know some time; but here is home, and will he speak of
it to Mistress White, do you think?"

"Not ever, I suppose," said Schmidt; and we went in.

The sight we saw troubled me. In the little back parlor, at a round
mahogany table with scrolled edges and claw toes, sat facing the light
Mistress White. She was clad in a gray silk with tight sleeves, and her
profusion of rich chestnut hair, with its willful curliness that forbade
it to be smooth on her temples, was coiled in a great knot at the back
of her head. Its double tints and strange changefulness, and the smooth
creamy cheeks with their moving islets of roses that would come and go
at a word, were pretty protests of Nature, I used to think, against the
demure tints of her pearl-gray silken gown. She was looking out into the
garden, quite heedless of the older dame, who sat as her wont was
between the windows, and chirruped now and then, mechanically, "Has thee
a four-leaved clover?" As I learned some time after, one of our older
clerks, perhaps with a little malice of self-comfort at the fall of his
senior's principles, had, on coming home, told her laughingly all the
story of the morning. Perhaps one should be a woman and a Friend to
enter into her feelings. She was tied by a promise and by a sense of
personal pledge to a low and disgraced man, and then coming to love
another despite herself she had grown greatly to honor him. She might
reason as she would that only a sense of right and a yearning for the
fullness of a righteous life had made him give up his profession and
fellows and turn aside to follow the harder creed of Fox, but she well
knew with a woman's keenness of view that she herself had gone for
something in this change; and now, as sometimes before, she reproached
herself with his failures. As we came in she hastily dried her eyes and
went out of the room. At dinner little was said, but in the afternoon
there was a scene of which I came to know all a good while later.

Some of us had gone back to the afternoon work when Mr. Wholesome, who
had lingered behind, strayed thoughtfully into the little back garden.
There under a thin-leaved apricot tree sat Mistress White, very pretty,
with her long fair fingers clasped over a book which lay face down on
her lap. Presently she was aware of Richard Wholesome walking to and fro
and smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, then, as yet in England, called a
churchwarden. These were two more than commonly good-lookin