was right.'"

"And where, my dear, did you get all this gossip?" asked Penhallow.

"It is complicated; ask Pole."

"I could guess," laughed Leila.

"And I," cried the Squire.

"You will all suffer," cried Ann, "and don't complain, James Penhallow,
if tough beef is the final result of political complications." Whereupon
she gathered her skirts and fled laughing.

"Pole will pay dearly," said the Squire, who was secretly securing meat
for the discharged mill-hands and understood what had influenced Pole.

Grey Pine and Westways during the summer and fall of 1858 felt, like many
in the Northern States, the need to live with economy. Want of employment
added to the unrest, and the idle men found time to discuss the angry
politics which rang through the debates in the Senate. The changed tariff
on iron, to which Pennsylvania was always selfishly sensitive, affected
the voting, and Penhallow was pleased when the Administration suffered
disaster in the October elections. All parties--Republican, American and
Douglas Democrats--united to cast discredit on the President's policy,
but Penhallow knew that the change of duties on iron had little to do
with the far-spread ruin of trade and manufactures the result of long
credits and the careless finance of an over-prosperous people. The
electoral results were looked upon as a Republican victory. He so
explained it on a November afternoon, as he rode through the still forest
with Leila Grey, when the faint haze and warmer days told of that
mysterious arrest of decay we call the Indian summer.

As they rode, the long lapses into silence told of the pleasant relations
of two people entirely at ease with one another. Now it was a question
asked--and now quick discussion. She had slowly won with maidenhood what
few children have, more or less of the varied forms of imagination, which
once had rather amused or puzzled her in John Penhallow. Her uncle, who
thought slowly unless in danger, rode on with his mind upon a small order
for rails and was far from feeling the mystery of the autumn days. The
girl beside him was reading into the slow rocking to and fro of the
falling leaves some reluctance to become forever a part of the decaying
mould.

"Please, Uncle Jim, don't trot. Let them walk. It is so full of tender
deaths."

"What do you mean, Leila?--as if death were ever beautiful or tender. You
and your aunt bother me with your absurd manufacture of some relation to
nature--"