ulations in the game of hearts.

To him such flight signified the indeterminate continuance of his
sister's maiden singleness and a like prolongation of her lover's
galling suspense. To Ruth it stood not only for the loss of her brother,
but for the narrowing of their father's already narrowed life,--a
narrowing which might come to mean a shortening as well; and it meant
also the leaving of Isabel and Arthur to their mistake and to their
unskilfulness slowly and patiently to work out its cure. To go away
were, for him, to consent to be the one unbroken string on a noble but
difficult instrument. These thoughts and many more like them passed to
and fro, out through the abstracted eyes of the one, across to the
fading clouds, and back through the abstracted eyes and into the
responding heart of the other.

At length the sister rose. "I must go to father," she said.

The brother stood up. Their eyes exchanged a gentle gaze and tenderly
contracted.

"I will come presently," he replied, and was turning toward the water,
when he paused, threw a hand toward the steep wood across the pool, and
silently bade her listen.

The note he had remotely heard was rare on Bylow Hill since the town had
come in below, and one of the errands which oftenest brought the hill's
dwellers to this nook in solitary pairs was to hearken for that voice of
unearthly rapture,--a rapture above all melancholy and beyond all
mirth,--the call of the hermit thrush.

Now the waiting seemed in vain. The brother's hand sank, the sister
turned, and soon he saw her pass from view among the boughs as she wound
up the rambling path toward the three homes.

At the top she halted, still longing to hear at his side that marvellous
wood-note, and was just starting on once more, when from the same
quarter as before it came again, with new and fervent clearness. With
noiseless foot she sprang back down the bendings of the path, having no
other thought but to find her brother standing as she had left him, a
rapt hearer of the heavenly strain.

She reached the spot, but found no hearkening or standing form. The
young man's stalwart frame lay prone on the green bank, where he had
thrown himself the moment she had left his sight, and his face was
buried in the deep moss.

The stir of her swift coming reached his ear barely in time for him,
as she choked down a cry that had all but escaped her, to turn upon
his back, meet her glance, and drive the agony from his