out, "Tom
Endover always used to come to see us off."

"Of course he did," said Lucy.

"Do you know, I'm rather glad his wife was out of town," went on Mary
Leonard, after a pause. "I should like to have seen her well enough, but
you know she wasn't an Englefield girl."

"What can she know about old Englefield!" said Lucy, with mild contempt.
"I'm very glad she was out of town."

As they left the city behind them, the early morning sun shone forth
with vivid brilliancy. Against the western sky the buildings stood out
with a peculiar distinctness, as if the yellow light shining upon them
was an illumination inherent in themselves, singling them out of the
landscape, and leaving untouched the cold gray behind them. The lines of
brick and stone had the clearness and precision of a photograph, and yet
were idealized, so that in the yellow, mellow, transparent light a tall,
smoke-begrimed chimney of a distant furnace looked airy and delicate as
an Italian tower.

The "Daily Morning Chronicle"

THE village lay still and silent under the observant sun. The village
street stretched in one direction down the hill to the two-miles-off
railway station, and in the other to the large white house with pillared
portico, from which there was a fine view of the sunset, and beyond
which it still continued, purposeful but lonely, until it came suddenly
upon half a dozen houses which turned out to be another village.

Not a man, woman, or child crossed from one house to another; not a dog
or a cat wandered about in the sunshine. The white houses looked as if
no one lived in them; the white church, with its sloping approach,
looked as if no one ever preached in it and no one ever came to it to
listen. It seemed to Lucyet Stevens, as she sat at the little window of
the post-office, behind which her official face looked so much more
important than it ever did anywhere else, as if the village street
itself were listening for the arrival of the noon mail. For it was
nearly time for the daily period of almost feverish activity. By and by
from the station would come Truman Hanks with the leather bag which, in
village and city alike, is the outward and visible sign of the fidelity
of the government. It is probable that he will bring it up in a single
carriage, for though sometimes he takes the two-seated one, in case
there should be a human arrival who would like to be driven up, this
possibility was so slight a one at this time of