not; have omitted it any more than he would
have neglected Sunday morning service; but he was scarcely more aware of
the words than Willie or Mary were. It was the reading which gave Mr.
Denner so much pleasure.

Perhaps the cases he had never pleaded, the dramatic force which he
secretly longed to exert, expended themselves in the sonorous chapters
of Isaiah or in the wail of Jeremiah. Indeed, the thought had more than
once occurred to Mr. Denner that the rector, who read the service with
cheerful haste, might improve in his own delivery, could he listen to the
eloquence under which Mary and little Willie sat every evening.

To-night it was the victory of Jephtha. The reading proceeded as usual:
Mary slumbered tranquilly at her end of the room; Willie counted the
number of panes of glass in the window opposite him, and wondered what
he should do if suddenly a white face should peer in at him out of the
darkness; Mr. Denner had reached the vow that whatsoever should first
meet Jephtha,--when, with his hand extended, his eyebrows drawn together,
and his whole attitude expressing the anxiety and fear of the conqueror,
he stopped abruptly. Here was an inspiration!

Mary woke with a start. "Is it a stroke?" she exclaimed. But Willie, with
one frightened look at the window and the long table, slipped from his
chair to kneel, thinking the reading was over. The sound of his little
copper-toed boots upon the floor aroused Mr. Denner; he frowned
portentously. "_So Jephtha passed over unto the children of Ammon_,"
he read on, "_to fight against them, and the Lord delivered them into
his hands_."

When prayers were ended, however, and he was sitting in his library
alone, he said with a subdued glee, "That is the way to do it,--the one
I see first!" And Mr. Denner went to bed with a quiet mind, and the peace
which follows the decision of a momentous question.

CHAPTER XI.

The cold that winter was more persistent and severe in the mountains than
down in Ashurst.

At Lockhaven the river had been frozen over for a month, even above the
bridge and the mills, where the current was swiftest. Long lines of
sawdust, which had been coiling and whirling in the eddies, or stretching
across the black seething water, were caught in the ice, or blown about
with the powdered snow over its surface.

Rafts could not come down the river, so the mills had no work to do, for
the logs on hand at the beginning of the cold snap had been