f old Tom Brent, the drunkard, and of the terrible, the unspeakable
Margaret, his wife. They could not forget that he was born and lived the
first years of his life on the "mean" street, when it was a mean
street; and when any obstinate old fossil was told of the youth's
promise, he would shake his head, as who should say, "What good can come
out of that Nazareth?"

But the young man went his way and heeded them not. He knew what they
were saying. He knew what they were thinking, even when they held his
hand and smiled upon him, and it filled him with a spirit of distrust
and resentment, though it put him bravely on his mettle. While he was a
man, and in the main manly, sometimes he was roused to an anger almost
childish; then, although he did not want to be a preacher at all, he
wished and even prayed to become a great one, just to convince the old
fools who shook their heads over him. To his ears had crept, as such
tales will creep, some of the stories of his parents' lives, and, while
he pitied his mother, there was a great fierceness in his heart against
his father.

But as in the old days when Miss Prime's discipline would have turned
all within him to hardness and bitterness Eliphalet Hodges stood between
him and despair, so now in this crucial time Elizabeth was a softening
influence in his life.

As the days came and went, he had continued to go to see her ever since
the night when he had stood with her at the gate and felt the bitterness
of her lack of sympathy; but all that had passed now, and unconsciously
they had grown nearer to each other. There had been a tacit
understanding between them until just a few weeks before. It was on a
warm spring evening: he had just passed through her gate and started
towards the house, when the opening chords of the piano struck on his
ear through the opened window and arrested him. Elizabeth had a pleasant
little voice, with a good deal of natural pathos in it. As the
minister's daughter, the scope of her songs was properly, according to
Dexter, rather limited, but that evening she was singing softly to
herself a love-song. The words were these:

If Death should claim me for her own to-day,
And softly I should falter from your side,
Oh, tell me, loved one, would my memory stay,
And would my image in your heart abide?
Or should I be as some forgotten dream,
That lives its little space, then fades entire?
Should Time send o'er you its r