land, and found that he
could bear the sight of the place where he and Lucina had been
together; its strangeness of aspect seemed to place it so far in the
past.

Jerome threw up his head in the thin, sparkling air. "I will have her
yet," he said, quite aloud; and "if I do not, I can bear that."

He felt like one who would crush the stings of fate, even if against
his own heart. He had grown old and thin during the last weeks; he
had worked so hard and resolutely, yet with so little hope; and he
who toils without hope is no better than a slave to his own will.
That day, when he went home, his eyes were bright and his cheeks
glowing. His mother and sister noticed the difference.

"I was afraid he was gettin' all run down," Ann Edwards told Elmira;
"but he looks better to-day."

Elmira herself was losing her girlish bloom. She was one who needed
absolute certainties to quiet distrustful imaginations, and matters
betwixt herself and Lawrence Prescott were less and less on a stable
footing. Lawrence was working hard; she should not have suspected
that his truth towards her flagged, but she sometimes did. He did not
come to see her regularly. Sometimes two weeks went past, sometimes
three, and he had not come. In fact, Lawrence endeavored to come only
when he could do so openly.

"I hate to deceive father more than I can help," he told Elmira, but
she did not understand him fully.

She was a woman for whom the voluntary absence of a lover who yet
loves was almost an insoluble problem, and in that Lucina was not
unlike her. She was not naturally deceptive, but, when it came to
love, she was a Jesuit in conceiving it to sanctify its own ends.

The suspense, the uncertainty, as to her lover coming or not, was
beginning to tell upon her. Every nerve in her slight body was in an
almost constant state of tension.

It was just a week from that day that Jerome and Elmira, being seated
in meeting, saw Lucina enter with her parents and her visiting
friends. Jerome's heart leaped up at the sight of Lucina, then sank
before that of the young man following her up the aisle. "He is going
to marry her; she has forgotten me," he thought, directly.

As for Elmira, she eyed Miss Rose Soley's dark ringlets under the
wide velvet brim of her hat, the crimson curve of her cheek, and the
occasional backward glance of a black eye at Lawrence Prescott seated
directly behind her. When meeting was over, she caught Jerome by the
arm. "Come