ed high neighborly confidence--before night a rumor had spread
like the wind that Margaret Talbert's lover had eloped with her aunt.

Billy heard the other children talking of this news and hushing
themselves when he came up. Tom learned of the occurrence by a
telephone, and, after supper, told Cyrus and myself; Maria was informed
of it by telephone through an old friend who thought Maria should know
of what every one was saying. Lorraine, walking to the office to meet
Charles, was overtaken on the street by Mrs. Temple, greatly concerned
for us and for Peggy, and learned the strange story from our sympathetic
neighbor, to repeat it to Charles. At ten o'clock there was only one
person in the house, perhaps in Eastridge, who was ignorant of our
daughter's singular fortune. That person was our dear girl herself.

Since my own intelligence of the report I had not left her alone with
anybody else for a moment; and now I was standing in the hall watching
her start safely up-stairs, when to our surprise the front-door latch
clicked suddenly; she turned on the stairs; the door opened, and we both
faced Charles. From the first still glances he and I gave each other he
knew she hadn't heard. Then he said quietly that he had wished to see
Peggy for a moment before she went to sleep. He bade me a very confiding
and responsible good-night, and went out with her to the garden where
they used to play constantly together when they were children.

Up-stairs, unable to lie down till she came back, I put on a little
cambric sack and sat by the window waiting till I should hear her foot
on the stairs again. "Charles is telling her," I said to Cyrus. He was
walking up and down the room, dumb with impatience and disgust, too
pained for Peggy, too tried by his own helplessness to rest or even
to sit still. In a way it has all been harder for him than for any one
else. His impulses are stronger and deeper than my dear girl's, and far
less cool. She is very especially precious to him; and, whether because
she looks so like him, or because he thinks her ways like my own, her
youth and her fortune have always been at once a more anxious and a more
lovely concern with him than any one else's on earth. She is, somehow,
our future to him.

While we waited here in this anxiety up-stairs, down in the garden I
could hear not the words, but the tones of our children as they spoke
together. Charles's voice sounded first for a long time, with an air
o