and unsmiling cottages,
fronting on cinder sidewalks, and alternating irregularly with about as
many larger homesteads that sat back in their well-shaded gardens with
kindlier dignity and not so grim a self-assertion. Behind, on the west,
these gardens dropped swiftly out of sight to a hidden brook, from the
farther shore of which rose the great wooded hill whose shelter from the
bitter northwest had invited the old Puritan founders to choose the spot
for their farming village of one street, with a Byington and a Winslow
for their first town officers. In front, eastward, the land declined
gently for a half mile or so, covered, by modern prosperity, with a
small, stanch town, and bordered by a pretty river winding among meadows
of hay and grain. At the northern end, instead of this gentle decline,
was a precipitous cliff side, close to whose brow a wooden bench, that
ran half-way round a vast sidewalk tree, commanded a view of the valley
embracing nearly three-quarters of the compass.

In civilian's dress, and with only his sea-bronzed face and the polished
air of a pivot gun to tell that he was of the navy, Lieutenant Godfrey
Winslow was slowly crossing the rural way with Ruth Byington at his
side. He had the look of, say, twenty-eight, and she was some four years
his junior. From her father's front gate they were passing toward the
large grove garden of the young man's own home, on the side next the
hill and the sunset. On the front porch, where the two had just left
him, sat the war-crippled father of the girl, taking pride in the
placidity of the face she once or twice turned to him in profile,
and in the buoyancy of her movements and pose.

His fond, unspoken thought went after her, that she was hiding some care
again,--her old, sweet trick, and her mother's before her.

He looked on to Godfrey. "There's endurance," he thought again. "You
ought to have taken him long ago, my good girl, if you want him at all."
And here his reflections faded into the unworded belief that she would
have done so but for his, her own father's, being in the way.

The pair stopped and turned half about to enjoy the green-arched vista
of the street, and Godfrey said, in a tone that left his companion no
room to overlook its personal intent, "How often, in my long absences,
I see this spot!"

"You wouldn't dare confess you didn't," was her blithe reply.

"Oh yes, I should. I've tried not to see it, many a time."

"Why, Godfrey Winslo