same time vigorously protesting against the retreat of his flock.

"Mercy on us!" ejaculated Mrs. Gourlay, "the hens are trampling over your yellow chrysanthemums, Linda."

Confidences can wait, but the peril of a cherished flower-bed is not lightly to be set aside. Mrs. Meeks was stung into renewed interest in the life she had been upon the point of denouncing as utterly devoid of satisfaction. It was impossible to sit still and watch those lazy, awkward negroes vainly trying to head off the stout-hearted rooster. She went out, at first with rather a contemptuous, indifferent air, but, as the cause of provocation scuttled toward her she suddenly felt her indefinite sense of wrong against a sex at large become concentrated into fury toward this small masculine specimen, and entered into the chase with an ardor that soon routed him from the field.

She entered the house half laughing, half frowning at the two darkies, who had rather enjoyed the little excitement.

"Aunt Rose, you are as bad as a child, standing giggling there! You had better be making some little cakes for lunch. Miss Louise will stay."

"Laws, Mis' Linda, I couldn't he'p myse'f. Dat rooster, he de wuss sp'iled fowl I ebber see. He oughter be clapped inter de pot. He got a heap o' sense, too, but he done sp'iled tell he jes rotten." Thus Rose, as she sauntered back to her kitchen, to look up eggs and sugar for her cakes. Meanwhile, Mrs. Gourlay was saying:

"No, Linda, I can't stay to-day. You drive back with me and stay all night. It's an age since you spent the night at my house. Come, it will do Mr. Meeks good to show him you feel a proper resentment. It's high time you took a stand."

"Stay all night?" said Linda slowly. She felt that the significance of the act would be greater to her husband than her adviser was aware. It would be dropping the old life, putting a check upon all the sweet, confidential relations that were so dear to both, and starting out in a new, untried path of independence, of separateness that might end in complete alienation. She was a reasoning woman, used to foreseeing consequences. Sometimes she was impatient of the sound logical faculty that held her impulsive disposition in check, and longed to plunge headlong into some kind of folly, as a child bound over by a promise not to meddle with sweets, has spasms of temptation which even the certainty of illness and castor oil are hardly sufficient to restrain.

She got up and walked slowly toward the door that opened into her own and her husband's room. It was a spacious chamber, capable of holding the belongings of two persons, and before its wide-open fireplace filled with small logs ready for lighting, was drawn a great easy-chair, in which he loved to recline in the evenings with her on a cushion at his feet, while they watched the blaze together. A slight, nervous shudder passed over Linda as her dress brushed against the chair on her way to the closet where her numerous hats were arranged in their boxes. Mr. Meeks liked to see his pretty wife well dressed, and no woman in the county had such an abundance of fine clothes. She took down a fawn-colored wool gown and went to the dressing-case to fasten it before the glass. A serious, tremulous face looked back at her, a face made for sweet looks, for happiness, but now shadowed by the most miserable feelings a woman can have, for "to be wroth with one we love doth work like madness in the brain."

There, hanging on its pretty stand, was her jeweled watch, his wedding gift to her. Shining on the pin cushion were brooches and little trinkets, every one of which marked some pleasant episode. A vase of her favorite late white roses gathered by his hands only the evening before, breathed reproachful sweetness as she hastily bent over them.

But Linda was a proud woman as well as a tender one. The Fitzhugh spirit had been chafed beyond endurance; it could bear the hurts of privation, of grief, ruin and all sufferings inflicted by evil circumstances; it could not submit to insult. So she named the roughness of the man whose one great fault had to-day come to outweigh in her mind innumerable virtues. She called old Rose, gave a few orders in a tone that warned the servant to preserve silence in the midst of surprise, and then, beside her friend who kept up a cheerful flow of talk, moved tall and stately toward the carriage, and gazed dry-eyed, but ah, how sadly, at the fine old red brick dwelling half-covered with Virginia creeper and clematis, till a turn of the road swept it out of sight.

The strong black horses pranced merrily along the road, which now on one side lay beneath the mountain, covered with the red, yellow and brown masses of forestry that in the autumn glorify the earth, and in daily bleeding beauty divert a gazer's thoughts from the cruel frosts of night. To the left a deep gorge, rocky and dangerous, swept to the river below. Two vehicles, coming in opposite directions, could barely pass each other, and the driver who had the inside track might well bless his luck. But secure in the skill of their black Jehu, the two women gave no single thought to danger, but kept up their conversation indefatigably. John, keen and alert, pulled up his team carefully as he heard the tramp of a horseman rapidly approaching.

The horseman also slowed up, and when alongside stopped entirely, to exchange greetings. He was elderly and distinguished-looking, despite his shabby, dust-covered clothing and carelessly-cropped hair and beard. His worn, melancholy face brightened as he swept off his hat and made careful inquiries after the ladies' health. Then he cantered on and the inmates of the carriage leaned back again.

"Poor Colonel Thomas!" commented Mrs. Gourlay. "I recollect when he was the first young man in the county. He has gone all to pieces in the last year. He was rather high once, but Amanda was too much for him. Sam calls her 'Petruchio in petticoats.'"

Her tones smote her listener's ear as sounds coming from afar. Poor Colonel Thomas! Had he ever been in love with that sharp-tongued woman? How terrible for a woman to have upon her conscience the wreck of a man's life. If Robert should ever come to wear that bowed look—if instead of the proud confidence that well became his comely Saxon features, he should show in sunken eyes and fitful flush the marks of that ill remedy that promises but never brings "surcease of sorrow...." But he was too strong, too sane; misery could never drive him to dissipation, although it might drive him to desperation of another sort. Her quick fancy began to picture Robert estranged from the woman he loved. Mentally she saw him growing cold, gloomy and reserved—their intimacy gone as if it had never been, and they two, bound by unbreakable ties, aging in sight of each other, their lives dragging on in a way that might come to end in mutual aversion and disgust. She knew that Robert would construe her going away to-day, after their cold parting, into a determination to assert herself against him, and still worse, to seek abroad sympathy for that which she was bound as a loving wife to bear in silence and to forget.

The proud Fitzhugh blood flamed in her cheeks and her head flung up unconsciously. But at the same instant there came into her mind, as a bugle note sounds amid the horrid discord of battle, a sentence Robert had uttered to her once in the early days of their love, when he had inadvertently offended her by a careless remark: "A man is not to be judged by one word, but by all the acts of his life."

And as if in her mental struggle she had been seeking some maxim as a guide, she