, and resting his elbows on his knees, propped his
chin on his hands, and stared at the smoke curling heavily up into the
cavernous chimney, where the soot hung long and black. It was very
lonely. Willie Denner, of course, had long ago gone to bed, and unless
the lawyer chose to go into the kitchen for company, where Mary was
reading her one work of fiction. "The Accounts of the Death Beds of
Eminent Saints," he had no one to speak to. Many a time before had he sat
thus, pondering on the solitude of his life, and contrasting his house
with other Ashurst homes. He glanced about his cold bare room, and
thought of the parlor of the Misses Woodhouse. How pleasant it was, how
bright, and full of pretty feminine devices! whereas his library--Mary
had been a hard mistress. One by one the domestic decorations of the
late lady of the house had disappeared. She could not "have things round
a-trapin' dust," Mary said, and her word was law.

"If my little sister had lived," he said, crouching nearer the fire,
and watching a spark catch in the soot and spread over the chimney-back
like a little marching regiment, that wheeled and maneuvered, and then
suddenly vanished, "it would have been different. She would have made
things brighter. Perhaps she would have painted, like Miss Ruth; and
I have no doubt she would have been an excellent housekeeper. We
should have just lived quietly here, she and I, and I need never have
thought"--Mr. Denner flushed faintly in the firelight--"of marriage."

Mr. Denner's mind had often traveled as far as this; he had even gone to
the point of saying to himself that he wished one of the Misses Woodhouse
would regard him with sentiments of affection, and he and Willie, free
from Mary, could have a home of their own, instead of forlornly envying
the rector and Henry Dale.

But Mr. Denner had never said which Miss Woodhouse; he had always thought
of them, as he would have expressed it, "collectively," nor could he have
told which one he most admired,--he called it by no warmer name, even to
himself.

But as he sat here alone, and remembered the pleasant evening he had had,
and watched his fire smoulder and die, and heard the soft sigh of the
rising wind, he reached a tremendous conclusion. He would make up his
mind. He would decide which of the Misses Woodhouse possessed his deeper
regard. "Yes," he said, as he lifted first one foot and then the other
over the fender, and, pulling his little coat-tails