ot told you that, too?"

"And about experience of life making us care the more for those who fail
in everything?"--he waited a moment. "You have not mentioned that that
was a mistake also. I wish you'd stop looking out of that confounded
window," he added irritably, "and look at me. Heaven knows I've failed
in some things!"

She laughed a little at his tone, but she did not follow his suggestion.

"Oh, no," she said, "you have succeeded."

"And that means--what?"

"I told you I was sitting among the ruins of my theories," she said,
while a faint color, which he saw with sudden pleasure, rose in her
cheek.

"That adverse theory--has that gone too?"

"I have had enough of theories," she declared softly. "What I really
care for is success."

Her Neighbors' Landmark

THE sun had not quite disappeared behind the horizon, though the days no
longer extended themselves into the long, murmurous twilight of summer;
instead, the evening fell with a certain definiteness, precursor of the
still later year.

On the step of the door that led directly into the living-room of his
rambling house sat Reuben Granger, an old man, bent with laborious
seasons, and not untouched by rheumatism. The wrinkles on his face were
many and curiously intertwined; his weather-beaten straw hat seemed to
supply any festal deficiency indicated by the shirt-sleeves; and his dim
eyes blinked with shrewdness upon the dusty road, along which, at
intervals, a belated wagon passed, clattering. His days of usefulness
were not over, but he had reached the age when one is willing to spend
more time looking on. He had always been tired at this hour of the day,
but it was only of late that fatigue had had a certain numbing effect,
which disinclined him to think of the tasks of tomorrow. He came to this
period of repose rather earlier nowadays, and after less sturdy
labor--somehow, a great deal of the sturdy labor got itself done without
him; and there was an acquiescence in even this dispensation perceptible
in the fall of his knotted hands and the tranquil gaze of his faded
eyes.

About a dozen yards beyond him, on the doorstep leading directly into
the living-room of a house which joined the other, midway between two
windows (the union marked by a third doorway unused and boarded up,
around whose stone was the growth of decades), sat Stephen Granger. His
weather-beaten straw hat shaded eyes dim also, but still keen; and a
network of curious w