round her little finger; that she had only to
beckon to him and he would follow her to the ends of the earth. Now fear
had entered her heart. She no longer felt sure, because she no longer
felt worthy, of him, and feeling both uncertainty and unworthiness, her
lips were sealed and she was rendered incapable of making any bid for
forgiveness.

So the little world of Pleasant River went on, to all outward seeming,
as it had ever gone. On one side of the stream a girl's heart was
longing, and pining, and sickening, with hope deferred, and growing,
too, with such astonishing rapidity that the very angels marveled! And
on the other, a man's whole vision of life an duty was widening and
deepening under the fructifying influence of his sorrow.

The corn waved high and green in front of the vacant riverside cottage,
but Stephen sent no word or message to Rose. He had seen her once, but
only from a distance. She seemed paler and thinner, he thought,--the
result; probably, of her metropolitan gayeties. He heard no rumor of any
engagement, and he wondered if it were possible that her love for Claude
Merrill had not, after all, been returned in kind. This seemed a wild
impossibility. His mind refused to entertain the supposition that any
man on earth could resist falling in love with Rose, or, having fallen
in, that he could ever contrive to climb out. So he worked on at his
farm harder than ever, and grew soberer and more careworn daily. Rufus
had never seemed so near and dear to him as in these weeks when he had
lived under the shadow of threatened blindness. The burning of the barn
and the strain upon their slender property brought the brothers
together shoulder to shoulder.

"If you lose your girl, Steve," said the boy, "and I lose my eyesight,
and we both lose the barn, why, it'll be us two against the world, for a
spell!"

The "To Let" sign on the little house was an arrant piece of hypocrisy.
Nothing but the direst extremity could have caused him to allow an alien
step on that sacred threshold. The plowing up of the flower-beds and
planting of the corn had served a double purpose. It showed the too
curious public the finality of his break with Rose and her absolute
freedom; it also prevented them from suspecting that he still entered
the place. His visits were not many, but he could not bear to let the
dust settle on the furniture that he and Rose had chosen together; and
whenever he locked the door and went back to the