p in that idea as if his
own happiness depended on my marrying her."

"You're rivals then, after a new fashion," was my comment. "Don't you
see, though, how you are to settle it?"

"No."

"Why, each of you should propose in form, for the other. Then Miss
Winwood would have to take the difficulty into her own hands."

"Ha, ha!" laughed Vibbard. "That's a good idea. But suppose she don't
care for either of us?"

"Very well. I don't see that in that case she would be worse off than
yourselves, for neither of you seems to care for her."

"Oh yes, we do!" exclaimed Silverthorn, instantly.

"Yes, we care a great deal," insisted Vibbard.

They both grew so very earnest over this that I didn't dare to
continue the subject, and it was left in greater mystery than before.

At last the time of graduation came, and the two friends parted to
pursue their separate ways. Silverthorn had a widowed mother living at
a distance in the country, whose income had barely enabled her to send
him through college on a meagre allowance. He went home to visit her
for a few days, and then promptly took his place on a daily newspaper
in Boston, where he spent six months of wretched failure. He had great
hopes of achieving in a short time some prodigious triumph in writing,
but at the end of this period he gave it all up, and decided to
develop the mechanical genius which he thought he had perhaps
inherited from his father. I began to have a suspicion when I learned
that this new turn had led him to Stansby, where he procured a
position as a sort of clerk to the superintendent, Winwood.

After some months, I went out to see him there. In the evening we went
to the Winwoods', and I watched closely to discover any signs of a new
relation between Silverthorn and the daughter. Mr. Winwood himself was
a homely, perfectly commonplace man, whose face looked as if it had
been stamped with a die which was to furnish a hundred duplicate
physiognomies. Mrs. Winwood was a fat, woolly sort of woman, who
knitted, and rocked in her rocking-chair, keeping time to her needles.
A smell of tea and chops came from the adjoining room, where they
had been having supper; and there was a big, hot-colored lithograph
of Stansby Mills hung up over the fireplace, with one or two
awkward-looking engravings of famous men and their families on the
remaining wall-spaces. Yet, even with these crude and barren
surroundings, the girl Ida retained a peculiar and inspiring c