thoven and Wagner; pictures--not costly paintings, but engravings,
photo-gravures, and etchings, scenes from other lands, sweet spiritual
faces, suggestions of great lives--looked down from the walls; while
over all, as a frieze to the oaken room, ran the words: "'Tis love
that makes the world go round."

To Steve Loveland this home seemed more like Paradise than mortal
abode. He watched its building and making with as intense an interest
as Randolph's and with far more of sentiment. Marriage to him meant
Elysium--the inexpressible, the unattainable; more so than ever now.
But whatever yearnings the sweet little nest awoke in the breast of
this lonely outsider, his duty and purpose remained fixed.

In the fall of the year, when the grapes hung in luscious bunches on
the slender vine; when country by-lanes were mellow with a wealth of
sumach and maple coloring; when Nature was saying farewell in her own
sweet way, at once so festive and so melancholy, then Constance and
Randolph turned their backs on the din and confusion of the city, and
seeking the happy woodlands, entered their own little home.

On that very same day Steve received a summons to his sister, who
lived with her mother in the little country town. There he was witness
to a short, sharp contest with pneumonia; then came a defeat; and then
a quiet burial in the village churchyard; next a sinking from hour to
hour of the invalid mother whose prop and stay had been taken from
beneath her; a second calling of friends to the stricken home; and ere
two weeks of absence had been told, Steve found himself alone in the
world, as far as any near of kin were concerned.

His grief was quiet, but very poignant. The old bachelor lodgings
became unendurable. Randolph had gone to a home of his own, and Steve
could not sit there alone, listening to the clods of earth as they
fell on mother and Mary.

Both Randolph and Constance stretched out tender, sympathizing hands
to the lonely man, and would have been glad had he consented to widen
their fireside circle by his presence, but beyond an occasional visit
Steve did not feel that he could go to them. He had long been
independent--he was over thirty now, and he was not ready to merge his
life into the life of another household. Still less was he willing to
intrude his continued presence upon a newly married couple. The life
there was sacred to him, and although he felt himself next of kin,
almost, to its inmates, he shra