fused to yield, but was clearly yielding. Alice and I showed
Trescott, on a plat, the place for his new home. He was quite taken with
the idea, and said that ma would certainly be tickled with it.

Josie sat apart with Mr. Elkins, in earnest converse, for a long time.
She looked frequently at her father, Jim constantly at her. Mr. Cornish
dropped in for a little while, and joined us in presenting the case for
removal. While he was there the girl seemed constrained, and not quite
so fully at her ease; and I could detect, I thought, the old tendency to
scrutinize his face furtively. When he went away, she turned to Jim more
intimately than before, and almost promised that she would become his
neighbor in Lynhurst. After the Trescotts' carriage had come and taken
them away, Jim told us that it was for her father, and the temptations
of idleness in the town, that Miss Trescott feared.

"This fairy-godmother business," said he, "ain't what the prospectus
might lead one to expect. It has its drawbacks. Bill is going to cash in
all right, and I think it's for the best; but, Al, we've got to take
care of the old man, and see that he doesn't go up in the air."

CHAPTER XIII.

A Sitting or Two in the Game with the World and Destiny.

Our game at Lattimore was one of those absorbing ones in which the
sunlight of next morning sifts through the blinds before the players are
aware that midnight is past. Day by day, deal by deal, it went on, card
followed card in fateful fall upon the table, and we who sat in, and
played the World and Destiny with so pitifully small a pile of chips at
the outset, saw the World and Destiny losing to us, until our hands
could scarcely hold, our eyes hardly estimate, the high-piled stacks of
counters which were ours.

We saw the yellowing groves and brown fields of our first autumn; we
heard the long-drawn, wavering, mounting, falling, persistent howl of
the thresher among the settings of hive-shaped stacks; we saw the loads
of red and yellow corn at the corn-cribs,--as men at the board of the
green cloth hear the striking of the hours. And we heeded them as
little. The cries of southing wild-fowl heralded the snow; winter came
for an hour or so, and melted into spring; and some of us looked up from
our hands for a moment, to note the fact that it was the anniversary of
that aguish day when three of us had first taken our seats at the table:
and before we knew it, the dust and heat and summe