-bark path for a while. She was sure of
nothing. Wherever she had done what seemed to her right and natural, she
was barred and checked by the world's laws and experience. She had brought
these starving wretches out of a hell upon earth into this paradise, and
even they laughed at her want of wisdom: the very money which was her own
in the sight of God, and which had lengthened her father's life, ought to
be given back to-day to the poor, its rightful owners. If there was any
other cause for her to fight blindly against the narrow matter-of-fact
routine which ruled her life, she did not name it even to herself.

Looking toward the house, she saw her father escorting their guests to the
gate, where the carriage waited, David resplendent on the box. The captain
walked with a feeble kind of swagger: his voice came back to her in weak
gusts of laughter. She laid her hand on a tree, glancing about her with a
firm sense of possession. "The property is mine," she said, "and I'll keep
it as long as he lives, if all the paupers in the United States were
starving at the gates!"

CHAPTER XII.

Mr. Van Ness returned to the Hemlock Farm at stated periods during the
summer. He had, to be plain, sat down before Jane's heart to besiege it
with the same ponderous benign calm with which he ate an egg or talked of
death. There was a bronze image of Buddha in the hall at the Farm, the gaze
of the god fixed with ineffable content, as it had been for ages, on his
own stomach.

Jane went up to it one day after an hour's talk with Mr. Van Ness. "This
creature maddens me," she said. "I always want to break it into pieces to
see it alter."

Little Mr. Waring, who had come with Van Ness, hurried up as a connoisseur
in bronzes, adjusting his eye-glasses. "Why, it is faultless, Miss
Swendon!" he cried.

"That is precisely what makes it intolerable."

Much of Jane's large, easy good-humor was gone by this time. She had grown
thin, was eager, restless, uncertain of what she ought or ought not to do,
even in trifles.

Mr. Waring and Judge Rhodes were both at the Farm now. They ran over to New
York every week or two. Phil Waring was not a marrying man, but it was part
of his duty as a leader in society to be intimate with every important
heiress or beauty in the two cities. Out of sincere compassion to Jane's
stupendous ignorance he would sit for hours stroking his moustache, his
elbows on his knees, his feet on a rung of the chair, dr