ds sat down before the fire,
where, looking through the blue wreaths, they seemed to gain a soothing
and an inspiration. The missionary gave to his host a brief history of
his life with Della, of her sickness and death, and then incidentally
gave a sketch here and there of his own youth. We will commence where he
left off, giving but the substance in brief, instead of his own words,
so often interspersed with irrelevant allusions and interrupted by
remark and question.

Philip St. Leger was the son of a sea captain. His youth, of course, he
spent mostly at school, its monotony varied more than once by a
prolonged voyage with his father at sea. His mother was a woman of
society, and left her children much to the care of servants.
Consequently, she had much trouble with them in after years. Philip was
the oldest child. He was naturally good-dispositioned and tractable;
but, owing to a false system of training, became headstrong and
altogether beyond maternal control.

At the age of nineteen, after a wild and fruitless career at college,
and after repeated suspensions, he was really expelled near the
beginning of the senior year. To his parents this was a severe
mortification, and his father, being at that moment at home, sent him to
some distant cousins, who lived among the white hills of New Hampshire.

Colonel Selby, in whose family Philip found himself domiciled, was a
fine specimen of the country gentleman. Genial, hospitable, full of wit
and anecdote, he was also a member of the Baptist Church, an ex-Senator
of the United States, and ex-Governor of his own State. His eldest son
was married, his youngest still in college, and his only daughter, about
the age of twenty-two, was still an almost idolized child beneath her
father's roof. The mother of these children had died a few years
previously, and a widow from the city had supplied her place in the
father's home and heart.

Philip St. Leger, black-haired, black-eyed, melancholy and romantic in
look, cityfied and aristocratic in air and manner, attracted much
attention among the simple people of the quiet town of Newberg. He could
not help perceiving that, for the first time in his life, he had become
a veritable lion. The very fact that he was Col. Selby's guest and
relative gave to him importance; another fact, that he was the son of a
wealthy sea captain from a distant city, was all-powerful.

It had indeed crept out somehow that he had been wild and extravaga