ss than see Miss Harvey safe home."

Grace hesitated.

"Mrs. Tolchard, I am sure, will walk with us; it would be safer, in
case you felt faint again."

But Mrs. Tolchard would not come to save Grace's notions of propriety;
so Tom passed Grace's arm through his own. She offered to withdraw it.

"No; you will require it. You do not know yet how much you have gone
through. My fear is, that you will feel it all the more painfully when
the excitement is past. I shall send you up a cordial; and you must
promise me to take it. You owe me a little debt you know, to-day; you
must pay it by taking my medicines."

Grace looked up at him sidelong; for there was a playful tenderness
in his voice which was new to her, and which thrilled her through and
through.

"I will indeed, I promise you. But I am so much better now. Really, I
can walk alone!" And she withdrew her arm from his, but not hastily.

After that they walked on awhile in silence. Grace kept her veil
down, for her eyes were full of tears. She loved that man intensely,
utterly. She did not seek to deny it to herself. God had given him to
her, and hers he was. The very sea, the devourer whom she hated, who
hungered to swallow up all young fair life, the very sea had yielded
him up to her, alive from the dead. And yet that man, she knew,
suspected her of a base and hateful crime. It was too dreadful! She
could not exculpate herself, save by blank denial--and what would that
avail? The large hot drops ran down her cheeks. She had need of all
her strength to prevent sobbing.

She looked round. In the bright summer evening, all things were full
of joy and love. The hedge-banks were gay as flower gardens; the
swifts chased each other, screaming harsh delight; the ring-dove
murmured in the wood beneath his world-old song, which she had taught
the children a hundred times--

"Curuckity coo, curuck coo;
You love me, and I love you!"

The woods slept golden in the evening sunlight; and over head brooded,
like one great smile of God, the everlasting blue.

"He will right me!" she said. "'Hold thee still in the Lord, and abide
patiently, and He will make thy righteousness clear as the light, and
thy just dealing as the noon-day!'" And after that thought she wept no
more.

Was it as a reward for her faith that Tom began to talk to her? He had
paced on by her side, serious, but not sad. True, he had suspected
her; he suspected her still. But that scene with the dyin