n. Here, suddenly, Ray remembered the purse in his haversack,
containing all his uncounted pay. It was a weary while that he stayed
alone in the cold, leaning over it as if he stared at the thirty pieces
of silver, a faint sickness seized him, then hurriedly sweeping it up,
with a red spot burning cruelly into either cheek, he brought it down,
and emptied it in little Jane's lap, though he would rather have seen it
ground to impalpable dust. But, after a moment's thought, the astonished
recipient kept it for a use of her own. Finally, one night, Ray proposed
to instruct Janet in some particular branch of his general ignorance;
and after those firelight-recitations, little Jane forgot to move her
seat away, and her hand was kept in his through all the hour of Vivia's
slow enchantment.

So the cold weather wore away, and spring stole into the scene like a
surprise, finding Vivia as the winter found her,--but Ray still
undergoing volcanic changes, now passionless lulls and now rages and
spasms of grief: gradually out of them all he gathered his strength
about him.

It was once more a morning of early June, sunrise was blushing over the
meadows, and the gossamers of hoar dew lay in spidery veils of woven
light and melted under the rosy beams. From her window one heard Vivia
singing, and the strain stole down like the breath of the heavy
honeysuckles that trellised her pane:--

"No more for me the eager day
Breaks its bright prison-bars;
The sunshine Thou hast stripped away,
But bared the eternal stars.

"Though in the cloud the wild bird sings,
His song falls not for me,
Alone while rosy heaven rings,--
But, Lord, alone with Thee!"

One well could know, in listening to the liquid melody of those clear
tones, that love and sorrow had transfused her life at last to woof and
warp of innermost joy that death itself could neither tarnish nor
obscure. In a few moments she came down and joined Ray, where he stood
upon the door-stone, with one arm resting over the shoulder of little
Jane, and watched with him the antics of a youth who postured before
them. It was some old acquaintance of Ray's, returned from the war; and
as if he would demonstrate how wonderfully martial exercise supples
joint and sinew, he was leaping in the air, turning his heel where his
toe should be, hanging his foot on his arm and throwing it over his
shoulder in a necklace, skipping and prancing on the grass li