y up the steps she stumbled on her skirt,
and would have fallen, if the young man had not caught her. After that,
from time to time he put his arm about her, and stayed her against the
gusts.

Before they reached the top he said, "Miss Breen, I'm awfully sorry for
all this. Mrs. Maynard will be ashamed of what she said. Confound it! If
Maynard were only here!"

"Why should she be ashamed?" demanded Grace. "If she had been drowned,
I should have murdered her, and I'm responsible if anything happens to
her,--I am to blame." She escaped from him, and ran into the house. He
slunk round the piazza to the kitchen door, under the eyes of the ladies
watching at the parlor windows.

"I wonder he let the others carry her up," said Miss Gleason. "Of
course, he will marry her now,--when she gets her divorce." She spoke
of Mrs. Maynard, whom her universal toleration not only included in the
mercy which the opinions of the other ladies denied her, but round
whom her romance cast a halo of pretty possibilities as innocently
sentimental as the hopes of a young girl.

IV.

The next morning Grace was sitting beside her patient, with whom she
had spent the night. It was possibly Mrs. Maynard's spiritual toughness
which availed her, for she did not seem much the worse for her
adventure: she had a little fever, and she was slightly hoarser; but she
had died none of the deaths that she projected during the watches of the
night, and for which she had chastened the spirit of her physician
by the repeated assurance that she forgave her everything, and George
Maynard everything, and hoped that they would be good to her poor little
Bella. She had the child brought from its crib to her own bed, and
moaned over it; but with the return of day and the duties of life she
appeared to feel that she had carried her forgiveness far enough, and
was again remembering her injuries against Grace, as she lay in her
morning gown on the lounge which had been brought in for her from the
parlor.

"Yes, Grace, I shall always say if I had died and I may die yet--that I
did not wish to go out with Mr. Libby, and that I went purely to please
you. You forced me to go. I can't understand why you did it; for I don't
suppose you wanted to kill us, whatever you did."

Grace could not lift her head. She bowed it over the little girl whom
she had on her knee, and who was playing with the pin at her throat,
in apparent unconsciousness of all that was said. But