zled to go on, the girl stopped and asked a question, he
answered it generally without removing his eyes from the web. When once
or twice she pushed the manuscript away and leaned back in her chair,
impotent and irritated, he took the sheets from her hand, explained the
hard parts with clear precision, gave them back, and motioned to her to
continue. She read on for half an hour. When she finished, there was a
flush on her cheeks, the flush of annoyance and fatigue.

"I must go now," she said, placing the manuscript in her desk, and
taking down her broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, yellow as old corn, adorned
with a plain band of white ribbon.

"You are not, of course, foiled by a little chemistry," said Wainwright,
rising also, and looking at her without change of expression.

"Oh, no," she answered; but still she crossed the room and opened the
door, as if rather glad to escape, and, with a parting salutation, left
him.

Wainwright sat down again. He did not watch her through the window; he
took up a late volume of Herbert Spencer, opened it at the mark, and
began reading with that careful dwelling upon each word which is,
singularly enough, common alike to the scientific and the illiterate.
The mass of middle-class readers do not notice words at all, but take
only the general sense.

Honor went down the road toward Ellerby village, which was within sight
around the corner, walking at first rapidly, but soon falling into the
unhurrying gait of the Southern woman, so full of natural, swaying
grace. At the edge of the village she turned and took a path which led
into a ravine. The path followed a brook, and began to go up hill
gradually; the ravine grew narrow and the sides high. Where the flanks
met and formed the main hillside, there was, down in the hollow, a house
with a basement above ground, with neither paint without nor within. No
fences were required for Colonel Eliot's domain--the three near
hillsides were his natural walls, a ditch and plank at the entrance of
the ravine his moat and drawbridge. The hillsides had been cleared, and
the high corn waved steeply all around and above him as he stood in
front of his house. It went up to meet the sky, and was very good corn
indeed--what he could save of it. A large portion, however, was
regularly stolen by his own farm-hands--according to the pleasant
methods of Southern agriculture after the war. The Colonel was glad when
he could safely house one half of it. He was