onversation to an
abrupt close by telling her he had not the slightest intention of
marrying, and had quite made up his mind to go back to England as
soon as the harvest was over.

When Mrs. Burrell was telling her husband about it she was almost in
tears.

"If he goes to England, John, we'll never see him again; he'll marry
an English girl--I know it. They're so thick over there he can't help
it, when he sees so many dangling after him! He'll just have to marry
one of them."

"To thin them out, I suppose you mean," her husband said, smiling.
"Don't worry, anyway, and above all things, don't interfere. Leave
something for Providence to do."

After Mrs. Cavers and Libby Anne had gone, life in the Perkins's home
settled down to its old pleasing monotony. The schoolmaster found
Martha a willing and apt pupil, and came to look forward with
pleasure to the evenings he spent helping her to understand the world
in which she was living. Dr. Emory paid his regular visits, seeking
with the magic arts of music to draw Arthur's thoughts down the
pleasant lanes of love. Pearl Watson, like a true general, kept a
strict oversight of everything, but apparently took no active part
herself; only on Saturday afternoons, which she usually spent with
Martha, she had Martha tell her the stories she had read during the
week. At first the telling was haltingly done, for Martha was not
gifted with fluent speech, but under the spell of Pearl's sympathetic
listening, her story-telling powers developed amazingly.

When the summer days came, with their wealth of flowers and singing
birds, to Martha the whole face of Nature seemed changed; she heard
new music in the meadowlark's ringing note, and the plaintive piping
of the whippoorwill. The wild roses' fragrant beauty, the gorgeous
colouring of the tiger-lilies and moccasin flowers, the changing hues
of the grainfields at noon-day as the drifting clouds threw racing
shadows over them, were all possessed of a new charm, a new power to
thrill her heart, for the old miracle of love and hope had come to
Martha, the old witchery that has made "blue skies bluer and green
things greener," for us all. There was the early rising in the dewy
mornings when the river-valley was filled with silvery mist, through
which the trees loomed gray and ghostly; there was the quivering heat
of noonday, that played strange tricks on the southern horizon, when
even the staid old Tiger Hills seemed to pulsate with th