tearfully said the old man, "let us not yield to ow feelings
when the cry of a soul in shipwreck"--he stopped to swallow his
emotions. "Ow penitent brother on'y asks you to bear his message. It's
natu'al he should cling to the one pyo tie that holds him to us. O John,
'in wrath remembeh mercy!' An' yet you may be the nearest right, God
knows! O brethren, let's kneel and ask Him faw equal love an' wisdom!"

Garnet rose to kneel, but March put out a protesting hand. "I wouldn't
do that, sir." The tone was gentle, almost compassionate. "I don't
suppose God would strike you dead, but--I wouldn't do it, sir." He
turned to go, and, glancing back unexpectedly, saw on Garnet's face a
look so evil that it haunted him for years.

LXXVIII.

BARBARA FINDS THE RHYME

Barbara walked along the slender road in front of Rosemont's grove. The
sun was gone. Her father had not arrived yet with Johanna, but she
questioned every stir of the air for the sound of their coming. A
yearning which commonly lay very still in her bosom and ought in these
two long years to have got reconciled to its lovely prison, was up once
more in silent mutiny.

With slow self-compulsion she turned toward the house. The dim, vacated
dormitories grew large against the fading after-glow. The thrush's song
ceased. Remotely from the falling slope beyond the unlighted house the
voices of a negro boy and girl, belated in the milking-pen, came to
her ear more lightly than the gurgle of the shallow creek so near
her feet. Suddenly the cry of the whip-Will's-widow filled the
grove--"whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow!"--in
headlong importunity until the whole air sobbed and quivered with the
overcharge of its melancholy passion. Then as abruptly it was hushed,
the echoes died, and Barbara, at the grove gate, recalled the other
twilight hour, a counterpart of this in all but its sadness, when, on
this spot, she had bidden John March come the next day to show Widewood
to Henry Fair.

And now Henry Fair "some day soon," his unexpected letter said, was to
come again. And she was letting him come. One of his sweet mother's
letters--always so welcome--had ever so delicately hinted a hope that
she would do so, the fond mother affectionately imputing to the father's
wisdom the feeling that Henry's present life contained more
uncertainties than were good for his, or anyone's, future. He was coming
at last for her final word, and in her meditatio