led her, she drew her hands together, and it was as if her heart had
ceased to beat. Sorrow and anger and fierce shame overwhelmed her, and
she turned from him in silence and went to the door.

"Cynthy," he cried hoarsely, "Cynthy!"

"You must never speak to me again," she said, and was gone into the
storm.

Yes, she had failed. But she did not know that she had left something
behind which he treasured as long as he lived.

In the spring, when the new leaves were green on the slopes of Coniston,
Priest Ware ended a life of faithful service. The high pulpit, taken
from the old meeting house, and the cricket on which he used to stand
and the Bible from which he used to preach have remained objects of
veneration in Coniston to this day. A fortnight later many tearful faces
gazed after the Truro coach as it galloped out of Brampton in a cloud
of dust, and one there was watching unseen from the spruces on the hill,
who saw within it a girl dressed in black, dry-eyed, staring from the
window.

CHAPTER VII

Out of the stump of a blasted tree in the Coniston woods a flower will
sometimes grow, and even so the story which I have now to tell springs
from the love of Cynthia Ware and Jethro Bass. The flower, when it came
to bloom, was fair in life, and I hope that in these pages it will not
lose too much of its beauty and sweetness.

For a little while we are going to gallop through the years as before we
have ambled through the days, although the reader's breath may be
taken away in the process. How Cynthia Ware went over the Truro Pass to
Boston, and how she became a teacher in a high school there;--largely
through the kindness of that Miss Lucretia Penniman of whom we have
spoken, who wrote in Cynthia's behalf to certain friends she had in
that city; how she met one William Wetherell, no longer a clerk in
Mr. Judson's jewellery shop, but a newspaper man with I know not what
ambitions--and limitations in strength of body and will; how, many, many
years afterward, she nursed him tenderly through a sickness and--married
him, is all told in a paragraph. Marry him she did, to take care of him,
and told him so. She made no secret of the maternal in this love.

One evening, the summer after their marriage, they were walking in the
Mall under the great elms that border the Common on the Tremont Street
side. They often used to wander there, talking of the books he was to
write when strength should come and a little leisur