little ways; I think of it so often; and yet -there she is."

"You mean he is fond of her still?" faltered Giles; he wished he knew some retreat out of the conversation; at the same time he was pricked by an uncanny longing to hear more.

"I don't know. I don't see how he can be." Giles dropped his fan and picked it up; the exertion brought a little flush to his cheek. "But this is sure, he has about supported her for these last five years, besides what he has paid out-you see, it was this way: Billy worshipped Lilian for three years and never could screw up his courage to speak to her. She went away to school and came back; and went away on a visit and came back; then you remember how he told you how he felt. He went that very same month and asked her to marry him. I knew what had happened when he walked the floor of his room all night long, knew it just as well as when I heard of her engagement to Talbot Phillips two days after. She met him when she was away. Well, they were married very soon; and I thought when Billy got me to get the prettiest clock in the catalogue, that here was the last money he would spend on her. I was sorry, then. She was certainly a beautiful girl and very sweet-tempered. They had a great wedding; Billy didn't go, nor I. Her husband had property, and he came here to live because she wouldn't leave her father, who was feeble. They all lived here and her

children were born here. Then the old Judge died, perhaps he had been some restraint on Talbot; I don't know. He went from bad to worse.'

He drank?”

'Yes, he drank, and he was unfortunate. He is one of those pig-headed fellows who think that nobody can tell them anything. He never had been trained to anything; but he studied law; and when he is sober they say he makes a beautiful speech; but he has no head for business, and thought he had, and everything he touched went wrong. Little by little they lost everything. After father died, Billy was their doctor; in that way he found out how things were going. And you know Billy, how faithful he is; and she was sweet-tempered, and hadn't lost her beauty or her pretty ways-then.

He said he

One day Billy came to me and said, 'Sis, you have always stood by me, will you stand by me now?' I said, of course, what was he going to do? was going to try persuade Lilian Phillips to get a divorce from Tal; that Tal had knocked her down the day before; that he often was violent and cruel to her. And what is more,' said he, if she gets the divorce I mean to try to persuade her to marry me, after a decent while; and I want you to ask her to come here; I wouldn't think it fair not to tell you that much before I ask her."

"And you ?"

"I love Billy; and though I didn't feel drawn to Lilian, she did seem like a nice sweet girl-well, she was, I think. I told Billy I would stand by him. But I didn't need to; she wouldn't leave her husband; she said she couldn't think it was right. I don't know whether such things are right or wrong; I used to think they were all wrong; but it is easier to say Do right and be dreadfully unhappy,' when it isn't in your own family. I don't know whether she did right to refuse to leave Talbot or not; but I do know it was bad for Billy and worse for her; and I guess the little girl would be alive to-day, if it had been the other way, for Talbot somehow suspected that Billy had urged his wife to leave him; and they had high words. Talbot drew a pistol on Billy, but Billy knocked his hand up, and wrenched the pistol away from him."

"Pity he didn't blow his brains out!" came between Giles's teeth.

"I thought it was, then," said Billy's sister, calmly; "certainly it would have been a good thing for the poor little girl, such a pretty little thing, the image of her mother. But he didn't; he flung Talbot out of the door of his office and he went raving down the street, swearing and crying. Of course Billy couldn't be the doctor after that, and when the little girl was taken with diphtheria they called in a foolish young fellow. Billy says he means right and studies and he will improve; but it seems to me rather hard that a young doctor improving can kill so many people if he is allowed."

"The child died ?"

"Yes, she died, before Billy knew she was sick."

"Did Billy think—"

"I don't know what Billy thought; he said, 'We don't any of us know anything about diphtheria;' and he tried to think the doctor did all there was to do, but he had such success with those cases, even then, before anti-toxin. The next time one of the children fell sick, Lilian, herself, came for Billy; and he always has gone since; she made him promise he wouldn't ever ask her again to leave Talbot and he never has; but as they grew poorer and poorer he has simply found the money to keep them; he bought in the mortgage on the house and gave it to her. It was foolish; he would better have taken the house and let them live there rent free. At first, she made difficulties and didn't want to take money, now, she is so crushed and careless, she takes it. Why, he paid all the expenses of the boy's trial

"Trial?"

"You didn't know-but why should you? it was hushed up; the boy is like his father, handsome, winning, a nice boy lots of ways, but crazy if he drinks; and precisely the kind of boy to need a firm hand. The only person in the world he pays any attention to, is Billy. He got into a fight and stabbed a man; it was hushed up and money paid the man; and the boy was sent to the Philippines; only eighteen, and the other child is lame-hopelessly, Billy says, although he is always thinking of new things."

Giles did not speak for a moment; he did not see his way.

Billy's sister went on : "Billy doesn't go there often, only when the child is to be treated or when Talbot is drunk; Talbot sometimes keeps sober six months at a time, and he gets cases and picks up a little and buys new clothes and brags about getting into politics and is sure he will never backslide again; and is seen driving the little boy and his wife; and wants me to propose his wife for the Woman's Club, and all such nonsense; the next you hear he has knocked down a policeman and wants Billy to bail him out at the police-court. Billy carries them on his shoulders. There is no telling what they will do next; and that is how Billy's honest money goes. If he would not help them they would come to the end of their resources and they would have to sepa

rate; it would be better for them and better for him. He wouldn't think it right, I suppose."

"It would be hard for him, if he cares for her," said Giles.

"I don't see how he can!" declared Billy's sister with sudden vehemence. She caught at her self-control and smiled feebly. "You don't understand, you haven't seen her, she wasn't strong enough to raise her husband; she wasn't strong enough to leave him; he has dragged her down, she has lost her beauty, but that isn't the worst of it; she has grown so small, she isn't interested in anything outside of her own troubles, and those she is always pouring on Billy, and he is trying to help her. Now, you know, a pretty woman who occasionally tells her sorrows is very attractive to a man, but a poor, faded, whining creature who has lost her good looks and her charm and is nothing but pitiful and keeps on complaining why, she must be tedious ! But Billy is so loyal, he never says a word. I suppose it's awful, but it seems to me that she's more fatal to Billy than if she had been a wicked woman; because then his conscience might have rescued him; and now, his conscience only ties the weight on tighter. He might be almost anything in his profession but for her; he has stayed here to help her. When he's tired and depressed, he has to go out to her and hear about how they can't keep a girl the minute Tal begins again, and they didn't get their potatoes in early enough and now the rain is rotting them, and how bad her sick headaches are; and how Tal wants to put some money into a splendid scheme, and he can't get it-the whole wretched round, over and over. I should think Billy would look careworn; when I see him with that stoop in his shoulders and those gray hairs at forty-five, I almost hate her. And I don't feel the more kindly toward her that I am sure if Tal were to die that Billy would feel he must marry her. Giles, doesn't it seem the awfulest thing we know that people may not only ruin their lives as far as happiness or worldly success goes, but may drag down their souls by obeying their consciences? I know, I don't guess, I know that Lilian, if she had left Talbot, would have been a better woman. She is the kind of nature that needs sunshine.

She would have married Billy, then, before she had lost her love for dainty things and her cheerfulness; and she would have been happy and tried to please him and been interested in the large things that interest him; she is a weak creature, but she was charming once; she might be charming still if she had put things on her hair in time to keep it from coming out, and had a decent dressmaker and been happy! And, now, she has sunk into a complaining drudge who accepts money and sympathy and sacrifices from a man who owes her nothing; and doesn't give a thing in return. Isn't it Emerson who says that, he is base and he, only, who accepts favors and returns none. There's where she is; she seems to me to be as low, and lower, than the poor creature who loves a man and is false to her husband for him; for at least she gives something back. And yet it has all come from them both trying to do their duty. Giles, I have seen the same thing in other cases, and it appalls me."

Giles had sat, as a man of the world sits, with no visible agitation on his features, sometimes looking at his boots, sometimes at his cigar, which had gone out. Yet, all the while, he was feeling as if his soul were under a rain of blows. He was dizzy. The single hint of comfort he could find was in the time-honored belief of man that women are always unjust to women; it might not be so bad. He shrank from any further discussion of Lilian, as from new blows; and he caught at the possible diverting of the subject. What he said came out of his past thought, his life's experience, and the rough-and-ready working solution of the problems of life that a man who has lived intensely and amid many interests, makes for his own guidance, of necessity rather than intellectual luxury; he had not vigor enough in his soul to have grappled with any question at that moment; unconsciously he fell back on his unspoken creed. "I think," said he, "that we have to have our consciences enlightened as much as our minds; and we pay for our mistakes there, just as we do everywhere else. pose we make our own consciences, if it comes to that."

I sup

Billy's sister sighed: "Well, maybe; I think Billy's needs hardening; it's too ten

der. Giles, you're very patient to listen to all this. Come in and see Billy's den, and his room, and the portrait the doctors have had painted of him for the new hospital-I let Billy give five hundred for an operating-room and he was so pleased; he didn't know he had the money."

The

For the rest of his visit there was little more said on the subject that Giles dreaded. Indeed, Billy's sister had said herself there was nothing to be done, and patience was the only virtue available. "But do get Billy away, all you can," she begged at parting. And Giles promised. He drove back to the station over the hillroad, and he turned up the Burnham drive. His jaws were set as in a vice. His thoughts were not so much thoughts as dim, heavy sensations. He put them into no words; he only drove doggedly on. Every rod on the way into the Burnham grounds, deepened his dejection. grass waved rank, yet scant, as grass too seldom mowed, will grow; there were thickets in the rye-field; the drive was overgrown with pussly and tansy and flaunting narrow dock; the little purling stream that he remembered on the hillside was choked by a squalid heap of household refuse; nearer the house a few shrubs, hardier than the most of their kind, altheas and lilacs and syringas, still fought for life in the neglected, weed-entangled flower-beds. Some yellow roses were in bloom, withering on their stems. Giles could see Lilian's light figure in the trim garden of the past, with her basket of roses. He could hear her laughter. He looked about him with a smile bitterer than a groan. There was the house, falling into ruin, patched here and there. The wide porch under the white columns was covered with a muddy printage of dogtracks; the flies buzzed noisily through the cracks of the broken screen door. Giles tied his horse-Billy must have mended the post, for it stood firm and there was a good iron ring in it. A half dozen hens, disturbed at his approach, rose with a whirr. The noise muffled Giles's footsteps so that a man and a woman in the room with the open windows did not hear his appoach; but he could hear their high voices distinctly. The woman sobbed: "I did not!" The man snorted derision, not so much violent as

brutally contemptuous. "You're a liar; you did pay her; she said her mother was sick and you got her wages from Billy; he was just fool enough to let you have the money; Maggie told me, herself."

The woman sobbed more bitterly. "I was so afraid you'd be angry; and Billy offered and her mother was sick-I sent her some soup"My soup?"

"And I thought I had lost her twenty years ago," he shuddered to himself; "my God, how little I knew!"

A sombre dejection. beyond his shaking off, weighed on him all through the journey; he felt ill and shaken; and he was conscious only of a childish, homesick longing for his wife. Once, it came to him, with the force of a discovery, that during the last ten years he had not had

"Well, more fool you; but I'm not mad; go and get me my soup and some beer; and for God's sake do tidy yourself up a little!"

"I was working in the garden, and Burnham was so fretful when I came in I hadn't time; I guess if you had to keep the garden and the house and had such a backache, you wouldn't be dressed up much, either-yes, yes, I'm going, Tal." The voice was in the dreary, querulous pipe of a habitual complainer, but it was Lilian's voice. She came into the light, and put out one hand to draw the curtain; Giles would not look up; he would not see her; but his eyes could not escape her hand. He saw it plainly. Sick at heart, he stole away. Like a thief, he softly unhitched the horse, noiselessly swung himself into the wagon, and then drove swiftly and more swiftly, down the hill, along the road.

Half an hour later he was at the carwindow, watching the fields drift by.

puzzle that he had not brought to Fanny. But this he could never show to any human soul, not even to Billy, poor Billy. He felt a shrinking even from the dishonor of thinking of her, so sunken and battered by the merciless years. He had a smothering recoil from the black and heavy mystery before him; how weakness should always be punished so rigorously and sin sometimes so lightly. Long and sadly he pondered, finding no light. But-it was as the train rolled into his home-station-suddenly his heart freed itself with a leap, as a bird flutters from the snare; for he said, proudly, "Nothing, no man, no poverty, no conceivable state of things would have pulled Fanny down like that!" His eyes, flashing with an only half-comprehended exultation, suddenly ran to one placid, well-poised figure in the crowd, and fastened on her faithful face.

He did not know all that he felt; but he knew that if he had lost his angel forever, he had at last found his wife.