es from
his own quarry and which he sells all over the country and far beyond
its borders. A widowed sister-in-law looks after his house for him
and her sons manage the business of slating which is connected with
the trade in slate and is scarcely inferior to it in size. It is their
uncle's spirit, the spirit of orderliness, of conscientiousness to the
point of obstinacy, that rests upon the nephews and gains and keeps
for them such confidence that they are sent for from far away wherever
a slater is needed to roof a new building or to make extensive repairs
to an old one.

It is a peculiar life that goes on in the house with the green
window-shutters. The sister-in-law, still a beautiful woman, little
younger than the master of the house, treats him with a kind of silent
respect, or even veneration. And her sons do the same. The old
gentleman shows his sister-in-law a respectful consideration, a sort
of chivalry that has something touching in its grave reserve; toward
his nephews he displays the fondness of a father. Yet even there
something lies between them that lends to their whole intercourse
something of considerate formality.

The sabbath-like peace that now spreads its wings above the most
strenuous activity of the dwellers in the house did not always hover
there. There was a time when bitter sorrow that came from stolen
happiness, and wild desires divided its inmates, when even the menace
of murder cast its shadow into the house; when despair at self-created
misery wandered, wringing its hands in the still night, from the back
door, up the stairs and along the piazza and down again by the path
between the little garden and the stable-yard to the shed, creeping
restlessly to the front again and again to the back.

What, at that time, made the hearts in the house swell to the
bursting-point, what went on in the shadowed souls and issued from
them in part, in the self-forgetfulness of fear, or became a deed, a
deed of desperation--all that may pass through the memory of the man
with whom we have been occupied. It is thirty-one years today since he
returned to his home town from a long absence. So we turn back the
thirty-one years and find a young man instead of the old one whom we
leave. He is tall, but not so strong; and, like the old man, he wears
his brown hair cut short at the back and brushed into a
"corkscrew-curl" above his high white forehead. The sternness of the
old man does not yet appear in his fac