tle Katy was told as
one might tell something that had happened a hundred years ago, without
any personal sympathy. It was simply a curious story, an interesting
adventure with which to beguile a weary hour of stage riding in the
darkness. It would have gratified Albert to have been able to detect the
vibration of a painful memory or a pitying emotion, but Helen did not
suffer her placidity to be ruffled by disturbing emotion. The
conversation drifted to other subjects presently through Mr. Minorkey's
sudden recollection that the drowning excitement at Metropolisville had
brought on a sudden attack of his complaint, he had been seized with a
pain just under his ribs. It ran up to the point of the right shoulder,
and he thought he should die, etc., etc., etc. Nothing saved him but
putting his feet into hot water, etc., etc., etc.

The gray dawn came on, and Charlton was presently able to trace the
lineaments of the well-known countenance. He was not able to recognize it
again without a profound emotion, an emotion that he could not have
analyzed. Her face was unchanged, there was not the varying of a line in
the placid, healthy, thoughtful expression to indicate any deepening of
her nature through suffering. Charlton's face had changed so that she
would not have recognized him readily had it been less concealed. And by
so much as his countenance had changed and hers remained fixed, had he
drifted away from her. Albert felt this. However painful his emotion was,
as he sat there casting furtive glances at Helen's face, there was no
regret that all relation between them was broken forever. He was not
sorry for the meeting. He needed such a meeting to measure the parallax
of his progress and her stagnation. He needed this impression of Helen to
obliterate the memory of the row-boat. She was no longer to remain in his
mind associated with the blessed memory of little Kate. Hereafter he
could think of Katy in the row-boat--the other figure was a dim unreality
which might have come to mean something, but which never did mean
anything to him.

I wonder who keeps the tavern at Cypher's Lake now? In those old days it
was not a very reputable place; it was said that many a man had there
been fleeced at poker. The stage did not reach it on this snowy morning
until ten o'clock. The driver stopped to water, the hospitable landlord,
whose familiar nickname was "Bun," having provided a pail and cut a hole
through the ice of the lake fo