e month. The Major stayed in town for the
evening mail and drove home after dark, alone, but complacent, almost
jovial. He had got three valentines.

XLIV.

ST. VALENTINE'S: EVENING

At Widewood that same hour there was deep silence. Since the first of
the year the only hands left on the place were a decrepit old negro and
wife, whom even he pronounced "wuthless," quartered beyond the
stable-yard's farther fence. For some days this "lady" had been
Widewood's only cook, owing to the fact that Mrs. March's servant,
having a few nights before seen a man prowling about the place, had left
in such a panic as almost to forget her wages, and quite omitting to
leave behind her several articles of the Widewood washing.

Within the house John March sat reading newspapers. His healthy legs
were crossed toward the flickering hearth, and his strong shoulders
touched the centre-table lamp. The new batten shutters excluded the
beautiful outer night. His mother, to whom the mail had brought nothing,
was sitting in deep shadow, her limp form and her regular supply of
disapproving questions alike exhausted. Her slender elbow slipped now
and then from the arm of her rocking-chair, and unconscious gleams of
incredulity and shades of grief still alternated across her face with
every wrinkling effort of her brows to hold up her eyelids.

John was not so absorbed as he seemed. He felt both the silence and the
closed shutters drearily, and was not especially cheered by the
following irrelevant query in the paragraph before him:

"Who--having restored the sight of his jailer's blind daughter and
converted her father from idolatry--was on this day beheaded?"

Yet here was a chance to be pleasant at the expense of a man quite too
dead to mind.

"Mother," he began, so abruptly that Mrs. March started with a violent
shudder, "this is February fourteenth. Did any ancient person of your
acquaintance lose his head to-day?" He turned a facetious glance that
changed in an instant to surprise. His mother had straightened up with
bitter indignation, but she softened to an agony of reproach as she
cried:

"John!"

"Why, mother, what?"

"Ah! John! John!" She gazed at him tearfully. "Is this what you've
joined the church for? To cloak such----"

"My dear mother! I was simply trying to joke away the dismals! Why,"--he
smiled persuasively--"if you only knew what a hard job it is." But the
ludicrousness of her misconstruction t