shone a pair of hazel eyes, very large, very gentle, but inexpressibly sad and mournful. This was certainly not the kind of man Miss Nelly had expected to see, yet, after her first embarrassment had passed, the very circumstance, oddly enough, added to her indignation and stung her wounded pride still more deeply. Nevertheless, the arch hypocrite instantly changed her tactics, with the swift intuition of her sex.

"I have come," she said, with a dazzling smile, infinitely more dangerous than her former dignified severity, "I have come to ask your pardon for a great liberty I have just taken. I believe the new house above us on the hill is yours. I was so much pleased with its exterior that I left my friends for a moment below here," she continued artfully, with a slight wave of the hand, as if indicating a band of fearless Amazons without, and waiting to avenge any possible insult offered to one of their number, "and ventured to enter it. Finding it unoccupied, as I had been told, I am afraid I had the audacity to sit down and amuse myself for a few moments at the piano, while waiting for my friends."

Hawkins raised his beautiful eyes to hers.

He saw a very pretty girl, with frank gray eyes glistening with excitement, with two red, slightly freckled cheeks, glowing a little under his eyes, with a short scarlet upper lip turned back, like a rose leaf, over a little line of white teeth, as she breathed somewhat hurriedly in her nervous excitement. He saw all this calmly, quietly, and, save for the natural uneasiness of a shy, reticent man, I fear without a quickening of his pulse.

"I knowed it," he said simply. "I heerd ye as I kem up.'

Miss Nelly was furious at his grammar, his dialect, his coolness, and still more at the suspicion that he was an active member of her invisible claque.

66

Ah," she said, still smiling, "then I think I heard you'

"I reckon not," he interrupted gravely. "I did n't stay long. I found the boys hanging round the house, and I allowed at first I'd go in and kinder warn you; but they promised to keep still, and you looked so comfortable and wrapped up in your mu sic that I had n't the heart to disturb you, and kem away. I hope," he added earnestly, "they did n't let on ez they heerd you. They aint a bad lot,-them Blazin' Star boys,

though they're a little hard at times. But they'd no more hurt ye than they would a-a-a cat!" continued Mr. Hawkins, blushing with a faint apprehension of the inelegance of his simile.

"No! no!" said Miss Nelly, feeling suddenly very angry with herself, the Fool, and the entire male population of Five Forks. "No! I have behaved foolishly, I suppose, and if they had it would have served me right. But I only wanted to apologize to you. You'll find everything as you left it. Good-day!"

She turned to go. Mr. Hawkins began to feel embarrassed. "I'd have asked ye to sit down," he said, finally, "if it hed been a place fit for a lady. I oughter done so, enny way. I don't know what kept me from it. But I ain't well, Miss. Times I get a sort o' dumb ager, it's the ditches, I think,

Miss, and I don't seem to hev

about me."

Instantly Miss Arnot was all sympathy; her quick woman's heart was touched.

"Can I-can anything be done?" she asked, more timidly than she had before spoken.

"No!not onless ye remember suthin'

about these pills." He exhibited a box containing about half a dozen. "I forget the direction, I don't seem to remember much, any way, these times,—they're Jones' Vegetable Compound. If ye 've ever took 'em ye 'll remember whether the reg'lar dose is eight. They ain't but six here. But perhaps ye never tuk any," he added deprecatingly.

66

"No," said Miss Nelly, curtly. She had usually a keen sense of the ludicrous, but somehow Mr. Hawkins' eccentricity only pained her.

"Will you let me see you to the foot of the hill?" he said again, after another embarrassing pause.

Miss Arnot felt instantly that such an act would condone her trespass in the eyes of the world. She might meet some of her invisible admirers, or even her companions; and, with all her erratic impulses, she was nevertheless a woman, and did not entirely despise the verdict of conventionality. She smiled sweetly and assented, and in another moment the two were lost in the shadows of the wood.

Like many other apparently trivial acts in an uneventful life, it was decisive. As

she expected, she met two or three of her late applauders, (whom, she fancied, looked sheepish and embarrassed; she met also her companions, looking for her in some alarm, who really appeared astonished at her escort, and, she fancied, a trifle envious of her evident success. I fear that Miss Arnot, in response to their anxious inquiries, did not state entirely the truth, but, without actual assertion, led them to believe that she had at a very early stage of the proceeding completely subjugated this weak-minded giant, and had brought him triumphantly to her feet. From telling this story two or three times she got finally to believing that she had some foundation for it, then to a vague sort of desire that it would eventually prove to be true, and then to an equally vague yearning to hasten that consummation. That it would redound to any satisfaction of the Fool she did not stop to doubt. That it would cure him of his folly she was quite confident. Indeed, there are very few of

us

men or women who do not believe that even a hopeless love for ourselves is more conducive to the salvation of the lover than a requited affection for another.

The criticism of Five Forks was, as the