other things, he did not care to differ with you." Then
she paused, as though to see whether I might not yield to her words.
And if the words of any one would have availed to make me yield, I
think it would have been hers as now spoken. "Do you know what people
will say of you, Mr Neverbend?" she continued.

"What will they say?"

"If I only knew how best I could tell you! Your son has asked me--to
be his wife."

"I have long known that he has loved you well."

"But it can never be," she said, "if my father is to be carried away
to this fearful place. People would say that you had hurried him off
in order that Jack--"

"Would you believe it, Eva?" said I, with indignation.

"It does not matter what I would believe. Mr Grundle is saying
it already, and is accusing me too. And Mr Exors, the lawyer,
is spreading it about. It has become quite the common report in
Gladstonopolis that Jack is to become at once the owner of Little
Christchurch."

"Perish Little Christchurch!" I exclaimed. "My son would marry no
man's daughter for his money."

"I do not believe it of Jack," she said, "for I know that he is
generous and good. There! I do love him better than any one in the
world. But as things are, I can never marry him if papa is to be shut
up in that wretched City of the Dead."

"Not City of the Dead, my dear."

"Oh, I cannot bear to think of it!--all alone with no one but me with
him to watch him as day after day passes away, as the ghastly hour
comes nearer and still nearer, when he is to be burned in those
fearful furnaces!"

"The cremation, my dear, has nothing in truth to do with the Fixed
Period."

"To wait till the fatal day shall have arrived, and then to know that
at a fixed hour he will be destroyed just because you have said so!
Can you imagine what my feelings will be when that moment shall have
come?"

I had not in truth thought of it. But now, when the idea was
represented to my mind's eye, I acknowledged to myself that it would
be impossible that she should be left there for the occasion. How or
when she should be taken away, or whither, I could not at the moment
think. These would form questions which it would be very hard to
answer. After some score of years, say, when the community would be
used to the Fixed Period, I could understand that a daughter or a
wife might leave the college, and go away into such solitudes as
the occasion required, a week perhaps before the hour arranged for
depa