is the meaning of it?"

"This is my house, my darling. There is our friend who gave it to us.
You will need to teach no more. The mill and a little farm surrounding
us will make us independent."

Podge turned to Duff Salter.

"How kind of you!" she said. "Yet it frightens me the more. These
surprises, tender as they are, excite me. Everything about you is
mysterious. You are not even deaf as you were. What silly things you may
have heard us say."

"Dear girl," exclaimed Duff Salter, "nothing which I heard from your
lips ever affected me except to love you. You cured me of years of
suspicion, and I consented to hear again. The world grew candid to me;
its sounds were melodious, its silence was sincere. It is you who are
deaf. You cannot hear my heart."

"I hear no other's, at least," said Podge. "Tell me the story of your
strange deceit."

They drew chairs upon the lawn. Podge took off her bonnet and looked
very delicate as her color rose and faded alternately in the emotions of
one wooed in earnest and uncertain of her fate.

"I have not come by money without hard labor," said the hale and
handsome man. "This gray beard is not the creation of many years. It is
the fruit of anxiety, toil, and danger. My years are not double yours."

"You have recovered at least one of your faculties since I knew you,"
said Podge slyly.

"You mean hearing. The sense of feeling too, perhaps--which you have
lost. But this is my tale: After I went to Mexico, and became the
superintendent of a mine, I found my nature growing hard and my manner
imperious, not unlike those of my dead friend, William Zane. The hot
climate of Mexico and confinement in the mines, hundreds of feet below
the surface and in the salivating fumes of the cinnabar retorts,
assisted to make me impetuous. I fought more than one duel, and, like
all men who do desperate things, grew more desperate by experience
until, upon one occasion, I was made deaf by an explosion in the bowels
of the ground. For one year I could hear but little. In that year I was
comparatively humble, and one day I heard a workman say, 'If the boss
gets his hearing back there will be no peace about the mine.' This set
me to thinking. 'How much of my suspicion and anger,' I said, 'is the
result of my own speaking. I provoked the distemper of which I am
afflicted. I start the inquiries which make me distrustful. I hear the
echo of my own idle words, and impeach my fellow-man upon it. Until I