ch ran the same risks, only with
better luck." Presently he added:

"I feel tired, Deena--and a little oppressed. Perhaps you had better
ring the bell--but stay. Will you kiss me before you ring?"

She kissed him with a pity that wrung her heart, and he sighed
contentedly and shut his eyes. He only spoke once more, just as the
doctor came to his bedside.

"I should have been glad to see the old house before I die, but it is
just as well as it is."

He was dying all the afternoon, peacefully and gently, and at sunset
the end came.

CHAPTER XI.

Master Richard Shelton sat at the foot of his sister's table
dispensing its hospitalities chiefly to himself. Through some law
unknown to science, all dishes seemed to gravitate toward the main
center of Dicky's trencher, thereby leaving the rest of the table
comparatively bare.

For eighteen months Master Shelton had given Mrs. Ponsonby the
advantage of his company; not so much through volition--albeit, he was
well enough pleased with his quarters--as through submission to
paternal authority.

Conventional ideas are apt to wilt under the blight of poverty, and to
revive under the fuller harvesting of this world's goods, and Mr.
Shelton, Sr., who had, in the days of his leanness, let Polly run wild
with all the college boys of Harmouth, became suddenly particular, as
his bank account fattened, in regard to the niceties of conduct in his
daughters. His scruples even embraced Deena; he said she was too young
a widow to live alone, and a blank sight too handsome, and that either
she must return to the protection of his roof or else receive her
brother under her own. With the docility of the intelligent, she
accepted his fiat, but chose the evil represented by a unit rather
than by the sum total of family companionship.

So she and Dicky had lived together since the day when Simeon had been
laid to rest beside his mother in the churchyard, and Deena had taken
up life with such courage as she could muster in the old house. She
had started out with a long illness, as the result of overtaxed
nerves, and the nurse who had been engaged for Simeon found ample
employment with Simeon's widow; but a good constitution and a quiet
mind are excellent helps toward recovery, and by September she found
herself in admirable health.

Stephen's energies had been absorbed in editing Simeon's book. He had
the assistance of the botanical department of Harmouth, and the book
was produced i