"

"You shall have me as long as I am alive," she said, giving his strong
hand a little loving squeeze.

"Truth to tell," said Raeburn, "I thought a few weeks ago that it would
be a case of 'Here lies Luke Raeburn, who died of litigation!' But,
after all, to be able to work to the last is the happiest lot. Tis an
enviable thing to die in harness."

They were walking up a hill, a sort of ravine with steep high banks on
either side, and stately pines stretching their blue-green foliage up
against the evening sky. A red glow of sunset made the dark stems look
like fiery pillars, and presently as they reached the brow of the hill
the great crimson globe was revealed to them. They both stood in perfect
silence watching till it sunk below the horizon.

And a great peace filled Erica's heart though at one time her father's
wish would have made her sad and apprehensive. In former times she had
set her whole heart on his learning before death that he was teaching
error. Now she had learned to add to "Thy will be done," the clause
which it takes some of us a life time to say, "Not my will."

CHAPTER XXXIX. Ashborough

There's a brave fellow!
There's a man of pluck!
A man who is not afraid to say his say,
Though a whole town's against him.
Longfellow

A man's love is the measure of his fitness for good or bad
company here or elsewhere. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The week at Oakdene proved in every way a success; Raeburn liked his
host heartily, and the whole atmosphere of the house was a revelation
to him. The last morning there had been a little clouded for news had
reached them of a terrible colliery accident in the north of England.
The calamity had a special gloom about it for it might very easily have
been prevented, the owners having long known that the mine was unsafe.

"I must say it is a little hard to see how such a horrible sin as
carelessness of the lives of human beings can ever bring about the
greater good which we believe evil to do," said Erica, as she took her
last walk in the wood with Donovan.

"'Tis hard to see at the time," he replied. "But I am convinced that it
is so. The sin is never good, never right; but when men will sin, then
the result of the sin, however frightful, brings about more good
that the perseverance in sin with no catastrophe would have done. A
longer-deferred good, of course, than the good which would have resulted
by adhering from the firs