wn. He'd been a fool and a dupe, he knew and realized it, but
Elmendorf had so preached about his higher destiny and the absolute
certainty of triumph and victory if they but made one grand concerted
effort, that he had staked all on the result, and lost it. He knew it
was all up with the strikers when once the general government said stop,
and so had gone home, to be greeted by the tidings that his mother was
sick unto death. Jenny was there, calm, brave, silent, full of resource,
but, oh, so pale and wan! She had employed the best physician to be had,
but she alone would be nurse. She never reproached, never chided him for
his long absence when most needed. Then had followed a few days of
sorrow and suspense, and then the gentle, harmless, helpless,
purposeless life fluttered away. Jenny paid all the bills, the doctor,
the undertaker, everything, and Mart tried vainly to get some work; but
he was a marked man. Then, the day after Jenny had settled up everything
and made herself some simple mourning garb, she went to resume her
duties at the library, and came back in a little while, white and ill,
and she had been very ill since,--out of her head at times, he believed,
said Mart, and he had gone and got the doctor whom she had employed for
her mother, a kind fellow who had been unremitting in his attentions,
and who told him bluntly to shut up when he talked about not knowing
where the money was to come from to pay him, and said that that little
woman was worth ten times her weight in gold, which, said Mart, was
God's truth, as he himself ought to have had sense enough to know
before.

Little by little, as they walked homeward together, Cranston's orderly
riding with the horses along the street, and dozens of people turning
curiously to gaze at the cavalry officer and the late striker, it began
to dawn upon Cranston that Mart's sister, who was worth so much more
than her weight in gold, was the very Miss Wallen who had been so oddly
unwilling to write at his dictation the letter to Elmendorf. Arrived at
the house, he was sure of it, for there, with solemn face, was Mr.
Wells. "My wife," said he, "is up-stairs, trying to see what she can do.
This is Martin Wallen, is it?--Well, Martin, I regret exceedingly to
hear you assaulted Mr. Elmendorf to-day--and didn't kill him."

Manifestly Mr. Wells was not a proper person for the position he held,
being far too impulsive in speech for a bookish man; but then Wells had
been s