him superintending the
loading of the schooner that bore them away, and that was all. Even the
two negroes who worked in the mill--one bright, young, and yellow; the
other old, slow, and black--felt no curiosity about the locked room and
Cranch's absences; it was but a part of his way.

What was in this room, then? Nothing finished as yet, save dreams.
Cranch had that strong and singular bias of mind which makes, whether
successful or unsuccessful, the inventor.

It was a part of his unconsequence in every way that all persons called
him "Bro"--even his negro helpers at the mill. When he first came to
live with Mrs. Manning, she had tried hard to speak of him as "Mr.
Cranch," and had taught her daughter to use the title; but, as time wore
on, she had dropped into Bro again, and so had Marion. But, now that
Marion was twenty-five and her own mistress, she had taken up the custom
of calling him "Ambrose," the only person in the whole of Wilbarger who
used, or indeed knew, the name. This she did, not on his account at all,
but on her own; she disliked nicknames, and did not consider it
dignified to use them. Cranch enjoyed her "Ambrose" greatly, and felt an
inward pride every time she spoke it; but he said nothing.

There was a seminary at Wilbarger--a forlorn, ill-supported institution,
under the charge of the Episcopal Church of the diocese. But the
Episcopal Church of the diocese was, for the time being, extremely poor,
and its missions and schools were founded more in a spirit of hope than
in any certainty of support; with much the same faith, indeed, which its
young deacons show when they enter (as they all do at the earliest
possible moment) into the responsibilities of matrimony. But in this
seminary was, by chance, an excellent though melancholy-minded
teacher--a Miss Drough, equally given to tears and arithmetic. Miss
Drough was an adept at figures, and, taking a fancy to Marion Manning,
she taught her all she knew up to trigonometry, with chess problems and
some astronomy thrown in. Marion had no especial liking for mathematics
in the beginning, but her clear mind had followed her ardent teacher
willingly: at twenty-five she was a skilled arithmetician, passably well
educated in ordinary branches, well read in strictly old-fashioned
literature, and not very pious, because she had never liked the reverend
gentleman in charge of the seminary and the small church--a thin man who
called himself "a worm," and alway