udge, Mary and Mr. Will Axworthy are quits. If he has had
a good time in her society, she has had an equally good time in his, and
he does not enjoy her letters so much as he did her propinquity."

"He's a cold-hearted, cowardly----"

"Tut! tut! my dear!"

By this time we were on the platform, and the engine was backing its one
car down to receive me and the other unhappy toilers compelled to go
away and leave that sapphire-blue lake behind.

"Don't you think, Isabel, that it's about time you quit trying to play
Providence and gave God a chance?"

"Dave! you're blasphemous!"

"No, I'm not. I only wish to remark that in your schemes for the welfare
of one particular person, you are apt to overlook the comfort and
happiness of everyone else concerned. That's the worst of not being
omniscient. You're only an amateur sort of a deity after all."

"Send that girl out here by the very next train." And I obeyed.

CHAPTER VII.

ANOTHER week of night work, and then the sunniest of Sundays on the
shore of old Lake Michigan.

I noticed that Mary was in deep disgrace with my wife, who would hardly
speak to her, and I judged therefore that Mr. Will Axworthy had not been
brought to time.

I am not a venturesome boatman, and generally confine my aquatic outings
to the smaller lake, but that Saturday night there was not a breath of
wind, and the water was placidity personified, so I drifted in my small
skiff through the channel that connects the smaller with the larger body
of water. On the sandy point jutting out at the mouth, upon an old
stump, sat a solitary maiden, the picture of woe.

"Hello, Mary!" said I, ignoring the tears; "want to go for a boat ride?"

"I don't care if I do," she replied, seating herself in the stern, which
I turned toward her.

Silently I pulled out into the big lake, where the copper-colored sun
going down in a haze near the horizon bade us beware of a hot day on the
morrow. Out of the lake to the right rose the full moon, failing as yet
to make her gentle influence felt against the radiant glow the sun was
leaving behind him.

"So Axworthy's gone back on you, Mary?"

The fountains played again.

"Yes; and it aint the first time I've got left, neither."

With Mrs. Mason, the Ferguson Family, Lincoln Todd, and young Flaker on
the tablets of my mind, I could truthfully assent to that remark.

"Still, it may be just the making of you in the long run."

"I'm not breakin' my heart