th his bass viol
driving up to the churchyard fence to hitch their horses. The sun was
dipping low and red behind the Town-House Hill on the other side of the
river.

"What makes my father dislike the very mention of yours?" asked
Waitstill. "I know what they say: that it is because the two men had
high words once in a Cochrane meeting, when father tried to interfere
with some of the exercises and was put out of doors. It doesn't seem as
if that grievance, seventeen or eighteen years ago, would influence his
opinion of your mother, or of you."

"It isn't likely that a man of your father's sort would forget or
forgive what he considered an injury; and in refusing to have anything
to do with the son of a disgraced man and a deranged woman, he is well
within his rights."

Ivory's cheeks burned red under the tan, and his hand trembled a little
as he plucked bits of clover from the grass and pulled them to pieces
absent-mindedly. "How are you getting on at home these days, Waitstill?"
he asked, as if to turn his own mind and hers from a too painful
subject.

"You have troubles enough of your own without hearing mine, Ivory, and
anyway they are not big afflictions, heavy sorrows, like those you have
to bear. Mine are just petty, nagging, sordid, cheap little miseries,
like gnat-bites;--so petty and so sordid that I can hardly talk to God
about them, much less to a human friend. Patty is my only outlet and
I need others, yet I find it almost impossible to escape from the
narrowness of my life and be of use to any one else." The girl's
voice quivered and a single tear-drop on her cheek showed that she was
speaking from a full heart. "This afternoon's talk has determined me in
one thing," she went on. "I am going to see your mother now and then. I
shall have to do it secretly, for your sake, for hers, and for my own,
but if I am found out, then I will go openly. There must be times when
one can break the lower law, and yet keep the higher. Father's law, in
this case, is the lower, and I propose to break it."

"I can't have you getting into trouble, Waitstill," Ivory objected.
"You're the one woman I can think of who might help my mother; all the
same, I would not make your life harder; not for worlds!"

"It will not be harder, and even if it was I should 'count it all joy'
to help a woman bear such sorrow as your mother endures patiently day
after day"; and Waitstill rose to her feet and tied on her hat as one
who had ma