rl, over to Bachelor Billy,
who stood leaning against the mantel, and then down again into the
lady's eyes. It was almost pitiful to look into his face and see the
strong emotion outlined there, marking the fierceness of the conflict
in his mind between a great desire for honest happiness and a stern
and manly sense of the right and proper thing for him to do. At last
he spoke.

"Mrs. Burnham," he said, in a sharp voice, "I can't, I can't!"

A look of surprise and pain came into the lady's face.

"Why, Ralph!" she exclaimed, "I thought,--I hoped you would be glad
to go. We would be very good to you; we would try to make you very
happy."

"An' I'll give you half of ev'ry nice thing I have!" spoke out the
girl, impetuously.

"I know, I know!" responded Ralph, "it'd be beautiful, just as it was
that Sunday I was there; an' I'd like to go,--you don't know how I'd
like to,--but I can't! Oh, no! I can't!"

Bachelor Billy was leaning forward, watching the boy intently,
surprise and admiration marking his soiled face.

"Then, why will you not come?" persisted the lady. "What reason have
you, if we can all be happy?"

Ralph stood for a moment in deep thought.

"I can't tell you," he said, at last. "I don't know just how to
explain it, but, some way, after all this that's happened, it don't
seem to me as though I'd ought to go, it don't seem to me as though
it'd be just right; as though it'd be a-doin' what--what--Oh! I can't
tell you. I can't explain it to you so'st you can understand. But I
mus'n't go; indeed, I mus'n't!"

At last, however, the lady understood and was silent.

She had not thought before how this proposal, well meant though it
was, might jar upon the lad's fine sense of honor and of the fitness
of things. She had not realized, until this moment, how a boy,
possessing so delicate a nature as Ralph's, might feel to take a
position now, to which a court and jury had declared he was not
entitled, to which he himself had acknowledged, and to which every one
knew he was not entitled.

He had tried to gain the place by virtue of a suit at law, he had
called upon the highest power in the land to put him into it, and his
effort had not only ended in ignominious failure, but had left him
stamped as a lineal descendant of one whose very name had become a
by-word and a reproach. How could he now, with the remotest sense of
honor or of pride, step into the place that should have been occupied
by Robert Burnh