that nor any other wealth would ever meet.

Little Jane came up the field with a basket of the last barberries
lightly poised upon her head. A narrow wrinkle was beginning to divide
the freckled fairness of her forehead. She kept it down with many an
endeavor. Trying to croon to herself as she passed, and stopping only to
hang one of the scarlet girandoles in Vivia's braids, she went in. The
sunshine, loath to leave her pleasant little figure, followed after her,
and played about her shadow on the floor.

Vivia still sat there and questioned the wide atmosphere, that, brooding
palpitant between her and the lake, still withheld the desolating secret
that horizon must have whispered to horizon throughout the aching
distance.

"Oh that the bells in all these silent spires
Would clash their clangor on the sleeping air,
Ring their wild music out with throbbing choirs,
Ring peace in everywhere!"

she sang, and trembled as she sang. But there the burden broke, and
rising, her eyes shaded by her hand, Vivia gazed down the lonely road
where a stage-coach rolled along in a cloud of dust. What prescience,
what instinct, it was that made her throw the shawl over her head, the
shawl that Beltran liked to have her wear, and hasten down the field and
away to lose herself in the wood, she alone could have told.

The slow minutes crept by, the coach had passed at length with loud
wheel and resounding lash, its last dust was blowing after it, and it
had left upon the door-stone a boy in army-blue, with his luggage beside
him. A ghastly visage, a shrunken form, a crippled limb, were what he
brought home from the war. With his one foot upon the threshold, he
paused, and turned the face, gray under all its trace of weather, and
furrowed, though so young, to meet the welcoming wind. He gazed upon the
high sky out of which the sunshine waned, on the long champaign blending
its gold and russet in one, on the melancholy forest over which the
twilight was stealing; he lifted his cap with a gesture as if he bade it
all farewell,--then he grasped his crutch and entered.

Without a word, Mrs. Vennard dropped the needles she was sorting upon
the mat about her. Little Jane sprang forward, but checked herself in a
strange awe.

"Let me go to bed, auntie," said he, with a dry sob; "and I never want
to get up again!"

* * * * *

Midnight was winding the world without in a white glimmer of mi