iant joy, and purity, and love!
Surely, a mortal sin to do otherwise than love her! And Verty
congratulated himself on exemption from this sad sin of omission.

He sat thus, looking with his dreamy smile through the window, across
which the shadows of the autumn trees flitted and played. Listlessly
he took up a pen, nibbed the feather with his old odd smile, and began
to scrawl absently on the sheet of paper lying before him.

The words he wrote there thus unconsciously, were some which he had
heard Redbud utter with her soft, kind voice, which dwelt in his
memory.

"Trust in God."

This Verty wrote, scarcely knowing he did so; then he threw down the
pen, and reclining in the old lawyer's study chair, fell into one of
those Indian reveries which the dreamy forests seem to have taught the
red men.

As the young man thus reclined in the old walnut chair, clad in his
forest costume, with his profuse tangled curls, and smiling lips, and
half-closed eyes, bathed in the vagrant gleams of golden sunlight,
even Monsignor might have thought the picture not unworthy of his
pencil. But he could not have reproduced the wild, fine picture; for
in Verty's face was that dim and dreamy smile which neither pencil nor
words can describe on paper or canvas.

At last he roused himself, and waked to the real life around
him--though his thoughtful eyes were still overshadowed.

He looked around.

He had never been alone in Mr. Rushton's sanctum before, and naturally
regarded the objects before him with curiosity.

There was an old press, covered with dust and cobwebs, on the top of
which huge volumes of Justinian's Institutes frowned at the ceiling; a
row of shelves which were crammed with law books; an old faded carpet
covered with ink-splotches on his right hand, splotches evidently
produced by the lawyer's habit of shaking the superfluous ink from his
pen before he placed it upon the paper; a dilapidated chair or two;
the rough walnut desk at which he sat, covered with papers, open law
volumes, and red tape; and finally, a tall mantel-piece, on which
stood a half-emptied ink bottle--which mantel-piece rose over a wide
fire-place, surrounded with a low iron fender, on which a dislocated
pair of tongs were exposed in grim resignation to the evils of old
age.

There was little to interest Verty in all this--or in the old
iron-bound trunks in the corners.

But his eye suddenly falls on a curtain, in the recess farthest from
th