he spoke meekly.

"And we can go right on helping each other, as we have done all these
weeks? I do not need to leave you?"

"Oh, no, no!" She spoke with a gasp of dismay at the thought. "It--won't
hurt so much if I can see you going right on--getting strong--like you
have been, and being happy--and--" She paused in her slowly trailing
speech and looked about her. They were down in a little glen, and there
were no mountain tops in sight for her to look up to as was her custom.

"And what, Cassandra? Finish what you were saying." Still for a while
she was silent, and they walked on together. "And now won't you say what
you were going to say?" He could not talk himself, and he longed to hear
her voice.

"I was thinking of the music you made. It was so glad. I can't talk and
say always what I think, like you do, but seems like it won't hurt me so
here," she put her hand to her throat, "where it always hurts me when I
am sorry at anything, if I can hear you glad in the music--like you were
that--night I thought you were the 'Voices.'"

"Cassandra, it shall be glad for you, always."

She looked into his eyes an instant with the clear light of
understanding in her own. "But for you? It is for you I want it to be
glad."

CHAPTER XIV

IN WHICH DAVID VISITS THE BISHOP, AND FRALE SEES HIS ENEMY

The bishop was seated in a deep canvas chair on his wide veranda,
looking out over his garden toward a distant line of blue hills. His
little wife sat close to his side on a low rocker, very busy with the
making of buttonholes in a small girl's frock of white dimity and lace.
Betty Towers loved lace and pretty things.

The small girl was playing about the garden paths with her puppy and
chattering with Frale in her high, happy, childish voice, while he bent
weeding among the beds of okra and egg-plant. His face wore a more than
usually discontented look, even when answering the child with teasing
banter. Now and then he lifted his eyes from his work and watched
furtively the movements of David Thryng, who was pacing restlessly up
and down the long veranda in earnest conversation with the bishop and
his wife.

The two in the garden could not understand what was being said at the
house, but each party could hear the voices of the other, and by calling
out a little could easily converse across the dividing hedge and the
intervening space.

"Talk about the influence of the beautiful in nature upon the human
soul,--it i