ad and gazed at the quiet woodland, the
open shadow-work of the bare branches, the fields beyond lying in the
calm sunlit rest of a Southern winter. Then he put his hand deep into
the gold pieces, and drew a long breath. It was impossible to believe,
but it was true. The lost treasure was found. It meant to him Shelby
and home; as he realized what it meant his heart felt as if it would
break with the joy of it. He would give her this for his Christmas gift,
this legacy of his people and hers, and then he would give her himself.
It was all easy now--life seemed not to hold a difficulty. And the two
would keep tenderly, always, the thought of a child who had loved his
home and his people and who had tried so hard, so long, to bring them
together. He knew the dream-child would not visit him again--the little
ghost was laid that had followed him all his life. From over the border
whence it had come with so many loving efforts it would never come
again. Slowly, with the heavy weight in his arms, he walked back to the
garden sleeping in the sunshine, and the box hedges met him with a wave
of fragrance, the sweetness of a century ago; and as he passed through
their shining door, looking beyond, he saw Shelby. The girl's figure
stood by the stone column of the garden entrance, the light shone on her
bare head, and she had stopped, surprised, as she saw him. Philip's pace
quickened with his heart-throb as he looked at her and thought of the
little ghostly hands that had brought theirs together; and as he looked
the smile that meant his welcome and his happiness broke over her face,
and with the sound of her voice all the shades of this world and the
next dissolved in light.

"'Christmas gif',' Marse Philip!" called Shelby.

THE WIFE OF THE GOVERNOR

The Governor sat at the head of the big black-oak table in his big
stately library. The large lamps on either end of the table stood in old
cloisonne vases of dull rich reds and bronzes, and their shades were of
thick yellow silk. The light they cast on the six anxious faces grouped
about them was like the light in Rembrandt's picture of The Clinic.

It was a very important meeting indeed. A city official, who had for
months been rather too playfully skating on the thin ice of bare respect
for the law, had just now, in the opinion of many, broken through. He
had followed a general order of the Governor's by a special order of his
own, contradicting the first in words not a