verlooking the lake he stopped and looked away to the east, where the
darkness was slowly gathering over the prairie. Night never looks so
strange as when it creeps over a prairie, seeming to rise, like a
shadowy Old Man of the Sea, out of the grass. The images become more and
more confused, and the landscape vanishes by degrees. Away to the west
Charlton saw the groves that grew on the banks of the Big Gun River, and
then the smooth prairie knolls beyond, and in the dim horizon the "Big
Woods." Despite ail his anxiety, Charlton could not help feeling the
influence of such a landscape. The greatness, the majesty of God, came to
him for a moment. Then the thought of Kate's unhappy love came over him
more bitterly from the contrast with the feelings excited by the
landscape. He went rapidly over the possible remedies. To remonstrate
with Katy seemed out of the question. If she had any power of reason, he
might argue. Bat one can not reason with feeling. It was so hard that a
soul so sweet, so free from the all but universal human taint of egoism,
a soul so loving, self-sacrificing, and self-consecrating, should throw
itself away.

"O God!" he cried, between praying and swearing, "must this alabaster-box
of precious ointment be broken upon the head of an infernal coxcomb?"

And then, as he remembered how many alabaster-boxes of precious womanly
love were thus wasted, and as he looked abroad at the night settling down
so inevitably on trees and grass and placid lake, it seemed to him that
there could be no Benevolent Intelligence in the universe. Things rolled
on as they would, and all his praying would no more drive away the
threatened darkness from Kate's life than any cry of his would avail to
drive back the all-pervading, awesome presence of night, which was
putting out the features of the landscape one after another.

Albert thought to go to his mother. But then with bitterness he
confessed to himself, for the first time, that his mother was less wise
than Katy herself. He almost called her a fool. And he at once rejected
the thought of appealing to his step-father. He felt, also, that this was
an emergency in which all his own knowledge and intelligence were of no
account. In a matter of affection, a conceited coxcomb, full of
flattering speeches, was too strong for him.

The landscape was almost swallowed up. The glassy little lake was at his
feet, smooth and quiet. It seemed to him that God was as unresponsive to