it shakily after that, and that night she had slept
badly. The next morning they had gone over it again. "You fainted
when the kitten's paw was crushed in the door."

"It was dreadful----"

"And you cried when I cut my foot with the hatchet and we were out in
the woods. And if you are going to be a doctor you'll have to look at
people who are crushed and cut----"

"Oh, please, Randy----"

Three days of such intensive argument had settled it. Becky decided
that it was, after all, better to be an authoress. "There was Louisa
Alcott, you know, Randy."

He was scornful. "Women weren't made for that--to sit in an attic and
write. Why do you keep talking about doing things, Becky? You'll get
married when you grow up and that will be the end of it."

"I am not going to get married, Randy."

"Well, of course you will, and I shall marry and be a lawyer like my
father, and perhaps I'll go to Congress."

Later he had a leaning towards the ministry. "If I preached I could
make the world better, Becky."

That was the time when she had come down for Hallowe'en, and it was on
Sunday evening that they had talked it over in the Bird Room at
Huntersfield. There had been a smouldering fire on the wide hearth,
and the Trumpeter Swan had stared down at them with shining eyes. They
had been to church that morning and the text had been, "The harvest is
past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

"I want to make the world better, Becky,"

Randy had said in the still twilight, and Becky had answered in an awed
tone, "It would be so splendid to see you in the pulpit, Randy, wearing
a gown like Dr. Hodge."

But the pulpit to Randy had meant more than that. And the next day
when they walked through the deserted mill town, he had said,
"Everybody is dead who lived here, and once they were alive like us."

She had shivered, "I don't like to think of it."

"It's a thing we've all got to think of. I like to remember that
Thomas Jefferson came riding through and stopped at the mill and talked
to the miller."

"How dreadful to know that they are--dead."

"Mother says that men like Jefferson never die. Their souls go
marching on."

The stream which ground the county's corn was at their feet. "But what
about the miller?" Becky had asked; "does his soul march, too?"

Randy, with the burden of yesterday's sermon upon him, hoped that the
miller was saved.

He smiled now as he thought of the rigidness of his boyi