an instant
the destiny of half the world. Every restless soul that could break its
moorings was swept westward on the wave of excitement that followed.
Blue Mound felt the magnetism of those bits of yellow metal along with
the rest of the world, and wild stories were told at singing-school and
in harvest fields of the fortunes that awaited those who crossed the
plains.

Lloyd Archer, eager, restless, and discontented, caught the fever among
the first. Marg'et Ann listened to his plans, heartsore and helpless.
She had ceased to advise him. There was a tacit acknowledgment on her
part that she had forfeited her right to influence his life in any way.
As for him, unconsciously jealous of the devotion to duty that made her
precious to him and unable to solve the problem himself, he yet felt
injured that she could not be true to him and to his ideal of her as
well. If she had left the plain path and gone with him into the byways,
his heart would have remained forever with the woman he had loved, and
not with the woman who had so loved him; and yet he sometimes urged her
to do this thing, so strange a riddle is the "way of a man with a maid."

Lloyd had indulged a hope which he could not mention to any one, least
of all to Marg'et Ann, that the minister would marry again in due
season. But nothing pointed to a fulfillment of this wish. The good man
seemed far more interested in the abolition of slavery in the South than
in the release of his daughter from bondage to her own flesh and blood,
Lloyd said to himself, with the bitterness of youth. Indeed, the
household had moved on with so little change in the comfort of its
worthy head that a knowledge of Lloyd's wishes would have been quite as
startling to the object of them as the young man's reasons for their
indulgence.

The gold fever had seemed to the minister a moral disorder, calling for
spiritual remedies, which he had not failed to administer in such
quantity and of such strength as corresponded with the religious
therapeutics of the day.

Marg'et Ann hinted of this when her lover came to her with his plans.

She was making soap, and although they stood on the windward side of the
kettle, her eyes were red from the smoke of the hickory logs.

"Do you think it is just right, Lloyd?" she asked, stirring the unsavory
concoction slowly with a wooden paddle. "Isn't it just a greed for
gold, like gambling?"

Lloyd put both elbows on the top of the ash hopper and looke