his
transaction between herself and Rube but a repetition, under a
somewhat different formula, of those mathematical problems worked out
on her slate at school? It was all very simple.

Young woman, if you were in Mell's place; if you had six good reasons
for not telling the man you are about to marry that you did not care a
straw about him, wouldn't you hold your peace?

Then cast no stones at Mell.

Mell _was_ deeply moved by Rube's words, but not deep enough to damage
her future prospects. And since a woman has very poor prospects
outside of matrimony, ought we not to excuse her for attending closely
to business?

At all events, although Mell's thoughts were heavy, and her soul
stirred within her, and her thick breathing almost stifled in a
painful sense of guilt, she did not say a word. Feeling that Rube's
eyes were fixed upon her, she raised to him her own, suffused in
tears; an answer which fully satisfied her companion. From which it
will appear that a woman may weep for the man she takes in--weep, and
yet keep on taking him in.

And what can a man do? How could Rube tell that it was the hidden
pathos of his own groundless faith, and not a feeling of sympathetic
affection, which brought such softness of expression into that girl's
luminous orbs?

If the actual is the only true thing, and amounts to everything, as it
really does in the school of Realism, there is still one difficulty to
be encountered--to get hold of the actual. He who aspires to find out
the actual, where a woman is concerned, must get himself another kind
of eye, one whose vision is introspective and able to penetrate into
that mysterious element in a clever woman's nature which enables her
so successfully to clothe the Not-True in the beautiful garments of
Truth.

Rube Rutland felt uncertain about a good many things--his own strength
under temptation, his mother's consent to this marriage, Clara's
temper, the great sea serpent, the Pope's infallibility, the man in
the Iron Mask, and many a cock-and-bull story beside, but he never
once doubted Mell Creecy's love, the purest myth among them all.

He came, after this, every day to the little house upon the hill, and
had it out "comferterble in the parler," as old man Creecy had advised
Jerome to do. He courted with the enthusiasm of an incorrigible
faddist over a new fad; and no lover of those olden days of which he
had spoken, when goodly knights tilted in the jousts of arms, and won