could never understand why a people who have been grumbling about snow and frost for six months, and longing for genial weather, should flee from it as soon as it comes. I had made the discovery, quite by chance-and it was so novel that I might have taken out a patent on it-that if one has a comfortable home in our northern latitude he cannot do better than to stay in it when the hum of the mosquito is heard in the land, and the mercury is racing up and down the scale between fifty and ninety. This opinion, however, did not extend beyond our little neighborhood, and we may be said to have had the summer to ourselves.

I fancied that the neighborhood had not changed, but the coming of Margaret showed me that this was a delusion. No one can keep in the same place in life simply by standing still, and the events of the past two years had wrought a subtle change in our quiet. Nothing had been changed to the eye, yet something had been taken away, or something had been added, a door had been opened into the world. Margaret had come home, yet I fancied it was not the home to her that she had been thinking about. Had she changed?

She was more beautiful. She had the air-I should hesitate to call it that of the fine lady-of assured position, something the manner of that greater world in which the possession of wealth has supreme importance, but it was scarcely a change of manner so much as of ideas about life and of the things valuable in it gradually showing itself. Her delight at being again with her old friends was perfectly genuine, and she had never appeared more unselfish or more affectionate. If there was a subtle difference, it might very well be in us, though I find it impossible to conceive of her in her former role of teacher and simple maiden, with her heart in the little concerns of our daily life. And why should she be expected to go back to that stage? Must we not all live our lives?

Miss Forsythe's solicitude about Margaret was mingled with a curious deference, as to one who had a larger experience of life than her own. The girl of a year ago was now the married woman, and was invested with something of the dignity that Miss Forsythe in her pure imagination attached to that position. Without yielding any of her opinions, this idea somehow changed her relations to Margaret: a little, I thought to

that will make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he's going to find out some way of seeing her; and if he don't, all the plotting and planning in the world isn't going to make him."

"Who's plotting?" again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man. hides with shame, but a woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a milliner's bill.

"Oh, not you!" exulted his wife. "I understand what you want. You want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at the office."

The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the Milldam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature. If Corey could hardly help feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel wished he talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had not many other topics, and if he had a choice between the mare and the edifice on the water side of Beacon street, it was just now the latter. Sometimes, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it happened that the young man met Irene there again. She had come up with her mother alone, and they were in the house, interviewing the carpenter as before, when the Colonel jumped out of his buggy and cast anchor at the pavement. More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the carpenter, and Irene was sitting in the bowwindow on a trestle, and looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her father, and bowed and blushed. Her father went on upstairs to find her mother, and Corey

hungry man that if he would possess his appetite in patience, he would very likely have a splendid dinner next year. Women are not constituted to understand this sort of reasoning. It is needless to say that in our general talks on the situation these personalities were not referred to, for although Margaret was silent, it was plain to see that she was uneasy.

Morgan liked to raise questions of casuistry, such as that whether money dishonestly come by could be accepted for good purposes.

"I had this question referred to me the other day," he said. "A gambler-not a petty cheater in cards, but a man who has a splendid establishment in which he has amassed a fortune, a man known for his liberality and good-fellowship and his interest in politics-offered the president of a leading college a hundred thousand dollars to endow a professorship. Ought the president to take the money, knowing how it was made?"

"Wouldn't the money do good-as much good as any other hundred thousand dollars?" asked Margaret.

"Perhaps. But the professorship was to bear his name, and what would be the moral effect of that?"

"Did you recommend the president to take the money, if he could get it without using the gambler's name?"

"I am not saying yet what I advised. I am trying to get your views on a general principle."

"But wouldn't it be a sneaking thing to take a man's money, and refuse him the credit of his generosity?"

"But was it generosity? Was not his object, probably, to get a reputation which his whole life belied, and to get it by obliterating the distinction between right and wrong?"

"But isn't it a compromising distinction," my wife asked, "to take his money without his name? The president knows that it is money fraudulently got, that really belongs to somebody else; and the gambler would feel that if the president takes it, he cannot think very disapprovingly of the manner in which it was acquired. I think it would be more honest and straightforward to take his name with the money.'

"The public effect of connecting the gambler's name with the college would be debasing," said Morgan; "but, on the contrary, is every charity or educational institution bound to scrutinize the source of every benefaction? Isn't it better that

money, however acquired, should be used for a good purpose than a bad one?"

"That is a question," I said, "that is a vital one in our present situation, and the sophistry of it puzzles the public. What would you say to this case? A man notoriously dishonest, but within the law, and very rich, offered a princely endowment to a college very much in need of it. The sum would have enabled it to do a great work in education. But it was intimated that the man would expect, after a while, to be made one of the trustees. His object, of course, was social position."

"I suppose, of course," Margaret replied, "that the college couldn't afford that. It would look like bribery."

"Wouldn't he be satisfied with an LL.D.?" Morgan asked. "I don't see," my wife said, "any difference between the two cases stated and that of the stock gambler, whose unscrupulous operations have ruined thousands of people, who founds a theological seminary with the gains of his slippery transactions. By accepting his seminary the public condones his conduct. Another man, with the same shaky reputation, endows a college. Do you think that religion and education are benefited in the long run by this? It seems to me that the public is gradually losing its power of discrimination between the value of honesty and dishonesty. Real respect is gone when the public sees that a man is able to buy it."

This was a hot speech for my wife to make. For a moment Margaret flamed up under it with her old-time indignation. I could see it in her eyes, and then she turned red and confused, and at length said:

"But wouldn't you have rich men do good with their money?"

"Yes, dear; but I would not have them think they can blot out by their liberality the condemnation of the means by which many of them make money. That is what they are doing, and the public is getting used to it."

"Well," said Margaret, with some warmth, "I don't know that they are any worse than the stingy saints who have made their money by saving, and act as if they expected to carry it with them."

"Saints or sinners, it does not make much difference to me," now put in Mrs. Fletcher, who was evidently considering

the question from a practical point of view, "what a man professes, if he founds a hospital for indigent women out of the dividends that I never received."

Morgan laughed. "Don't you think, Mrs. Fletcher, that it is a good sign of the times that so many people who make money rapidly are disposed to use it philanthropically?"

"It may be for them, but it does not console me much just now."

"But you don't make allowance enough for the rich. Perhaps they are under a necessity of doing something. I was reading this morning in the diary of old John Ward, of Stratford-on-Avon, this sentence: 'It was a saying of Navisson, a lawyer, that no man could be valiant unless he hazarded his body, nor rich unless he hazarded his soul!'"

"Was Navisson a modern lawyer?" I asked.

"No; the diary is dated 1648-1679."

"I thought so."

There was a little laugh at this, and the talk drifted off into a consideration of the kind of conscience that enables a professional man to espouse a cause he knows to be wrong as zealously as one he knows to be right; a talk that I should not have remembered at all, except for Margaret's earnestness in insisting that she did not see how a lawyer could take up the dishonest side.

Before Margaret went to Lenox, Henderson spent a few days with us. He brought with him the abounding cheerfulness, and the air of a prosperous, smiling world, that attended him in all circumstances. And how happy Margaret was! They went over every foot of the ground on which their brief courtship had taken place, and Heaven knows what joy there was to her in reviving all the tenderness and all the fear of it! Busy as Henderson was, pursued by hourly telegrams and letters, we could not but be gratified that his attention to her was that of a lover. How could it be otherwise, when all the promise of the girl was realized in the bloom and the exquisite sensibility of the woman. Among other things, she dragged him down to her mission in the city, to which he went in a laughing and bantering mood. When he had gone away, Margaret ran over to my wife, bringing in her hand a slip of paper. "See that!" she cried, her eyes dancing with pleasure. It