defeat and their hopes in such a way as to save
distress to her father. She wound up by simply asking her mother to get
Dr. Rathbone to impart as much information as he deemed advisable to his
patient.

They were a very depressed lot at Dixon's cottage that evening. Dixon
was never anything else but taciturn, and the disappointment of the day
was simply revolving in his mind with the monotonous regularity of a
grindstone. They had lost, and that's all there was about it. Why talk
it over? It could do no good. He would nurse up Lucretia, and work back
into her by mile gallops a fitting strength for the Brooklyn Derby. With
incessant weariness he rocked back and forth, back and forth in the big
Boston rocker; while Allis, at a little table in a corner of the room,
sought to compose the letter she wished to send home.

With apathetic indifference the girl heard a constrained knock at the
cottage door; she barely looked up as Dixon opened to a visitor. It was
Crane who entered.

At almost any other time his visit would have been unpleasant. In
his presence even the most trivial conversation seemed shrouded in a
background of interested intentions; but to-night Dixon's constrained
depression weighed heavy on her spirits and irritated her.

"Luck was against you to-day, Dixon," exclaimed the visitor.

"They were too strong for the little mare," answered the Trainer,
curtly. "Our cast-off won, of course, but there were a half dozen in the
race that would have beaten Lucretia, I fancy."

Allis looked inquiringly at the Trainer; he had not talked that way to
her. Then a light dawned upon the girl. She had not associated Dixon
with diplomacy in her mind, she knew that he could maintain a golden
silence, but here he was, actually throwing out to the caller a
disparaging estimate of Lucretia's powers. This perpetual atmosphere of
duplicity was positively distasteful. In the free gallop of the horses
there was nothing but an inspiration to honest endeavor; but in this
subtle diplomacy Allis detected the touch of defilement which her
mother so strongly resented. Perhaps to-night she was more sensitive
to depressing influences; at any rate she felt a great weariness of
the whole business. Then the spirit of resolve rose in open rebellion
against these questionings; almost Jesuitical she became at once. What
mattered the ways or means, so that she did no wrong? Was not the saving
of her father's health and spirit, and his and her