the bright stars kept watch over them. The moon was not where she could look in at those north or east kitchen windows. But by degrees the fair April night changed. Clouds gathered themselves up from all quarters of the horizon, till they covered the sky; the faces of the stars were hid; thunder began to roll along among the hills, and bright incessant flashes of white lightning kept the room in a glare. The violence of the storm did not come over Shah-wee-tah, but it was more than enough to rouse Winthrop, whose sleep was not so deep as his little sister's. And when Winnie did come to her consciousness she found herself lifted from the floor and on her brother's lap; he half sitting up; his arms round her, and her head still on his breast. Her first movement of awakening was to change her position and throw her arms around his neck.

"Winnie --" he said gently.

The flood-gates burst then, and her heart poured itself out, her head alternately nestling in his neck and raised up to kiss his face, and her arms straining him with nervous eagerness.

"O Winthrop! -- O Winthrop! -- O dear Winthrop! --" was the cry, as fast as sobs and kisses would let her.

"Winnie --" said her brother again.

"O Winthrop! -- why didn't you come!"

He did not answer that, except by the heaving breast which poor Winnie could not feel.

"I am here now, dear Winnie."

"O Winthrop! --" Winnie hesitated, and the burden of her heart would burst forth, -- "why aren't you a Christian! --"

It was said with a most bitter rush of tears, as if she felt that the most precious thing she had, lacked of preciousness; that her most sure support needed a foundation. But when a minute had stilled the tears, and she could hear, she heard him say, very calmly,

"I am one, Winnie."

Her tears ceased absolutely on his shoulder, and Winnie was for a moment motionless. Then as he did not speak again, she unclasped her arms and drew back her head to look at him. The constant flashes of light gave her chance enough.

"You heard me right," he said.

"Are you?" -- she said wistfully.

"By God's help -- this night and for ever."

Winnie brought her hands together, half clapping, half clasping them, and then threw them to their former position around his neck, exclaiming, --

"Oh if she had known it before --!"

There was no answer to that, of words; and Winnie could not see the sudden paleness which witnessed to the answer within. But it came, keen as those lightning flashes, home-thrust as the thunderbolts they witnessed to, that his 'now' had come too late for her.

The lightnings grew fainter, and failed -- the thunder muttered off in the distance, and ceased to be heard -- the clouds rolled down the river and scattered away, just as the dawn was breaking on Wut-a-qut-o. There had been nothing spoken in the farmhouse kitchen since Winnie's last words. Winthrop was busy with his own thoughts, which he did not tell; and Winnie had been giving hers all the expression they could bear, in tears and kisses and the strong clasp of her weak arm, and the envious resting, trusting, lay of her head upon Winthrop's shoulder and breast. When the glare of the lightning had all gone, and the grey light was beginning to walk in at the windows, her brother spoke to her.

"Winnie, -- you would be better in bed."

"Oh no, -- I wouldn't. -- Do you want me to go, Governor?" she added presently.

"Not if you could rest as well here, but you want rest, Winnie."

"I couldn't rest so well anywhere!" -- said Winifred energetically.

"Then let me take the big chair and give you a chance."

He took it, and took her in his arms again, where she nestled herself down as if she had been a child; with an action that touchingly told him anew that she could rest so well nowhere else.

"Governor --" she said, when her head had found its place -- "you haven't kissed me."

"I did, Winnie, -- it must have been before you were awake."

But he kissed her again; and drawing one or two long breaths, of heart-weariness and heart-rest, Winnie went to sleep.

The grey dawn brightened rapidly; and a while after, Karen came in. It was fair morning then. She stood by the hearth, opposite the two, looking at them.

"Has she been here all night?" she whispered.

Winthrop nodded.

"Poor lamb! -- Ye're come in good time, Master Winthrop."

She turned and began to address herself to the long gone-out fire in the chimney.

"What are you going to do, Karen?" he said softly.

She looked back at him, with her hand in the ashes.

"Haven't you watched to-night?"

"I've watched a many nights," she said shaking her head and beginning again to rake for coals in the cold fireplace, -- "this aint the first. That aint nothin'. I'll watch now, dear, 'till the day dawn and the shadows flee away'; -- what else should Karen do? 'Taint much longer, and I'll be where there's no night again. O come, sweet day! --" said the old woman clasping her hands together as she crouched in the fireplace, and the tears beginning to trickle down, -- "when the mother and the childr'n'll all be together, and Karen somewheres -- and our home won't be broken up no more! --"

She raked away among the ashes with an eager trembling hand.

"Karen, --" said Winthrop softly, -- "Leave that."

"What, dear?" -- she said.

"Leave that."

"Who'll do it, dear?"

"I will."

She obeyed him, as perhaps she would have done for no one else. Rising up, Winthrop carried his sleeping sister without wakening her, and laid her on the bed in her own little room, which opened out of the kitchen; then he came back and went to work in the fireplace. Karen yielded it to him with equal admiration and unwillingness; remarking to herself as her relieved hands went about other business, that, "for sure, nobody could build a fire handsomer than Mr. Winthrop"; -- and that "he was his mother's own son, and deserved to be!"

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Chapter XXV

That thee is sent receive in buxomness; The wrestling of this worlde askith a fall; Here is no home, here is but wildernesse, Forthe, pilgrim, forthe, o best out of thy stall, Loke up on high, and thanke thy God of all. CHAUCER.

As soon as she was awake Winnie sought her brother's side again; and from that moment never left it when it was possible to be there. In his arms, if she could; close by his side, if nearer might not be; she seemed to have no freedom of life but in his shadow. Her very grief was quieted there; either taking its tone from his calm strength, or binding itself with her own love for him. Her brother was the sturdy tree round which this poor little vine threw its tendrils, and climbed and flourished, all it could.

He had but a few days to spend at Shahweetah now. Towards the end of them, she was one evening sitting, as usual, on his knee; silent and quiet. They were alone.

"Winnie," said her brother, "what shall I do with you?"

She put her arms round his neck and kissed him, -- a very frequent caress; but she made no answer.

"Shall I take you to Mannahatta with me?"

"Oh yes, Winthrop!"

It was said with breathless eagerness.

"I am almost afraid to do it."

"Why, Winthrop?"

"Hush --" he said gently; for her words came out with a sort of impatient hastiness; -- "You don't know what kind of a place it is, Winnie. It isn't much like what home used to be."

"Nor this aint, neither," she murmured, nestling her head in his bosom.

"But you wouldn't have the free air and country -- I am afraid it wouldn't be so good for you."

"Yes it would -- it would be better for me. -- I can't hardly be good at all, Governor, except where you are. I get cross now- a-days -- it seems I can't help it -- and I didn't use to do so --"

How gently the hand that was not round her was laid upon her cheek, as if at once forbidding and soothing her sorrow. For it was true, -- Winnie's disease had wrought to make her irritable and fretful, very different from her former self. And it was true that Winthrop's presence governed it, as no other thing could.

"Would you rather go with me, Winnie?"

"Oh yes, Governor! --oh yes!"

"Then you shall."

He went himself first to make arrangements, which he well knew were very necessary. That one little attic room of his and that closet which was at once Mother Hubbard's cupboard and his clothes press, could never do anything for the comfort of his little sister. He went home and electrified Mrs. Nettley with the intelligence that he must leave her and seek larger quarters, which he knew her house could not give.

"To be sure," said Mrs. Nettley in a brown study, -- "the kitchen's the kitchen, -- and there must be a parlour, -- and George's painting room, -- and the other's my bedroom, -- and George sleeps in that other little back attic. -- Well, Mr. Landholm, let's think about it. We'll see what can be done. We can't let you go away -- George would rather sleep on the roof."

"He would do what is possible, Mrs. Nettley; and so would I."

It was found to be possible that "the other little back attic" should be given up. Winthrop never knew how, and was not allowed to know. But it was so given that he could not help taking. It was plain that they would have been worse straitened than in their accommodations, if he had refused their kindness and gone somewhere else.

Mrs. Nettley would gladly have done what she could towards furnishing the same little back attic for Winnie's use; but on this point Winthrop was firm. He gathered himself the few little plain things the room wanted, from the cheapest sources whence they could be obtained; even that was a serious drain upon his purse. He laid in a further supply of fuel, for Winnie's health, he knew, would not stand the old order of things, -- a fire at meal-times and an old cloak at other times when it was not very cold. Happily it was late in the season and much more fire would not be needed; a small stock of wood he bought, and carried up and bestowed in the closet; he could put his clothes in Winnie's room now and the closet need no longer act as a wardrobe. A few very simple stores to add to Mother Hubbard's shelves, and Winthrop had stretched his limited resources pretty well, and had not much more left than would take him to Wut-a-qut-o, and bring him back again.

"I don't see but I shall have to sell the farm," said Mr. Landholm on this next visit of his son's.

"Why, sir?"

"To pay off the mortgage -- that mortgage to Mr. Haye."

Winthrop was silent.

"I can't meet the interest on it; --I haven't been able to pay any these five years," said Mr. Landholm with a sigh. "If he don't foreclose, I must. -- I guess I'll take Asahel and go to the West."

"Don't do it hastily, father."

"No," said Mr. Landholm with another sigh; -- "but it'll come to that."

Winthrop had no power to help it. And the money had been borrowed for him and Rufus. Most for Rufus. But it had been for them; and with this added thought of sorrowful care, he reached Mannahatta with his little sister.

It was early of a cold spring day, the ground white with a flurry of snow, the air raw, when he brought Winnie from the steamboat and led her, half frightened, half glad, through the streets to her new home. Winnie's tongue was very still, her eyes very busy. Her brother left the eyes to make their own notes and comments, at least he made none, till they had reached the corner of Little South St. He made none then; the door was opened softly, and he brought her up the stairs and into his room without disturbing or falling in with anybody. Putting her on a calico-covered settee, Winthrop pulled off his coat and set about making a fire.

Winnie had cried all the day before and as much of the night as her poor eyelids could keep awake; and now in a kind of lull, sat watching him.

"Governor, you'll catch cold --"

"Not if I can make the fire catch," said he quietly.

"But you wanted me to keep on my things."

"Did you want to take them off?"

Winnie sat silent again, shrugging her shoulders to the chill air. But presently the fire caught, and the premonitory snapping and crackling of the kindling wood gave notice of a sudden change of temperature. Winnie's feelings took the cheery influence of the promise and she began to talk in a more hearty strain.

"Is this your room, Winthrop?"

"This is my room, Winnie. Yours is there, next to it."

"Through that door?"

"No -- through the entry; -- that is the door of my storehouse."

Winnie got up to look at it.

"'Tisn't a very large storehouse," was her conclusion.

"And not much in it. But the large storehouses are not far off, Winnie. Shall I leave you here for five minutes, while I go to get something from one of them?"

"Do you mean out of doors? -- from the shops?"

"Yes. Shall I leave you five minutes?"

"O yes!"

He had come before her and was holding both her hands. Before he let them go he stooped down and kissed her.

It was not a very common thing for Winthrop to kiss her; and Winnie sat quieted under the power and the pleasure of it till the five minutes were run out and he had got back again. His going and coming was without seeing any one of the house; a fact owing to Mrs. Nettley's being away to market and Mr. Inchbald out on another errand.

Winthrop came in with his hands full of brown papers. Winnie watched him silently again while he put his stores in the closet and brought out plates and knives and forks.

"Where do you sleep, Governor?"

"In a pleasanter place than I slept in last night," said her brother.

"Yes, but where? I don't see any bed."

"You don't see it by day. It only shews itself at night."

"But where is it, Governor?"

"You're sitting on it, Winnie."

"This! --"

"What is the matter with it?"

"Why, --" said Winnie, looking dismayfully at the couch with which Winthrop had filled the place of his bed, transferred to her room, -- "it's too narrow!"

"I don't fall out of it," said her brother quietly.

"It isn't comfortable!"

"I am, when I am on it."

"But it's hard!"

"Not if I don't think it is hard."

"I don't see how that makes any difference," said Winnie discontentedly. "It's hard to me."

"But it's not your bed, Winnie."

"I don't like it to be yours, Winthrop."

He was busy laying a slice of ham on the coals and putting a skillet of water over the fire; and then coming to her side he began, without speaking, and with a pleasant face, to untie the strings of her bonnet and to take off that and her other coverings, with a gentle sort of kindness that made itself felt and not heard. Winnie bore it with difficulty; her features moved and trembled.

"It's too much for you to have to take care of me," she said in a voice changed from its former expression.

"Too much?" said Winthrop.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"It's too much. Can you do it?"

"I think I can take care of you, Winnie. You forget who has promised to take care of us both."

She threw her arms round his neck exclaiming, "I forget everything! --"

"No, not quite," said he.

"I do! -- except that I love you. I wish I could be good, Winthrop! -- even as good as I used to be."

"That wouldn't content me," said her brother; -- "I want you to be better."

She clasped her arms in an earnest clasp about his neck, very close, but said nothing.

"Now sit down, Winnie," said he presently, gently disengaging her arms and putting her into a chair, -- "or something else will not be good enough."

She watched him again, while he turned the ham and put eggs in the skillet, and fetched out an odd little salt-cellar and more spoons and cups for the eggs.

"But Winthrop!" she said starting, -- "where's your tea- kettle?"

"I don't know. I have never had it yet, Winnie."

"Never had a tea-kettle?"

"No."

"Then how do you do, Winthrop?"

"I do without," he said lightly. "Can't you?"

"Do without a tea-kettle!"

"Yes."

"But how do you make tea and coffee?"

"I don't make them."

"Don't you have tea and coffee?"

"No, except when somebody else makes it for me."

"I'll make it for you, Winthrop!"

"No, Winnie -- I don't want you to have it any more than myself."

"But Winthrop -- I can't drink water!"

"I think you can -- if I want you to."

"I won't," was in Winnie's heart to say; it did not get to her lips. With a very disturbed and unsettled face, she saw her brother quietly and carefully supply her plate -- the ham and the eggs and the bread and the butter, -- and then Winnie jumped up and came to his arms to cry; the other turn of feeling had come again. He let it have its way, till she had wept out her penitence and kissed her acknowledgment of it, and then she went back to her seat and her plate and betook herself to her breakfast. Before much was done with it, however, Mrs. Nettley and Mr. Inchbald came to the door; and being let in, overwhelmed them with kind reproaches and welcomes. Winnie was taken down stairs to finish her breakfast with tea and coffee; and Winthrop leaving her in hands that he knew would not forget their care of her, was free to go about his other cares, with what diligence they might require.

That same morning, before she had left her own room, Miss Haye was informed that a black girl wished to speak with her. Being accordingly ordered up, said black girl presented herself. A comely wench, dressed in the last point of neatness, though not by any means so as to set off her good accidents of nature. Nevertheless they could not be quite hid; no more than a certain air of abundant capacity, for both her own business and other people's. She came in and dropped a curtsey.

"Who are you?" said Elizabeth.

"I am Clam, ma'am."

"Clam!" said Elizabeth. "O, are you Clam? Where have you come from?"

"From the boat, last place, ma'am."

"Boat! what boat?"

"The boat what goes with wheels and comes down the river," said Clam lucidly.

"Oh! -- And have you just come down?"

"We was comin' down all yesterday and last night, ma'am."

"Who were coming?"

"Mr. Winthrop Landholm, and Winifred, and me."

"Winifred and you," said Elizabeth. "And did he send you to me?"

Clam nodded. "He said he would ha' writ somethin', if he'd ha' had a piece of paper or card or anything, but he hadn't nothing."

"He would have written what?"

"Don't know -- didn't say."

"Do you know who I am?"

Clam nodded again and shewed her teeth. "The lady Mr. Winthrop sent me to."

"Do you remember ever seeing me before?"

"When he was out walkin' with you in the rain," said Clam, her head first giving significant assent.

"Look here," said Elizabeth a little shortly, -- "when I speak to you, speak, and don't nod your head."

To which Clam gave the prohibited answer.

"What are you sent here for now?"

"I dun' know, ma'am."

"What did Mr. Winthrop say you were to do?"

"Said I was to come here, and behave."

"Why have you come away from Mrs. Landholm?"

"Didn't," said Clam. "She went away first. She's gone to heaven."

"Mrs. Landholm! Is she dead?"

Clam nodded.

"When? -- and what was the matter?"

"'Twa'n't much of anything the matter with her," said Clam; -- "she took sick for two or three days and then died. It's more'n a fortnight ago."

"And they sent for Mr. Winthrop?"

"Job Underhill rode down after him as hard as he could and fetched him up on horseback."

"In time?" said Elizabeth.

"He was in time for everything but himself. It was too late for him. But all the rest of the folks had the good of his coming."

"Why what was there for him to do?" said Elizabeth.

"He finds enough to do -- or he's pretty apt to --whenever he comes to a place," said Clam. "There was everybody to put in order, about. There was Mr. Landholm hardly fit to live, he was so willin' to die; and Winifred was crazy. She went and crawled under one of the beds to hide when she thought he was a comin'."

"When who was coming?"

"He -- Mr. Winthrop. And Karen was takin' airs -- that aint out o' the common -- but I'd a little liever have him master than her mistress -- she wa'n't mine, neither."

"And where was Mr. Asahel?"

"He was there -- and good enough what there was of him; but he won't never stand in other folks' shoes."

"Do you say Winifred was crazy?"

"She was so feared to see her brother come home!"

"Her brother Winthrop?"

"There wa'n't no other coming," said Clam.

"Poor thing!" said Elizabeth. "And you say he has brought her down to Mannahatta?"

Clam nodded. "She don't think she's alive when he aint near her; so he's took her down to live with him. I guess it's good living with him," said Clam sagaciously. "I wish I did it."

"I must go and see her. Where is she?"

"She's wherever he's took her to."

"But where's that? -- don't you know?"

"It's to his house -- if you know where that is."

"Do you know what you've come here to do?" said Elizabeth after a slight pause.

Clam shook her head.

"One thing I can tell you, first of all," said Elizabeth, -- "it is to mind what I say to you."

"Mr. Winthrop said I was to behave," said Clam with another glimpse of her white teeth.

"Then don't shake your head any more when I speak to you. What have you been doing at Wut-a-qut-o?"

"At Wuttle-quttle?" said Clam.

"At Wut-a-qut-o. What did you do there?"

"'Tain't the name of the place," said Clam. "They call it Shah-wee-tah."

"Wut-a-qut-o is the name of the mountain -- it's all one. What have you been used to do there?"

"Set tables --" said Clam considerately.

"What did Mrs. Landholm teach you?"

"She learned me 'most everything," said Clam. "What she learned me most of all, was to have me read the Bible every day, and do nothin' wrong o' Sundays, and never say nothin' that wa'n't."

"That wasn't what?"

"That wa'n't it," said Clam. "Never to say nothin' that wa'n't the thing."

"Why, did you ever do that?" said Elizabeth.

"Maybe I did," said Clam, considering her new mistress's dressing-table. "Mis' Landholm was afeard on't."

"Well, you must be just as careful about that here," said Elizabeth. "I love truth as well as she did."

"All kinds?" said the girl.

Elizabeth looked at her, with a mouthful of answer which she did not dare to bring out. Nothing was to be made of Clam's face, except that infallible air of capacity. There was no sign of impertinent meaning.

"You look as if you could learn," she said.

"Been learnin' ever since I was big enough," said the black girl. And she looked so.

"Are you willing to learn?"

"Like nothin' better."

"Provided it's the right kind, I suppose," said Elizabeth, wholly unable to prevent her features giving way a little at the unshakable coolness and spirit she had to do with. Clam's face relaxed in answer, after a different manner from any it had taken during the interview; and she said,

"Well, I'll try. Mr. Winthrop said I was to be good; and I ain't a goin' to do nothin' to displease him, anyhow!"

"But the matter is rather to please me, here," said Elizabeth.

"Well," said Clam with her former wide-awake smile, "I guess what 'll please him 'll please you, won't it?"

"Go down stairs, and come to me after breakfast," said her mistress. "I'll let you make some new dresses for yourself the first thing. And look here, --" said she pulling a bright- coloured silk handkerchief out of a drawer, -- "put that into a turban before you come up and let me see what you're up to."

Clam departed without an answer; but when she made her appearance again, the orange and crimson folds were twisted about her head in a style that convinced Elizabeth her new waiting-maid's capacity was equal to all the new demands she would be likely to make upon it.

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