r all, and toss her
what she did not value! How dared--Heaven? Was it Heaven she was
defying? Ah! she must not lose her soul, Heaven knew she would not lose
her soul--for Jim's sake!

She opened her clenched hands and smoothed out the checks, patiently,
meekly; and then she went on with the bills, a strange calm in her
mind, different from the calm of the last three days.

And then, for the first time, it struck her that the bills were all made
out to Jim.

JAMES BIXBY,
to HIRAM ROGERS, Dr.
to JAMES WILKINS, Dr.
to FIELDS & LYMAN, Dr.

It was his name that would have been disgraced, not hers; his memory
would have been stained. She turned white with terror of the danger
past.

After a while she put the bills aside, and drew out her folios of
pressed flowers. It seemed a hundred years since she had worked upon
them. How exquisite they were, those delicate ghosts of flowers;--the
regal columbine, the graceful gilia, coreopsis gleaming golden,
anemones, pale and soft. How they kept their loveliness when life was
past! They were only flower memories, but how fair they were, and how
lasting! No frost to blight them, no winds to tear their silken petals
any more! Well might they outlast the hand that pressed them!

And soon Marietta found herself doing the old, accustomed work with all
the old skill, and with a new grace and delicacy of touch. And when the
friends in her old home which she had left for Jim's sake, urged her to
come back to them, she answered, no;--she would rather stay in Colorado
and do her flower-books;--adding, in a hand that scrawled more than
usual with the effort for composure:

"They are my consolation."

XI.

A STROKE IN THE GAME.

The mining boom was off, and Springtown was feeling the reaction as
severely as so sanguine and sunny a little place was capable of doing.
To one who had witnessed, a year or more previous, the rising of the
tide of speculation, whose tossing crest had flung its glittering drops
upon the loftiest and firmest rocks of the business community, the
streets of the little Rocky Mountain town had something the aspect of
the shore at low tide. Such a witness was Harry Wakefield, if, indeed, a
man may be said to have "witnessed" a commotion which has swept him off
his feet and whirled him about like a piece of driftwood. It was, to be
sure, quite in the character of a piece of driftwood that Wakefield had
let himsel