e hallway.

Miss Garcide was in bed, sneezing patiently. "I won't be out for weeks,"
said the poor lady, "so you will have to amuse yourself alone."

Miss Castle kissed her and went away lightly down the polished stairs to
the great hall.

The steward came up to wish her good-morning, and to place the resources
of the club at her disposal.

"I don't know," she said, hesitating at the veranda door; "I think a
sun-bath is all I care for. You may hang a hammock under the maples, if
you will. I suppose," she added, "that I am quite alone at the club?"

"One gentleman arrived this morning," said the steward--"Mr. Crawford."

She looked back, poised lightly in the doorway through which the morning
sunshine poured. All the color had left her face. "Mr. Crawford," she
said, in a dull voice.

"He has gone out after trout," continued the steward, briskly; "he is a
rare rod, ma'am, is Mr. Crawford. He caught the eight-pound
fish--perhaps you noticed it on the panel in the billiard-room."

Miss Castle came into the hall again, and stepped over to the register.
Under her signature, "Miss Castle and maid," she saw "J. Crawford, New
York." The ink was still blue and faint.

She turned and walked out into the sunshine.

The future was no longer a gray, menacing future; it had become suddenly
the terrifying present, and its shadow fell sharply around her in the
sunshine.

Now all the courage of her race must be summoned, and must respond to
the summons. The end of all was at hand; but when had a Castle ever
flinched at the face of fate under any mask?

She raised her resolute head; her eyes matched the sky--clear,
unclouded, fathomless.

In hours of deep distress the sound of her own voice had always helped
her to endure; and now, as she walked across the lawn bareheaded, she
told herself not to grieve over a just debt to be paid, not to quail
because life held for her nothing of what she had dreamed.

If there was a tremor now and then in her low voice, none but the robins
heard it; if she lay flung face downward in the grasses, under the
screen of alders by the water, there was no one but the striped chipmunk
to jeer and mock.

"Now listen, you silly girl," she whispered; "he cannot take away the
sky and the sunshine from you! He cannot blind and deafen you, silly!
Cry if you must, you little coward!--you will marry him all the same."

Suddenly sitting up, alert, she heard something singing. It was the
river flowin