y when he read the letter; but never were elements more mistaken.

It was a June Sunday in the boarding-house bedroom; and for that matter
it was not the boarding-house bedroom at all: it was the old Orthodox
church on Tory Hill in Edgewood. The windows were wide open, and the
smell of the purple clover and the humming of the bees were drifting
into the sweet, wide spaces within. Justin was sitting in the end of the
Peabody pew, and Nancy Wentworth was beside him; Nancy, cool and restful
in her white dress; dark-haired Nancy under the shadow of her shirred
muslin hat.

Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,
Thy better portion trace.

The melodeon gave the tune, and Nancy and he stood to sing, taking the
book between them. His hand touched hers, and as the music of the hymn
rose and fell, the future unrolled itself before his eyes: a future in
which Nancy was his wedded wife; and the happy years stretched on and
on in front of them until there was a row of little heads in the old
Peabody pew, and mother and father could look proudly along the line at
the young things they were bringing into the house of the Lord.

The recalling of that vision worked like magic in Justin's blood.
His soul rose and stretched its wings and "traced its better portion"
vividly, as he sprang to his feet and walked up and down the bedroom
floor. He would get a few days' leave and go back to Edgewood for
Christmas, to join, with all the old neighbors, in the service at the
meetinghouse; and in pursuance of this resolve, he shook his fist in
the face of the landlady's husband on the mantelpiece and dared him to
prevent.

He had a salary of fifty dollars a month, with some very slight prospect
of an increase after January. He did not see how two persons could eat,
and drink, and lodge, and dress on it in Detroit, but he proposed
to give Nancy Wentworth the refusal of that magnificent future, that
brilliant and tempting offer. He had exactly one hundred dollars in
the bank, and sixty or seventy of them would be spent in the journeys,
counting two happy, blessed fares back from Edgewood to Detroit; and if
he paid only his own fare back, he would throw the price of the other
into the pond behind the Wentworth house. He would drop another ten
dollars into the plate on Christmas Day toward the repairs on the
church; if he starved, he would do that. He was a failure. Everything
his hand touched turned to naught. He looked himself full in the