sweeten
its toil and condone its wrongs with music, sat wrapt and silent,
swaying with Jack's voice until they could burst in upon the chorus.
The jasmine vines trilled softly with the afternoon breeze; a slender
yellow-hammer, perhaps emulous of Jack, swung himself from an outer
spray and peered curiously into the room; and a few neighbors, gathering
at their doors and windows, remarked that "after all, when it came to
real singing, no one could beat those d----d niggers."

The sun was slowly sinking in the rolling gold of the river when Jack
and Sophy started leisurely back through the broken shafts of light, and
across the far-stretching shadows of the cottonwoods. In the midst of
a lazy silence they were presently conscious of a distant monotonous
throb, the booming of the up boat on the river. The sound came
nearer--passed them, the boat itself hidden by the trees; but a trailing
cloud of smoke above cast a momentary shadow upon their path. The girl
looked up at Jack with a troubled face. Mr. Hamlin smiled reassuringly;
but in that instant he had made up his mind that it was his moral duty
to kill Mr. Edward Stratton.

IV.

For the next two months Mr. Hamlin was professionally engaged in San
Francisco and Marysville, and the transfer of Sophy from the school to
her new home was effected without his supervision. From letters received
by him during that interval, it seemed that the young girl had entered
energetically upon her new career, and that her artistic efforts were
crowned with success. There were a few Indian-ink sketches, studies made
at school and expanded in her own "studio," which were eagerly bought as
soon as exhibited in the photographer's window,--notably by a florid
and inartistic bookkeeper, an old negro woman, a slangy stable boy, a
gorgeously dressed and painted female, and the bearded second officer of
a river steamboat, without hesitation and without comment. This, as Mr.
Hamlin intelligently pointed out in a letter to Sophy, showed a general
and diversified appreciation on the part of the public. Indeed, it
emboldened her, in the retouching of photographs, to offer sittings
to the subjects, and to undertake even large crayon copies, which had
resulted in her getting so many orders that she was no longer obliged
to sell her drawings, but restricted herself solely to profitable
portraiture. The studio became known; even its quaint surroundings added
to the popular interest, and the origi