ich the flood had not reached.

Cheeseman stared at him. "What on airth are you settin' down there
for?" he asked.

"I'm going, pretty soon," Jerome replied.

"You'll catch your death, settin' there in those wet clothes. Come,
git up and go home."

Jerome did not stir; his white face was set straight ahead; he
muttered something which the other could not hear. Cheeseman looked
at him perplexedly. He laid hold of his shoulder and shook him again,
and ordered him angrily, with no avail; then set off himself. He was
old, and the chill of his wet clothes was stealing through him.

Not long afterwards Jerome went down the road towards home. Half way
there he met a hurrying man, belated for the tragic drama on the
village stage.

"Hullo!" he called, excitedly. "Your mill gone?"

"Yes."

"Dam gone?"

"Yes."

"Gosh! Bridge gone?"

"Don't know."

"Gosh! if I ain't quick, I'll miss the whole show," cried the man,
with a spurt ahead; but, after all, he stopped a moment and looked
back curiously at Jerome plodding down the flooded road, his weary
figure bent stiffly, with the slant of his own dejectedness, athwart
the pelting slant of the storm.

Chapter XXXVI

Jerome, when his mill went down, felt that his dearest hope in life
went with it. His fighting spirit did not fail him; he had not the
least inclination to settle back for the buffets of fate; but the
combat henceforth would be for honor only, not victory. He felt that
his defeats had established themselves in an endless ratio to his
efforts.

"I shall go to work again, and save up money for a new mill. I shall
build it after a long while; but something will always happen to put
me back, and I shall never marry her," he told himself.

Had he the money with which he had made good his father's loss, he
could have rebuilt in a short time, but he did not consider the
possibility of taking that and, perhaps, supplementing it by a loan
from his father. "It would break the old man's heart to touch his
money," he said, "and the mill might go again, and it would all be
lost."

On the morning after the destruction of his mill, Squire Eben Merritt
came to Jerome's door, and gave him a daintily folded little note.
"Lucina sent this to you," he said, and eyed him with a sort of sad
keenness as he took it and thanked him in a bewildered fashion, his
haggard face reddening.

The Squire himself looked as if he had passed a sleepless night, his
fresh color