those pamphlets, which I'll surely send."

He had the courage to look once more into her brown eyes, with their
red-gold deeps, as he shook hands. The clasp of her hand was firm and
frank.

"Good-by! I hope I shall see you again. My address is always Des
Moines, though I'm on the road a great deal."

Out into the open air again he passed like a man sanctified. It seemed
impossible that he had not only seen her, but had retained his
self-possession, and had actually dared to ask permission to write to
her!

The red-gold sunlight was flaming across the snow, and the shadows
stood out upon the shining expanse vivid as stains in ink. The sky,
aflame with orange and gold clouds, was thrown into loftier relief by
the serrate blue rim of trees that formed the western horizon. As he
walked, he had a reckoning with himself. It could not longer be
delayed.

He had been a boy to this day, but that hour made him a man, and he
knew he was a lover. Not that he used that word, for like the farm-born
man that he was, he did not say, "I love her," but he lifted his face
to the sky in an unuttered resolution to be worthy her.

He had come under the spell of her womanly presence. He had seen her in
her house-dress, and his admiration for her intellect and beauty had
added to itself a subtle quality, which rose from the potential
husbandship and fatherhood within him.

Now that he was out of her immediate presence, thoughts came thick and
fast. Every word she had spoken seemed to have a magical power of
arousing long trains of speculation. He walked far out into the quiet
evening, walked until he grew calmer, and the emotion of the hour faded
to a luminous golden dusk in his mind as the day changed into the
beautiful winter night.

As he sat down at his desk, an hour later, he saw a letter lying there.
It was one of Nettie's poor little school-girl love letters. A feeling
of disgust and shame seized him. He crumpled the letter in his hands,
and was on the point of throwing it away, when his mood changed, and he
softened. By the side of Miss Wilbur poor little Nettie was a willful
child.

* * * * *

A few days after there came to him a pamphlet directed in a woman's
hand. Its title page struck him as something utterly new, but it was
only the first of a flood of similar publications.

"The Coming Conflict. A Series of Lectures prophetic of the Coming
Revolution of the Poor, when they