er miracle became
temporarily inactive.

Two years had gone when there came to her a little package, through the
Tiverton mail. It was tied with the greatest caution, and directed in a
straggling hand. Mary opened it just as she struck into the Gully Road,
on her way home. Inside was a little purse, and three gold pieces. She
paused there, under the branches, the purse in one hand, and the gold
lying within her other palm. For a long time she stood looking at them,
her face set in that patient sadness seen in those whose only holding is
the past. It was all over and done, and yet it had never been at all.
She thought a little about herself, and that was very rare, for Mary.
She was not the poorer for what her soul desired; she was infinitely the
richer, and she remembered the girl at Southport, not with the pang that
once afflicted her heart, but with a warm, outrushing sense of womanly
sympathy. If he had money, perhaps he could marry. Perhaps he was
married now. Coming out of the Gully Road, she opened the purse again,
and the sun struck richly upon the gold within. Mary smiled a little,
wanly, but still with a sense of the good, human kinship in life.

"I won't ever spend 'em," she said to herself. "I'll keep 'em to bury
me."

A STOLEN FESTIVAL

David Macy's house stood on the spur of a breezy upland at the end of a
road. The far-away neighbors, who lived on the main highway and could
see the passin', often thanked their stars that they had been called to
no such isolation; you might, said they, as well be set down in the
middle of a pastur'. They wondered how David's Letty could stand it. She
had been married 'most a year, and before that she was forever on the
go. But there! if David Macy had told her the sun rose in the west,
she'd ha' looked out for it there every identical mornin'.

The last proposition had some color in it; for Letty was very much in
love. To an impartial view, David was a stalwart fellow with clear gray
eyes and square shoulders, a prosperous yeoman of the fibre to which
America owes her being. But according to Letty he was something
superhuman in poise and charm. David had no conception of his heroic
responsibilities; nothing could have puzzled him more than to guess how
the ideal of him grew and strengthened in her maiden mind, and how her
after-worship exalted it into something thrilling and passionate, not
to be described even by a tongue more facile than hers. Letty had a
vi