in
the moral necessity of his so doing.

Leonard's reply was a very brief exhortation to his friend to put away
all thought of resigning, and to take up his work again with the zeal
with which he had first entered upon it.

Mrs. Morris went away refreshed, and left the Byingtons equally so. Her
buoyancy had been as prettily restrained, her sympathies as sweet, her
dimple as unconscious, her belief in everybody's wit and wisdom except
her own as genuine, and her timid dissimulations as kindly meant and as
transparent, as ever. Yet there was an unspoken compassion for her when
she was gone, for in the parting words with which she playfully vaunted
her ignorance of the correspondence she was bearing, it was clear, even
to the General, that behind that small ignorance she had a larger
knowledge,--a fact that made her dainty cheerfulness seem very brave.

* * * * *

The freshets swept down the valleys, the myriad yellow twigs of the
brookside willows turned green, a cheery piping rose from the ponds, the
last gleam of snow passed from the farthest hills, the bluebird sang,
the harrow followed the plough, Ruth's crocuses shone above the greening
sod, and down by the old mill-pool and on the steep hillside beyond it
she and Isabel gathered arbutus, anemones, and the yellow violet. Spring
had come.

Then through the thickening greenery the dogwood shone like belated
drifts, the flashing warblers passed on into the north, the bobolink had
arrived, the robin was already overeating, the whole chorus of birds
that had come to nest and stay broke forth, and it was summer.

Leonard was back in his own town, enriched with new esteem from the
public and from the men of his profession. The noted case was won, a
victory for the peace and dignity of the state, due wholly, it was said,
to the energy and sagacity of the young district attorney. A murder had
been so cunningly done that suspicion could fasten nowhere, until
Byington laid his finger upon a man of so unspotted a name that no one
else had had the mental courage to point to him. Through a long and
masterly untangling of contradictions the state's counsel had so
overwhelmingly proved him guilty that he had confessed without waiting
for the jury's verdict.

"Yes," said many, "it was a great stroke, Leonard's management of that
thing." And not a few added that it had made him an older man--"that or
something." Those who were of his politics, an