Strickland shook his head stubbornly. “The risk—”

While this conversation was taking place Mrs. Kennedy was examining her chamber and thinking many pleasant things of John, whose handiwork was here so plainly visible. All the smaller and more fanciful pieces of furniture which the house afforded had been brought to this room, whose windows looked out upon the lake and the blue hills beyond. A clean white towel concealed the marred condition of the washstand, while the bed, which was made up high and round, especially in the middle, looked very inviting with its snowy spread. A large stuffed rocking chair, more comfortable than handsome, occupied the center of the room, while better far than all, the table, the mantel, and the windows were filled with flowers, which John had begged from the neighboring gardens, and which seemed to smile a welcome upon the weary woman, who, with a cry of delight, bent down and kissed them through her tears.

"Did these come from your garden?" she asked of Nellie, who, child- like, answered, "We haint any flowers. Pa won't let John plant any. He told Aunt Kelsey the land had better be used for potatoes, and Aunt Kelsey said he was too stingy to live."

"Who is Aunt Kelsey?" asked Mrs. Kennedy, a painful suspicion fastening itself upon her that the lady's opinion might be correct.

"She is pa's sister Charlotte," answered Nellie, "and lives in Rochester, in a great big house, with the handsomest things; but she don't come here often, it's so heathenish, she says."

Here spying John, who was going with the oxen to the meadow, she ran away, followed by Maude, between whom and herself there was for the present a most amicable understanding. Thus left alone Mrs. Kennedy had time for thought, which crowded upon her so fast that, at last throwing herself upon the bed, she wept bitterly, half wishing she had never come to Laurel Hill, but was still at home in her own pleasant cottage. Then hope whispered to her of a brighter day, when things would not seem to her as they now did. She would fix up the desolate old house, she thought; the bare windows which now so stared her in the face should be shaded with pretty muslin curtains, and she would loop them back with ribbons. The carpet, too, on the parlor floor should be exchanged for a better one, and when her piano and marble table came, the only articles of furniture she had not sold, it would not seem so cheerless and so cold.

Comforted with these thoughts, she fell asleep, resting quietly until, just as the sun had set and it was growing dark within the room, Maude came rushing in, her dress all wet, her face flushed, and her eyes red with tears. She and Nellie had quarreled--nay, actually fought; Nellie telling Maude she was blacker than a nigger, and pushing her into the brook, while Maude, in return, had pulled out a handful of the young lady's hair, for which her stepfather had shaken her soundly and sent her to her mother, whom she begged "to go home, and not stay in that old house where the folks were ugly and the rooms not a bit pretty."

Mrs. Kennedy's heart was already full, and drawing Maude to her side, the two homesick children mingled their tears together, until a heavy footstep upon the stairs announced the approach of Dr. Kennedy. Not a word did he say of his late adventure with Maude, and his manner was very kind toward his weary wife, who, with his hand upon her aching forehead, and his voice in her ear, telling her how sorry he was that she was sick, forgot that she had been unhappy.

"Whatever else he may do," she thought, "he certainly loves me," and after a fashion he did perhaps love her. She was a pretty little creature, and her playful, coquettish ways had pleased him at first sight. He needed a wife, and when their mutual friend, who knew nothing of him save that he was a man of integrity and wealth, suggested Matty Remington, he too thought favorably of the matter, and yielding to the fascination of her soft blue eyes he had won her for his wife, pitying her, it may be, as he sat by her in the gathering twilight, and half guessed that she was homesick. And when he saw how confidingly she clung to him, he was conscious of a half- formed resolution to be to her what a husband ought to be. But Dr. Kennedy's resolves were like the morning dew, and as the days wore on his peculiarities, one after another, were discovered by his wife, who, womanlike, tried to think that he was right and she was wrong.

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