t morning sunlight, those emerald fields,
those thronging numbers, the old women with their prayers, and the
little boys with their living burdens, it seems to me that the day was
worth all it cost, and more.

POOR RICHARD.

A STORY IN THREE PARTS.

PART III.

In country districts, where life is quiet, incidents do duty as events;
and accordingly Captain Severn's sudden departure for his regiment
became very rapidly known among Gertrude's neighbors. She herself heard
it from her coachman, who had heard it in the village, where the Captain
had been seen to take the early train. She received the news calmly
enough to outward appearance, but a great tumult rose and died in her
breast. He had gone without a word of farewell! Perhaps he had not had
time to call upon her. But bare civility would have dictated his
dropping her a line of writing,--he who must have read in her eyes the
feeling which her lips refused to utter, and who had been the object of
her tenderest courtesy. It was not often that Gertrude threw back into
her friends' teeth their acceptance of the hospitality which it had been
placed in her power to offer them; but if she now mutely reproached
Captain Severn with ingratitude, it was because he had done more than
slight her material gifts: he had slighted that constant moral force
with which these gifts were accompanied, and of which they were but the
rude and vulgar token. It is but natural to expect that our dearest
friends will accredit us with our deepest feelings; and Gertrude had
constituted Edmund Severn her dearest friend. She had not, indeed, asked
his assent to this arrangement, but she had borne it out by a subtile
devotion which she felt that she had a right to exact of him that he
should repay,--repay by letting her know that, whether it was lost on
his heart or not, it was at least not lost to his senses,--that, if he
could not return it, he could at least remember it. She had given him
the flower of her womanly tenderness, and, when his moment came, he had
turned from her without a look. Gertrude shed no tears. It seemed to her
that she had given her friend tears enough, and that to expend her soul
in weeping would be to wrong herself. She would think no more of Edmund
Severn. He should be as little to her for the future as she was to him.

It was very easy to make this resolution: to keep it, Gertrude found
another matter. She could not think of the war, she could not talk with
h