the faith; he never seemed inclined to talk with Mr. Styles about it She, you know, is quite an Infidel, and, of course, he could not have been ignorant of it. It's very sad to see a man so misled—the lust of the eye,' Harriet."

"I should say it was witchcraft," Harriet remarked, with a snappish tone; "she's a very plain-looking girl-like an owl with her big gray eyes and straight hair." Miss Legrand wore ners in ropy ringlets of great length.

"I shouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes!" exclaimed Miss Celia Smith to her sister, Miss Amelia. "I always thought they were dead set against each other." Miss Celia was more inclined to be emphatic than choice in her expressions.

"They made believe they were," her sister replied. "She must have been afraid he'd back out, after all, or they wouldn't have been married so, right off the reel. It was her last chance: she's on the wrong side of thirty-five, I should say." Miss Amelia was thirty-three, herself, although she only confessed to twenty-five. The memory of a certain sleigh-ride the winter before, during which her incessant fears of an overturn obliged Woodbury to steady her with his arm, was fresh in her mind, with all its mingled sweet and bitter. Several virgin hearts shared the same thought, as the carriages went homeward that it was a shame, so it was, that this strongminded woman, whom nobody imagined ever could be a rival, should sneak into the fold by night and carry off the pick of the masculine flock!

Meanwhile, the objects of all this gossip returned to the desolate cottage. When they entered the little sitting-room, Hannah's composure gave way, under the overwhelming sense of her loss which rushed upon her, as she saw that every thing was restored to its usual place, and the new life, without her mother, had commenced. Her tears flowed without restraint, and her husband allowed the emotion to exhaust itself before he attempted consolation. But at last he took her, still sobbing, to his breast, and silently upheld her.

"Hannah," he said, "my dear wife, how can I leave you here alone, to these sad associations? This can no longer be your home. Come to me with your burden, and let me help you to bear it."

"Oh, Maxwell," she answered, "you are my help and my comfort. No one else has the same right to share my sorrow. My place is beside you: I will try to fill it as I ought: but— Maxwell-can I, dare I enter your home as a bride, coming thus directly from the grave of my mother?"

"You will bring her blessing in the freshness of its sanctity," he said. "Understand me, Hannah. In the reverence for your sorrow, my love is patient. Enter my home, now, as the guest of my heart, giving me only the right to soothe and comfort, until you can hear, without reproach, the voice of love."

His noble consideration for her grief and her loneliness melted Hannah's heart. Through all the dreary sense of her loss penetrated the gratitude of love. She lifted her arms and clasped them about his neck. "Take me, my dear husband," she whispered, "take me, rebellious as I have been, unworthy as I am, and teach me to deserve your magnanimity."

He took her home that evening, under the light of the rising moon, down the silence of the valley, through the gathering mists of the meadows, and under the falling of the golden leaves. The light of Lakeside twinkled, a ruddy star, to greet them, and with its brightening ray stole into her heart the first presentiment of Woman's Home.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

CONCERNING THE NEW HOUSEHOLD OF LAKESIDE.

In a day or two all the familiar articles of furniture which Hannah desired to retain, were transferred to Lakeside with her personal effects, and the cottage was closed until a new tenant could be found. In the first combined shock of grief and change, the secluded beauty of her new home was especially grateful. The influences of Nature, no less than the tender attentions of her husband, and the quiet, reverent respect of Bute and Carrie, gradually soothed and consoled her. Day after day the balmy southwest wind blew, hardly stirring the smoky purple of the air, through which glimmered the floating drifts of gossamer or the star-like tufts of wandering down. The dead flowers saw their future resurrection in these winged, emigrating seeds; the trees let fall the loosened splendor of their foliage, knowing that other summers were sheathed in the buds left behind; even the sweet grass of the meadows bowed its dry crest submissively over the green heart of its perennial life. Every object expressed the infinite patience of Nature with her yearly recurring doom. The sun himself seemed to veil his beams in noonday haze, lest he should smite with too severe a lustre the nakedness of the landscape, as it slowly put off its garment of life.

As

For years past, she had been deprived of the opportunity so to breathe the enchantment of the heavenly season. soon as the chill of the morning dew had left the earth, she went forth to the garden and orchard, and along the sunny

margin of the whispering pine-wood behind the house, striving to comprehend the change that had come over her, and fit her views of life to harmony with it. In the afternoons she went, at Woodbury's side, to a knoll overhanging the lake, whence the landscape was broader and grander, opening northward beyond the point, where now and then a sail flashed dimly along the blue water. Here, sitting on the grassy brink, he told her of the wonderful life of the tropics, of his early hopes and struggles, of the cheating illusions he had cherished, the sadder knowledge he had wrested from experience, and that immortal philosophy of the heart in which all things are reconciled. He did not directly advert to his passion for herself, but she felt it continually as the basis from which his confidences grew. He was a tender, trustful friend, presenting to her, leaf by leaf, the book of his life. She, too, gave him much of hers in return. She found a melancholy pleasure in speaking of the Past to one who had a right to know it, and to whom its most trifling feature was not indifferent. Her childhood, her opening girlhood, her education, her desire for all possible forms of cultivation, her undeveloped artistic sympathies and their conflict with the associations which surrounded her all these returned, little by little, and her husband rejoiced to find in them fresh confirmations of the instinctive judgment, on the strength of which he had ventured his love.

In the evenings they generally sat in the library, where he read to her from his choice stores of literature, and from the reading grew earnest mutual talk which calmed and refreshed her mind. The leisure of his long years in India had not been thrown away he had developed and matured his natural taste for literature by the careful study of the English and French classics, and was familiar with the principal German and Italian authors, so far as they could be known through translations. He had also revived, to some extent, his musty knowledge of the Greek and Latin poets, and his taste had thus become pure and healthy in proportion to the variety of his