swered at length.

"Why haven't you ever told me about her?" asked Cynthia. How was she to
know that her innocent questions tortured him cruelly; that the spirit of
the Cynthia who had come to him in the tannery house had haunted him all
his life, and that she herself, a new Cynthia, was still that spirit? The
bygone Cynthia had been much in his thoughts since they came to Boston.

"What was she like?"

"She--she was like you, Cynthy," he said, but he did not turn round. "She
was a clever woman, and a good woman, and--a lady, Cynthy."

The girl said nothing for a while, but she tingled with pleasure because
Jethro had compared her to her mother. She determined to try to be like
that, if he thought her so.

"Uncle Jethro," she said presently, "I'd like to go to see the house
where she lived."

"Er--Ephraim knows it," said Jethro.

So when Ephraim came the three went over the hill; past the State House
which Bulfinch set as a crown on the crest of it looking over the sweep
of the Common, and on into the maze of quaint, old-world streets on the
slope beyond: streets with white porticos, and violet panes in the
windows. They came to an old square hidden away on a terrace of the hill,
and after that the streets grew narrower and dingier. Ephraim, whose
memory never betrayed him, hobbled up to a shabby house in the middle of
one of these blocks and rang the bell.

"Here's where I found Will when I come back from the war," he said, and
explained the matter in full to the slatternly landlady who came to the
door. She was a good-natured woman, who thought her boarder would not
mind, and led the way up the steep stairs to the chamber over the roofs
where Wetherell and Cynthia had lived and hoped and worked together;
where he had written those pages by which, with the aid of her loving
criticism, he had thought to become famous. The room was as bare now as
it had been then, and Ephraim, poking his stick through a hole in the
carpet, ventured the assertion that even that had not been changed.
Jethro, staring out over the chimney tops, passed his hand across his
eyes. Cynthia Ware had come to this!

"I found him right here in that bed," Ephraim was saying, and he poked
the bottom boards, too. "The same bed. Had a shack when I saw him.
Callate he wouldn't have lived two months if the war hadn't bust up and I
hadn't come along."

"Oh, Cousin Eph!" exclaimed Cynthia.

The old soldier turned and saw that there were tears in