was sold.

Marcus married; he never knew; he had a belles-lettres professorship
in a new college up in D----. He would not take a cent of the farm
money; he had had his share long ago; the four thousand dollars
were invested for Luke. He did the best he could, and all he knew;
but human creatures can never pay each other back. Only God can do
that, either way.

Luclarion did not stay in ----. There were too few there now, and
too many. She came down to Boston. Her two hundred and eighty
dollars a year was very good, as far as it went, but it would not
keep her idle; neither did she wish to live idle. She learned
dress-making; she had taste and knack; she was doing well; she
enjoyed going about from house to house for her days' work, and then
coming back to her snug room at night, and her cup of tea and her
book.

Then it turned out that so much sewing was not good for her; her
health was threatened; she had been used to farm work and "all
out-doors." It was a "stump" again. That was all she called it; she
did not talk piously about a "cross." What difference did it make?
There is another word, also, for "cross" in Hebrew.

Luclarion came at last to live with Mrs. Edward Shiere. And in that
household, at eight and twenty, we have just found her.

III.

BY STORY-RAIL: TWENTY-SIX YEARS AN HOUR.

Laura Shiere did not think much about the "stump," when, in her dark
gray merino travelling dress, and her black ribbons, nicely
appointed, as Mrs. Oferr's niece should be, down to her black kid
gloves and broad-hemmed pocket-handkerchief, and little black straw
travelling-basket (for morocco bags were not yet in those days), she
stepped into the train with her aunt at the Providence Station, on
her way to Stonington and New York.

The world seemed easily laid out before her. She was like a cousin
in a story-book, going to arrive presently at a new home, and begin
a new life, in which she would be very interesting to herself and to
those about her. She felt rather important, too, with her money
independence--there being really "property" of hers to be spoken of
as she had heard it of late. She had her mother's diamond ring on
her third finger, and was comfortably conscious of it when she drew
off her left-hand glove. Laura Shiere's nature had only been
stirred, as yet, a very little below the surface, and the surface
rippled pleasantly in the sunlight that was breaking forth from the
brief clouds.

Among the d