Him."

Mrs. Allison was one of those good souls who saw no harm in the vilest
of creatures; faults were hidden by her veil of sympathy. When
distressing reverses or abject despair visited any one, Mrs. Allison's
affability and indescribable tenderness smoothed over the troubled
situation and brought forth a gleam of gladness. Quiet, kindly,
magnanimous, tolerant, she could touch hearts to the depths in a manner
both winning and lasting. Whether the fault entailed a punishment
undeserved or inevitable, her feeling of pity was excited. She always
sympathized without accusing or probing the source of the evil. She
stretched forth a helping hand merely to aid. No nature, however hard,
could be impervious to the sympathy and the sweetness of her
affectionate disposition.

Motherly was the quality written full upon Mrs. Allison's face. Her
thoughts, her schemes, her purposes, her ambitions of life, were all
colored by this maternal attribute. In her daily homage and obeisance to
God, Whom she worshiped with the most childlike faith and simplicity; in
the execution of the manifold duties of her home, Marjorie was to her
ever a treasure of great price. She was sustained in her aims and
purposes by an enduring power of will,--a power clothed with the soft,
warm, living flesh of a kindly heart.

Her marriage with Matthew Allison had been happy, a happiness
intensified and concretely embodied in Marjorie, the only child
vouchsafed to them by the Creator. How often, at the time when the
deepening shadows moved their way across the dimming landscape,
announcing to the work worn world the close of another day, would she
sit for a brief while in silence and take complacence in the object of
her hopes and aspirations! It was Marjorie for whom she lived and toiled
and purposed. And it was Marjorie who embodied the sum-total of her
fancies and ambitions and aspirations, and translated them into definite
forms and realities.

III

A beautiful landscape unrolled itself before Stephen as he leisurely
rode along the Germantown road. The midsummer sun was now high in the
heavens, with just a little stir in the air to temper its warmth and
oppressiveness. Fragments of clouds, which seemed to have torn
themselves loose from some great heap massed beyond the ridge of low
hills to the westward, drifted lazily across the waste of blue sky,
wholly unconcerned as to their ultimate lot or destination. Breaths of
sweet odor, from freshly c