h and vaunted her
beauty, and her belief in its power, and her pitiful ambitions. The
woman was heartily welcome to the lot she had chosen. But the
treacherous man,--it was not in Justus Hoxon's scheme of things to
receive a blow and return nothing. A "hardy fighter" he was esteemed,
albeit his prowess was eclipsed by his more peaceful virtues. This,
however, should be returned in kind. He would make no attack to be put
in the wrong, arrested, perhaps, after the Colbury interpretation of
assault and battery. But Walter had many a weak point in his armor,
glaringly apparent now to the once fond brother.

Only a surly, bitter word he had for greeting to the few neighbors
whom he met, and who went their way in the conviction that his brother
had lost his election; for none ascribed any emotion of Justus Hoxon's
to his own sake.

He reached in the evening the little cabin where the padlock hung on
the door, and the heavy, untrodden dust of the drought lay without;
and so it was that the old days when "Fambly" had struggled through
their humble experiences came back to him with that incomparable
sweetness of the irrevocable past. Hardships! How could there be, with
fond faith in one another, and in all the world! Poverty--so rich they
were in love! Life, after all, is more than meat, and there is no
hunger like that of a famished heart. He reviewed that forlorn,
anxious, struggling orphanage, transfigured in the subtle glow of
regretful, loving memory, as one might gaze into the rich glamours of
a promised land. Alas, that our promised land should be so often the
land we made haste to leave! As he sat down on the step he saw the
ragged cluster of children troop down the road from twenty years
agone, almost as if he actually beheld them, himself at the head. He
could still feel their plump palms clinging to his hand at the first
suggestion of danger. He had led them a right thorny path, each to a
successful goal. And now could he turn against "Fambly"? Should he
denounce the treachery of one of the little group that he could see
huddling together for warmth on the meagre hearthstone, while outside
the snows of a long-vanished winter were a-whirl? Should he pull down
the temple on Walter's success--the pride of them all? He remembered
how his sisters, with that feminine necessity of hero-worship in their
untaught little hearts, had clung about Walter. He remembered too that
almost every thought of his own life had been given