e've had him thirteen years."

Some of the horses pricked up their ears at the sound of their voices.
One of them bit another's neck; the victim threw up his heels and
squealed.

Pat called from the stable, "Heigh, you divils!"

"I think he'd better take them in," said Dan's father; and he continued,
as if it were all the same subject, "I hope you'll have seen something
more of the world before you fall in love the next time."

"Thank you; there won't be any next time. But do you consider the world
such a school of morals; then? I supposed it was a very bad place."

"We seem to have been all born into it," said the father. He lifted his
arms from the fence, and Dan mechanically followed him into the stable.
A warm, homely smell of hay and of horses filled the place; a lantern
glimmered, a faint blot, in the loft where Pat was pitching some hay
forward to the edge of the boards; the naphtha gas weakly flared from
the jets beside the harness-room, whence a smell of leather issued and
mingled with the other smell. The simple, earthy wholesomeness of the
place appealed to Dan and comforted him. The hay began to tumble from
the loft with a pleasant rustling sound.

His father called up to Pat, "I think you'd better take the horses in
now."

"Yes, sir: I've got the box-stalls ready for 'em."

Dan remembered how he and Eunice used to get into the box-stall with
his pony, and play at circus with it; he stood up on the pony, and
his sister was the ring-master. The picture of his careless childhood
reflected a deeper pathos upon his troubled present, and he sighed
again.

His father said, as they moved on through the barn: "Some of the best
people I've ever known were what were called worldly people. They
are apt to be sincere, and they have none of the spiritual pride, the
conceit of self-righteousness, which often comes to people who are shut
up by conscience or circumstance to the study of their own motives and
actions."

"I don't think she was one of that kind," said Dan.

"Oh, I don't know that she was. But the chances of happiness, of
goodness, would be greater with a less self-centred person--for you."

"Ah, Yes! For me!" said Dan bitterly. "Because I hadn't it in me to
be frank with her. With a man like me, a woman had better be a little
scampish, too! Father, I could get over the loss; she might have died,
and I could have got over that; but I can't get over being to blame."

"I don't think I'd indulge in