"You could marry me or any man who, with honest love, won your honest love. The man who loved you and hesitated he is the one who casts shame on you

and on human love."

She grasped with a sense of wild joy the words that he spoke, reading into them a meaning that came nearer to her life and her hope than he could have dreamed. Her pity for him and his hopeless love, already chilled by the cold argument to which his disposition and training turned him, faded before the sense of escape which came to her.

"Would there be no wrong," she asked, "in my marrying a man who loved me and sought me as a wife?"

The sense that she was talking to a would-be lover had passed, and it was only as her pastor, the spiritual guide whose words she was to accept as fraught with the weight of the mandate to carry the word to the uttermost parts of the earth, that she thought of him and questioned.

"Marriage is ordained of God," he answered, lapsing into the office to which she appealed. "Sin is the violation of God's ordinance, and though your sins be as scarlet yet shall they be as white as snow if you repent and are forgiven. The man who has dared profess to love, as God would have man love, and yet forgetting his own sins, makes that sin which another has repented of an excuse or a stumbling block, is not a man, he is a miserable coward!"

"Oh, but he has n't," she cried, lost in the assurance coming to her from the minister of God, that it would not be sin for her to open her heart to the pleadings of her lover.

"He? Who?" demanded Craig, suddenly alive to some hidden purpose in the questioning, which he had not suspected.

She opened her eyes in surprise, forgetful, in the agony of her present joy that Craig had come to her as a lover and not as a clergyman.

"Who?" she repeated. "Why, Mr. Barnaby of course!"

IT

CHAPTER XLVII

BLANKET'S QUESTION IS SOLVED

T WAS Tom Blanket who saw the minister holding Amanda Ashgrave's hands that afternoon on sugar hill. The indications all pointed to one result, and that was the discomfiture of Barnaby. Still, since he had nothing else to do, and was utterly incapable of keeping a secret, it occurred to him that it would be a good thing to tell the Widow Marlow, because, in the nature of things, she was fairly on the way to losing a boarder, and it would be a friendly turn to be the first to break the news.

She heard with open eyes and mouth and trembling lips, for a silent tie of friendship had grown up between her and the minister, none the less real because never shaped in words. She drew up the corner of her apron and wiped away the mists that were dimming her glasses.

"I lived alone afore he come, an' I kin agin; but it's lonesome work, an' a body 's not so young as once." "You might do wuss 'n take another pardner," Blanket suggested delicately.

She shook her head.

"I hain't given to merryin'. With some women it 's a habit; but I hain't that-a-way."

"'T ain't good fur man to be alone, the Bible ses so," he suggested.

"But thar hain't nothin' erbout woman. I've looked partick'ler careful."

"Yes, but men hug women."

She flared with anger.

"I'm a decent widder, an' hev ben more'n thirty year, I'd hev you know. If ye can't talk decent, ye might jest as well go 'bout your business, Tom Blanket!"

She had n't grasped the joke and somehow, as he studied it, it did n't seem quite so plain as he had thought. He was sure it sounded differently when he heard it from Barnaby and stored it away for future use. So he made his peace and kept as near the original theme as he could without danger of offence.

"I 'spose I must get used to it," she sighed, "it 'll be kinder strange, a'ter three years, not to hev a man round the house."

"Hain't ye never thought ser'usly o' merryin' one?” he asked.

"No, I hain't!" she snapped.

"Wall now," he said, with a sigh, "thet 's disappintin'. I thought mebbe you hed."

"Well, I hain't," she reiterated.

He looked the crushing of his hopes, and his inability to withdraw gracefully. She waited, as if she expected from him feminine comprehension of feminine duplicity. Finally, caught in the mesh of her keenness and his masculine stupidity, she amplified:

"But thet hain't sayin' I might n't, ef you sh'd ever ax me."

Still he did not rise eagerly to the joy of this sudden revelation. He had dodged so long, playing with the sweet possibility, that it was a sensible loss to be brought to the issue of consummation. It simply availed him for one more dodge:

"When shall it be?"

The Widow Marlow gave a gasp. There was to be no formal proposal after all, and she was to stand cheated

at the end! A wise woman, however, who made no final sacrifice of substance for the sake of a mere shadow, she bowed to the inevitable when she recognised it, and postponed revenge to the time of illimitable opportunity.

"To-morrer week," she said. "Now get out, fur thar 's a mess o' things tu do afore then."

He accepted the date and drove away, but as he was turning into the road, he caught the failure of his joke, and called back:

"I meant embrace though thet 's a kind er hug;" but she was already back in the house and intent upon her baking.

Blanket dropped down into a rounded bunch, with his elbows on his knees, and let the old horse jog on. He was not thinking of his own gain so much as of Barnaby's loss. He had written him a letter to meet him on his return from Europe, where he had been travelling; but now, if Barnaby came, he would be too late.

"I swan some fellers hes luck," he said. "It kinder occurred to me to feel o' the widder, an' thar I be, fixed fur a week from to-morrer; an' thet chap courted like all tarnation, an' somebody else takes the gal off'n his hands! An' ten chances to one, he 'll be as mad's tophet when he finds it out. Mebbe he'll come up; 'cause I told him ef he did n't, she'd be likely to go pretty quick soon 's the year 's up."

That night, for the first time since she sent him away, Amanda wrote to Barnaby. She had so much she could have said, that her letter was of the briefest.

Her note ran:

When you promised to wait a year, I gave my promise that if ever, before the year was over, my mind was at rest as to my