stifling. Many, many years ago he had worn the locket there. And now? Now
an impulse seized him, and he yielded to it. He thrust his hand in his
coat and drew out a cowhide wallet, and from the wallet the oval locket
itself. There it was, tarnished with age, but with that memorable
inscription still legible,--"Cynthy, from Jethro"; not Cynthia, but
Cynthy. How the years fell away as he read it! He handed it in silence to
the storekeeper, and in silence went to the window again. Jethro Bass was
a man who could find no outlet for his agony in speech or tears.

"Yes," said Wetherell, "I thought you would have kept it. Dear, dear, how
well I remember it! And I remember how I patronized you when you came
into the shop. I believed I should live to be something in the world,
then. Yes, she loved you, Jethro. I can die more easily now that I have
told you--it has been on my mind all these years."

The locket fell open in William Wetherell's hand, for the clasp had
become worn with time, and there was a picture of little Cynthia within:
of little Cynthia,--not so little now,--a photograph taken in Brampton
the year before. Wetherell laid it beside the daguerreotype.

"She looks like her," he said aloud; "but the child is more vigorous,
more human--less like a spirit. I have always thought of Cynthia Ware as
a spirit."

Jethro turned at the words, and came and stood looking over Wetherell's
shoulder at the pictures of mother and daughter. In the rosewood box was
a brooch and a gold ring--Cynthia Ware's wedding ring--and two small
slips of yellow paper. William Wetherell opened one of these, disclosing
a little braid of brown hair. He folded the paper again and laid it in
the locket, and handed that to Jethro.

"It is all I have to give you," he said, "but I know that you will
cherish it, and cherish her, when I am gone. She--she has been a daughter
to both of us."

"Yes," said Jethro, "I will."

William Wetherell lived but a few days longer. They laid him to rest at
last in the little ground which Captain Timothy Prescott had hewn out of
the forest with his axe, where Captain Timothy himself lies under his
slate headstone with the quaint lettering of bygone days.--That same
autumn Jethro Bass made a pilgrimage to Boston, and now Cynthia Ware
sleeps there, too, beside her husband, amid the scenes she loved so well.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Coniston, Book II., by Winston Churchill

*** END OF THIS PRO