very many, but all neatly labeled with the
writer's name and the date of their arrival. These Gifford burned, and
the blackened ashes were in the wide fireplace, behind a jug of flowers,
on which he could hear, down the chimney, the occasional splash of a
raindrop. There was one package of letters where the name was "Gertrude;"
there were but few of these, and, had Gifford looked, he would have seen
that the last one, blistered with tears, said that her father had
forbidden further correspondence, and bade him, with the old epistolary
formality from which not even love could escape, "an eternal farewell."
But the tear-stains told more than the words, at least of Mr. Denner's
heart, if not of pretty sixteen-year-old Gertrude's. These were among the
first to be burned; yet how Mr. Denner had loved them, even though
Gertrude, running away with her dancing-master, and becoming the mother
of a family of boys, had been dead these twenty years, and the proverb
had pointed to Miss Deborah Woodhouse!

Some papers had to be sealed, and the few pieces of silver packed, ready
to be sent to the bank in Mercer, and then Gifford had done.

He was in the library, from which the bed had been moved, and which was
in trim and dreary order. The rain still beat fitfully upon the windows,
and the room was quite dark. Gifford had pushed the writing-desk up to
the window for the last ray of light, and now he sat there, the papers
all arranged and nothing more to do, yet a vague, tender loyalty to the
little dead gentleman keeping him. And sitting, leaning his elbows on the
almost unspotted sheet of blue blotting-paper which covered the open flap
of the desk, he fell into troubled thinking.

"Of course," he said to himself, "she's awfully distressed about Mr.
Denner, but there's something more than that. She seems to be watching
for something all the time; expecting that fellow, beyond a doubt. And
why he is not there oftener Heaven only knows! And to think of his going
off on his confounded business at such a time, when she is in such
trouble! If only for a week, he has no right to go and leave her. His
business is to stay and comfort her. Then, when he is at the rectory,
what makes him pay her so little attention? If he wasn't a born cad,
somebody ought to thrash him for his rudeness. If Lois had a
brother!--But I suppose he does not know any better, and then Lois
loves him. Where's Helen's theory now, I wonder? Oh, I suppose she thinks
he