teadying industry for which man has no
substitute.

"Upon my word, James, when you desire to exchange confidences, you must
get further away from me."

"You don't mean me to believe you overheard our talk in the library, with
the door closed and the curtain across it." Her acuteness of hearing
often puzzled him, and he had always to ask for proof.

She nodded gay assurance, and said again, ceasing to knit, "I overheard
too much--oh, not all--bits--enough to trouble me. I moved away so as not
to hear. All I care to know is how to be of real service to a friend to
whom we owe so much."

"I want you--in fact, Mark wants you--to hear in full what you know in
part."

"Well, James, I have very little curiosity about the details of the
misfortunes of my friends unless to know is to obtain means of
helpfulness."

"You won't get any here, I fear, but as he has been often strange and
depressed and, as he says, unresponsive to your kindness, he does want
you now to see what cause there was."

"Very well, if he wants it. I see you have a letter."

"Yes, I kept it. It was marked strictly confidential--I hate that--" She
smiled as he added, "It seems to imply the possibility of indiscretion on
my part."

"Oh, James! Oh, you dear man!" and she laughed outright, liking to tease
where she deeply loved, knowing him through and through, as he never
could know her. Then she saw that he was not in the mood for jesting with
an edge to it; nor was she. "At all events, you did not let me see that
letter--now I am to see it."

"Yes, you are to see it. You might at any time have seen it."

"Yes, read it to me."

"When our good Bishop sent Mark Rivers here to us, he wrote me this
letter--"

"Well, go on."

"MY DEAR SIR: I send you the one of my young clergy with whom I am the
most reluctant to part. You will soon learn why, and learning will be
thankful. But to make clear to you why I urge him--in fact, order him to
go--requires a word of explanation. He is now only twenty-six years of
age but looks older. He married young and not wisely a woman who lived a
childlike dissatisfied life, and died after two years. One of his
brothers died an epileptic; the other, a promising lawyer, became insane
and killed himself. This so affected their widowed mother that she fell
into a speechless melancholy and has ever since been in the care of
nurses in a farmer's family--a hopeless case. I became of late alarmed at
his increasing depressi