," he called to her; "it's a help
when you're climbing." He pulled down a slender birch, and, setting his
foot on it, broke it off at the root. She stopped, with an impatient
gesture, and waited while he tore off handfuls of leaves and whittled
away the side-shoots.

"Do hurry, Lewis!" she said.

They had left their train at five o'clock in the morning, and had been
sitting in the frowsy station, sleepily awaiting the express, when
Athalia had had this fancy for climbing the hill so that she might see
the view.

"It looks pretty steep," her husband warned her.

"It will be something to do, anyhow!" she said; and added, with a
restless sigh, "but you don't understand that, I suppose."

"I guess I do--after a fashion," he said, smiling at her. It was only in
love's fashion, for really he was incapable of quite understanding her.
To the country lawyer of sober piety and granite sense of duty, the
rich variety of her moods was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful
bewilderment. But whether he understood the impetuous inconsequence
of her temperament "after a fashion," or whether he failed entirely to
follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies with a sort
of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall was henpecked; they
also said that he had married beneath him. His father had been a
judge and his grandfather a minister; he himself was a graduate of a
fresh-water college, which later, when he published his exegesis on the
Prophet Daniel, had conferred its little degree upon him and felt that
he was a "distinguished son." With such a lineage he might have done
better, people said, than to marry that girl, who was the most fickle
creature and no housekeeper, and whose people--this they told one
another in reserved voices--were PLAY-ACTORS! Athalia's mother, who
had been the "play-actor," had left her children an example of
duty--domestic as well as professional duty--faithfully done. As she did
not leave anything else, Athalia added nothing to the Hall fortune; but
Lewis's law practice, which was hardly more than conveyancing now and
then, was helped out by a sawmill which the Halls had owned for two
generations. So, as things were, they were able to live in humdrum
prosperity which gave Lewis plenty of time to browse about among his
grandfather's old theological books, and by-and-by to become a very
sound Hebrew scholar, and spared Athalia much wholesome occupation which
would have been ste