ry was to
coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a
kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the
recreation of the mill-hands.

The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy
Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of
Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged
and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that
the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to
commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when
the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary
improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the
financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his
plan.

Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in
progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a
projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had
concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his
first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills
still invested them with interest.

Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all
allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as
she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive
shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its
progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.

Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside
her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she
said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to
be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to
the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had
always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule.
The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising
growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning
social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the
meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the
larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself
in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall
enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets