ved to sit there of an evening and smoke
his pipe and chat with Ezra Graves and the neighbors who dropped in.
Among these were Mr. Gamaliel Ives, who talked literature with Cynthia;
and Lucy Baird, his wife, who had taken Cynthia under her wing. I wish I
had time to write about Lucy Baird. And Mr. Jonathan Hill came--his
mortgage not having been foreclosed, after all. When Cynthia was alone
with Ephraim she often read to him,--generally from books of a martial
flavor,--and listened with an admirable hypocrisy to certain narratives
which he was in the habit of telling.

They never spoke of Jethro. Ephraim was not a casuist, and his sense of
right and wrong came largely through his affections. It is safe to say
that he never made an analysis of the sorrow which he knew was afflicting
the girl, but he had had a general and most sympathetic understanding of
it ever since the time when Jethro had gone back to the capital; and
Ephraim never brought home his Guardian or his Clarion now, but read them
at the office, that their contents might not disturb her.

No wonder that Cynthia was unhappy. The letters came, almost every day,
with the postmark of the town in New Jersey where Mr. Broke's locomotive
works were; and she answered them now (but oh, how scrupulously!), though
not every day. If the waters of love rose up through the grains of sand,
it was, at least, not Cynthia's fault. Hers were the letters of a friend.
She was reading such and such a book--had he read it? And he must not
work too hard. How could her letters be otherwise when Jethro Bass, her
benefactor, was at the capital working to defeat and perhaps to ruin
Bob's father? when Bob's father had insulted and persecuted her? She
ought not to have written at all; but the lapses of such a heroine are
very rare, and very dear.

Yes, Cynthia's life was very bitter that summer, with but little hope on
the horizon of it. Her thoughts were divided between Bob and Jethro. Many
a night she lay awake resolving to write to Jethro, even to go to him,
but when morning came she could not bring herself to do so. I do not
think it was because she feared that he might believe her appeal would be
made in behalf of Bob's father. Knowing Jethro as she did, she felt that
it would be useless, and she could not bear to make it in vain; if the
memory of that evening in the tannery shed would not serve, nothing would
serve. And again--he had gone to avenge her.

It was inevitable that