forward under his
arms, stood with his back to the fireplace,--"yes, I will make up my
mind; I will make it up to-morrow. I cannot go on in this uncertain way.
I cannot allow myself to think of Miss Ruth, and how she would paint
her pictures, and play my accompaniments, and then find my mind on Miss
Deborah's dinners. It is impracticable; it is almost improper. To-morrow
I will decide."

To have reached this conclusion was to have accomplished a great deal.

Mr. Denner went to bed much cheered; but he dreamed of walking about Miss
Ruth's studio, and admiring her pictures, when, to his dismay, he found
Mary had followed him, and was saying she couldn't bear things all of a
clutter.

The next morning he ate his breakfast in solemn haste; it was to be an
important day for him. He watched Mary as she walked about, handing him
dishes with a sternness which had always awed him into eating anything
she placed before him, and wondered what she would think when she
heard--He trembled a little at the thought of breaking it to her; and
then he remembered Miss Ruth's kind heart, and he had a vision of a
pension for Mary, which was checked instantly by the recollection of
Miss Deborah's prudent economy.

"Ah, well," he thought, "I shall know to-night. Economy is a good
thing,--Miss Ruth herself would not deny that."

He went out to his office, and weighed and balanced his inclinations
until dinner-time, and again in the afternoon, but with no result. Night
found him hopelessly confused, with the added grievance that he had not
kept his word to himself.

This went on for more than a week; by and by the uncertainty began to
wear greatly upon him.

"Dear me!" he sighed one morning, as he sat in his office, his little
gaitered feet upon the rusty top of his air-tight stove, and his
brierwood pipe at his lips--it had gone out, leaving a bowl of cheerless
white ashes,--"dear me! I no sooner decide that it had better be Miss
Deborah--for how satisfying my linen would be if she had an eye on the
laundry, and I know she would not have bubble-and-squeak for dinner as
often as Mary does--than Miss Ruth comes into my mind. What taste she
has, and what an ear! No one notices the points in my singing as she
does; and how she did turn that carpet in Gifford's room; dear me!"

He sat clutching his extinguished pipe for many minutes, when suddenly a
gleam came into his face, and the anxious look began to disappear.

He rose, and laid his