have married her husband's murderer." He hunched his shoulders and concluded, "The dilemma is not unusual."

"What happened, then?"

"My mother paid twenty calls upon the Duke of Newcastle, and after the twentieth I received the Collectorship of this port of Boston. It was exile, but lucrative exile. My good mother is a Whig and devout; and there is nothing like that combination for making the best of both worlds. Indeed you may say that at this point she added the New World, and made the best of all three. She assured me that its solitudes would offer, among other advantages, great opportunity for repentance. "Of course," she said, "if you must take the woman, you must.'

He ended with a short laugh. Ruth did not laugh. Her mind was masculine at many points, but like a true woman she detested ironical speech.

"That is Mr. Langton's way of talking," she said; "and you are using it to hide your feelings. Will you tell me her name ?-her Christian name only?"

"She was called Margaret-Margaret Dance. There is no reason why you should not have it in full." "Is there a portrait of her?"

"Yes; as a girl she sat to Kneller-a Dryad leaning against an oak. The picture hangs in my dressing

room."

"It should have hung, rather, in Dicky's nursery;

which," she added, using the weapon she most disliked, "need not have debarred your seeing it from time to time."

He glanced up, for he had never before heard her speak thus sharply.

"Perhaps you are right," he agreed; "though, for me, I let the dead bury the dead. I have no belief, remember, in any life beyond this one. Margaret is gone, and I see not how, being dead, she can advantage me or Dicky."

His words angered Ruth and at the same time subtly pleased her; and on second thoughts angered her the more for having pleased. She thought scorn of herself for her momentary jealousy of the dead; scorn for having felt relief at his careless tone; and some scorn to be soothed by a doctrine that, in her heart, she knew to be false.

For the moment her passions were like clouds in thunder weather, mounting against the wind; and in the small tumult of them she let jealousy dart its last lightning tongue.

"I am not learned in these matters, my lord. But I have heard that man must make a deity of something. The worse sort of unbeliever, they say, lives in the present and burns incense to himself. The better sort, having no future to believe in, idolizes his past."

"Margaret is dead," he repeated. "I am no sentimentalist."

She bent her head. To herself she whispered. "He may not idolize his past, yet he cannot escape from it." . . . And her thoughts might have travelled farther, but she had put the mare to a walk again and just then her ears caught an unaccustomed sound, or confusion of sounds.

At the end of the alley she reined up, wide-eyed.

A narrow gateway here gave access to what had yesterday been a sloping paddock where Miss Quiney grazed a couple of cows. To-day the cows had vanished and given way to a small army of labourers. Broad strips of turf had vanished also and the brown loam was moving downhill in scores of wheel-barrows, to build up the slope to a level.

Sir Oliver marked her amazement and answered it with an easy laugh.

"The time is short, you see, and already we have wasted half an hour of it unprofitably. .

lows appear to be working well."

These fel

She gazed at the moving gangs as one, having come by surprise upon a hive of bees, stands still and cons the small creatures at work.

"But what is the meaning of it?"

"The meaning? Why that for this week I am your riding-master, and that by to-morrow you will have a passable riding-school."

CHAPTER IX

THE PROSPECT

THIS happened on a Thursday. On the following Wednesday, a while before daybreak, he met her on horseback by the gate of Sabines, and they rode forth side by side, ahead of the coach wherein Miss Quiney sat piled about with baggage, clutching in one hand a copy of Baxter's Saint's Everlasting Rest and with the other the ring of a canary-cage. (It was Dicky's canary, and his first love-offering.) Yesterday had been Ruth's birthday—her eighteenth-and under conduct of Manasseh he had visited Sabines to wish her "many happy returns" and to say good-bye.

Sir Oliver would escort the travellers for twelve miles on their way, to a point where the inland road broke into cart-tracks, and the tracks diverged across a country newly disafforested and strewn with jagged stumps among which the heavy vehicle could by no means be hauled. Here Farmer Cordery was to be in waiting with his tilt-covered wagon.

They had started thus early because the season was hot and they desired to traverse the open highway and

the clearings and to reach the forest before the sun's rays grew ardent. Once past the elms of Sabines their road lay broad before them, easy to discern; for the moon, well in her third quarter, rode high, with no trace of cloud or mist. So clear she shone that in imagination one could reach up and run a finger along her hard bright edge; and under moon and stars a land-breeze, virginally cool, played on our two riders' cheeks. Ungloving and stretching forth a hand, Ruth felt the dew falling, as it had been falling ever since sundown; and under that quiet lustration the world at her feet and around her, unseen as yet, had been renewed, the bee-ravished flowers replaced with blossoms ready to unfold, the turf revived, reclothed in young green, the atmosphere bathed, cleansed of exhausted scents, made ready for morning's "bridal of the earth and sky":

"As a vesture shall he fold them up. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun; which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.

Darkling they rode, and in silence, as though by consent. Ruth had never travelled this highway before: it glimmered across a country of which she knew nothing and could see nothing. But no shadow of fear crossed her spirit. Her heart was hushed; yet it exulted, because her lord rode beside her.

They had ridden thus without speech for three or