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times in my own mind in what way or ways she could best be and do that, or, if there was but one way, what was it, what is it? I am young and strong; I have had advantages to prepare me for work as men have; I remember too much of Uncle Dick's theorizing concerning women not to be, in a sense, his disciple; to feel an impulse pushing me toward his goal. I realize, too, that to be a woman like Professor Mitchell is to write one's name in the stars; and to be a domestic deity like my five hundred good sisters is to write it in the heart of a man, which, according to sacred authority—”

"Is deceitful above all things," concluded Dick, with gravity, which elicited a merry round of laughter.

still worse one of wearing myself out in fashionable frivolity. I don't know that I have any special talent for special work. I do know that I am in the world, that I am selfish enough to wish to make the very most of my life, and that I have a right to the honest counsel and advice of my two best friends in the matter. I am open to conviction from Europe and America," she archly concluded.

"You see, Dick," smiled James, after a pause, "the fruit of your heresies. Here we have a young lady on our hands who, having been fed on the progressive ideas of the nineteenth century, now asks what shall be done with her."

"While you were in college," spoke Dick, looking dreamingly in the distance, "and this

“And desperately wicked," added Ricarda, question of what your duty might be came into with mock solemnity.

"Has that been your experience in finding it so, my child?" asked her father.

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Oh, no; no, papa," she quickly replied. "I find men-everybody very good and kind, judging from what St. Paul gives as a standard.”

'Are you an admirer of St. Paul?" asked Lane, secretly wishing to lead the conversation into a different channel.

"Yes and no. He uttered many strong and true thoughts, and was aflame with zeal for what he held to be the truth. But he seems never to have risen above bigotry and narrowness in regard to women, which might readily enough be excusable on various grounds, save that he was so much indebted to them. Indeed, from some source, it has been made to appear that he was financially kept afloat for a long time by the merchant Lydia, who was in a small way a sort of Kadijah to this Mohammed of Christianity. You see, Uncle Dick," she continued, half mirthfully, "it is but another illustration of your old time assertion, that, if a woman exerts herself in anybody's behalf, it is for a man.”

your mind, how did you dispose of it?"

"I didn't dispose of it at all. I simply said to myself, This is a matter I can not decide. I will let time and circumstances determine it for me.'

"Very well, let them still be the arbiters of your destiny. You can afford to wait for a signal of some sort, or, as a theological student would say, for a 'call from the Lord.'"'

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Is that the way young men do after leaving college, Uncle Dick? Sit down and wait, like Micawber, for something to turn up? Expecting some fine evening to see written in great letters in the sky their name and destined occupation?"

"Yes, some do about that. But what a young man does need be no guide for you. If a woman have finer instincts, she should wait with firmer faith for intuitive guidance, and depend less upon the bias of ambition and preference."

"That's a pretty fallacy," she laughed in reply. "I wish you and papa decided as arbitrarily about my future as you did in the past about what I should eat, what I should read, and

"To help man seems to be her destiny," ob- wherewithal I should be clothed. It would save served her father.

me a great deal of trouble. After all," and her voice had a shade of sadness in it—“ after all, I begin to learn that in the deep and vital things of life every human soul must decide for itself."

"And by no means an objectionable destiny, papa. He needs the help badly enough," she exclaimed, laughingly. "The only criticism I have to offer in regard to it is that he wants her to give it to him in his way, instead of being pleased "True, my child," chimed in her father, risto have her give it to him in her own way. And ing; "but, for the nonce, let us all be as butterthis brings me again to the question of my des- flies for the rest of the day, and take no thought tiny-of what my future is to be. Don't both for the morrow. There is a wood a half mile speak at once," she gayly concluded, as a pause away, and I propose that we go and investigate intervened. it. Ask Margredel to put us up a luncheon, and "Are you really in earnest, Ricarda," asked we will camp out, as in years gone by, when Riher father, "about having a career?" carda was in short dresses."

"I am in earnest as to what I shall do with my head, my heart, my hands, and my time. If I were a man instead of a woman, I could be no more so. I've a horror of rusting out, and a

The daughter hastened to execute her father's wish, and then sped to her own room to array herself for the expedition. At the end of a quarter of an hour she reappeared in the garden in a

short walking-dress, a wide-brimmed straw hat, During these weeks of their reunion, the feelings thick boots, and gloves.

"Here's the short dress still," she exclaimed. "Let us play that all these years have been an illusory bugbear, that I am little Sister Ricarda, that Uncle Dick is teaching me botany, and papa stuffing my brains with chalk formations and the chemistry of nature. But who's to be the Atlas of the lunch-basket?"

As Margredel approached with the luncheon, Dick speedily appropriated it, and the trio sallied forth, Ricarda and her father walking hand in hand, small schoolboy and schoolgirl fashion.

The day in the woods was but one out of many passed in like recreation-walking, riding, sitting in the garden, and on rainy ones the father and Lane making business visits to the city, while Ricarda busied herself with reading, correspondence, and household affairs.

that had been born in the mind of Lane upon his first meeting with Ricarda had grown and strengthened with each succeeding day, until he now felt himself wound up in them as in a web. No other woman had ever affected him as did she, and when he endeavored to analyze his feelings, and in turn tried to convince himself that the reason why she was such a source of exquisite and tender delight to him was because she had been like his child, his little sister, from her babyhood-like a plant that one has lovingly cared for, watching with interest its every budding shoot, enjoying the rain and the sun doubly for its sake, feeling with pleasure all the soft and balmy influences that conduce to its growth, and then, at the last, enjoying all the past again a hundred-fold over in the beauty of its blossoming. Was it not in a like way that he enjoyed Ricarda? Was she not simply the completed picture that had been but an outlined sketch when he went away?—the full splendor of the aurora, whose radiance had but just begun to shimmer about her head in those seasons agone, when

Upon returning from one of these rainy-day excursions, and the three friends being convened about the dinner-table, Lane announced with unusual vivacity that he had an idea. "And what is it?" asked Ricarda. “An idea he had bid her good-by? Was it not for such in the heat of August is an anomaly."

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reasons as these, he argued, that he had come to “You remember, Ricarda," he went on, hur- ask himself a score of times a day, “What was friedly, "asking me, the morning we were dis- life, his future, to be to him henceforth without cussing your future, if young men did so and so her?" But, despising shame in himself as thorafter leaving college? Well, I was in Wall oughly as he did in others, he had the courage to Street to-day, when a quartet of young fellows say no. His feelings were not the outgrowth of just out of college came to the bank for letters such conditions. Had he met this girl for the of credit. They were going abroad for a year's first time in his life, he felt sure that she would travel before beginning the study of a profession. have enthralled and delighted him in the same That's just the thing for Ricarda to do,' I way. And if he only had met her for the first thought, and I've come home a powerful com- time! Ah! then had he been free to translate mittee of ways and means, whereby you shall his thoughts into their true language, and to go both return with me, the last of next month, to to her in all reverence and noble faith, saying, England." "I love thee, and have need of thee"; for, with "And you would have Ricarda do as young Plato, he believed that we love by necessary men do, after all?" smiled her father. law" that which has a natural affinity to us; so that the real and genuine lover may be certain of a return of affection from the beloved? But now, with the history and associations of the past before him, blocking his way like a sacred shield, what could he do but keep silence, and let all the violence of the situation turn back like a flood upon his own heart? Then, too, like an array of merry, mocking imps, arose one by one his thousand and one talks with James, and could he in the face of these ask his friend to give him his child, the only help, joy, consolation, love, that life held for him; to be himself, after all, the man in ambush to appropriate this perfect woman, if such appropriation were possible? While he could not bring himself to say yes to these questions, he was equally powerless to say no. He would wait, and meantime, above all other hopes, the one to have his friend and Ricarda

"Yes, in this respect. It is the only thing with all my thinking that I see clearly she should do. I feel as decided about it as I did that she should go to college. And I feel equally sure that at the end of a year she will see her path of duty and work marked out as clearly as we see the milky way on a clear night." And Dick went rapturously on enumerating the various reasons why a trip of that kind would be the very best thing for both father and daughter. Ricarda listened silently until well on toward the close of the dinner, when Lane asked her what she thought of the idea.

"I like it," she replied, emphatically. "But papa may not find it practicable."

However, after the lapse of some days, it was found to be a feasible plan, and thenceforward their occupations were shaped in reference to it.

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return with him to England dominated all else. interest and sympathy which her life-long friend He felt that his salvation lay in it.

One day, as he was thinking of what was now at all moments uppermost, the thought arose in his mind, defining itself with statuesque clearness: "Would what you can give Ricarda compensate her for what you would demand of her? Would not the answer to your wishes on her part involve self-sacrifice on hers?" Even with his keen sense of justice, this phase of the matter had not before presented itself to him, and that it had not now seemed to him to denote some obliquity or obscuration of his moral sense. "Oh, conceited, selfish mortal that I am!" he mentally ejaculated. "To follow the impulse of my feelings would be to act as if I were worthy of immediate translation to heaven, or, what would be better, to have heaven in human form divine inclosing all heaven's sweetness and grace for my earthly portion." Then, again, and for the most part he felt that even for Ricarda herself no shelter could be so secure, no haven so free from storms and billows, as the encompassing precinct of his love. "And why do I think that?" he would ask. "Have not men from all time thought and felt the same thing, and from all time, and through all time, made the reality oftentimes so bitterly different? Am I better, stronger, and juster, than my fellows? Would my love possess the generosity to be content in having Ricarda give me help as she says in her way, whatever that way might be, instead of desiring to circumscribe it, to bend it to suit my way? In other words, will I think more of contributing to her happiness, her aims in life, her ambitions and desires, than in having her as some devoted reflection consecrate all herself to me and mine?"

He distinctly remembered what James had often said, "Wait until you have learned the lesson of love, when all things will look differently to you." This experience had now come to him, was coming to him more and more every hour. He recognized the difference without being able to explain to his own satisfaction why, with the incoming of love, which should endow every emotion and impulse with increased magnanimity, there should be awakened a corresponding jealousy and selfishness, a desire for close and unique possession.

With Ricarda, the delight of having Uncle Dick at home again knew no abatement, although what she at first termed delight gradually changed to another feeling, which she knew not so well how to define. But, as women arrive at conclusions more quickly than men, because hampered with less innate stubborn self-righteousness, currently known as logic, she very soon acknowledged to herself that this strange, new

aroused in her was love itself, or the mysterious power that was preparing her heart for its assumption. With this concession or recognition once yielded to, she fully believed that she had only herself to think of, entertaining for no moment the possible thought that a feeling akin to her own had or could take lodgment in the heart of Richard Lane.

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"At the very best," she argued, “he would be disappointed and ashamed of me, if he knew or even suspected that I loved him otherwise than as Uncle Dick. He would think, if he did not say it, I hoped better things from you, Ricarda.' So she quickly and firmly resolved that his expectation of better things should not fail of realization because of lack of effort and will on her part. Anchored to this resolve, she turned for support to the thought of her life-work, keeping its purpose constantly in her mind, and, to strengthen and aid it, resolved to secure the help of her father and friend in its undertaking and achievement.

The arrangement to go abroad was full of satisfaction to her.

"So long as I can be with Uncle Dick, I shall feel my wings plumed for any height. He stimulates me to my best, and if I am ever to touch the bottom of my life at any one point, and rise to its extreme zenith at the other, he is the one to help me to do it."

The difference of a score and more of years between the ages of Lane and Ricarda seemed in no wise to affect the equality of their companionship. Lane's habits of life, removed from all tendency to dissipation, had robbed him of none of the elasticity and vigor of youth. No great sorrow had come upon him, as upon Mygatt James, leaving him discrowned and bereft. But, most of all, his affections had not been dissipated in unholy or frivolous channels, nor his heart withered by selfishness, leaving him as so many unwedded men are left at two and forty, but as sign-boards for the label, “God failed on this animal."

"So long as I live," he had once said to James, "I shall never be able to get away from myself, and this is reason enough why I should keep myself as righteous and decent as possible." In doing this he had consciously, and maybe necessarily, incased himself in an armor of reserve that led him to appear unsocial and distant to most persons, even brusque and opinionated; but with his friends, and especially with James, he poured out his feelings with the fullest freedom, and which had led him at one time to compare himself to a champagne-bottle, and his chum to a tire bouchon. "You uncork me, Jim,” he laughed, "and I bubble over until there is

nothing left in my mind but dregs of humiliation plied the father, his eyes resting admiringly upon at my loquacity." her. "If she had been a man-"

He felt the same disposition to "talk himself out" to Ricarda that he did to her father; and now for the first time in his life he had touched upon an experience about which he could talk with neither.

This effort on the part of both to conceal mutual feelings, each from the other, and at the same time to conduct themselves toward each other with their accustomed freedom and confidence, would have required more tact than either possessed, if each had not felt that the other was entirely unaffected by unusual feelings. If Lane thought he detected a constraint in Ricarda's manner, he attributed it to but a reflection of his own conduct, and, if she felt a change in him, she as readily attributed it to her own fancies. Of the three, the father alone perceived the possible result of the relations between Ricarda and his friend; and he felt, upon the whole, that, if his child could love him, her happiness could find no better security in human keeping than in the heart and hand of Richard Lane. But he also kept his thoughts to himself; and so the weeks passed away without special event, until the middle of September had come.

VI.

THE day dawned cloudy and sultry, and, after the mid-day luncheon, Lane proposed that they go for "a breath of air" to the top of one of the hills that formed a range of miniature mountains, nearly an hour's walk distant to the northwest from the cottage. This hill was the highest of the peaks, but, from the ease of its ascent and the wide view it afforded of the country for miles around, had at one time been a favorite resort for a party of tourists who had spent a summer in the locality, and had erected on its summit a rude pavilion, which, having at the time been thatched like the cottage of a French peasant, was now thickly overgrown with vines, furnishing at once a picturesque monument in the midst of a few sturdy old trees, as well as shelter from rain.

"I think, Dick," replied James, "that your proposition is a remedy worse than the ill. I should lose what breath I have in climbing to that atmospheric Pisgah. Moreover, I think it will rain; the air is surcharged with electricity."

"Oh, then, let's go!" cried Ricarda. "There's no equal place within our reach for watching an electrical storm. If the rain descends, we'll hie to the pavilion. We have only to go armed cap à pie, in a Boston uniform.' Then, too, the mountain pinks must be making their final display for the season."

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'She would then have been nothing extraordinary," she laughingly interrupted; "for men with pistol cocked and saber girt' roam the world around, and nobody minds it; but, if a woman is not frightened at a mouse, she is a prodigy of heroism, and a savante if she knows how to spell. But you and Mr. Richard Lane" (making a courtesy to the latter) "spoiled me for the typical girl years ago, when you taught me to climb rocks and hills like a chamois, and to love wild storms like an Alpine hunter. Come, papa, and Uncle Dick."

But papa begged to be excused, and Lane and Ricarda set off without him.

"You are the only woman in the world who knows how to walk," remarked Lane, as they were rapidly approaching the hill.

"You have walked with them all?" she asked in mock astonishment.

"No, not quite," laughed Lane; "but those I have walked with kept me at a mincing, higgity-piggity pace, that made me feel like stretching out my arms, inflating my lungs, as if to free myself from some invisible fetter. I don't think it looks well to see a man a pace or two ahead of the woman with whom he is walking, who is generally his wife; yet I confess to a fellow feeling with him, for I could name no more insufferable impatience than to be compelled to keep step for a lifetime with the majority of American and French women. The English walk much better, have more of the spring, equipoise, and lightness that belong to natural healthful motion. And I tell you, Ricarda, nothing more inspires a man with the helpfulness of the woman at his side, and with a sense of her uplifting equality-if I may so express it-than a firm, light, well-reaching step, that accompanies his own like a higher octave in music. It seems like an index to her whole character; so when I walk with other women I feel restricted and hampered. When I walk with you, I feel a sense of freedom and a lightness of motion even greater than when I walk alone."

"Thank you! That is the first compliment you ever paid me, Uncle Dick. I think something must be going to happen," and she glanced archly around.

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'Something is going to happen!" he exclaimed, seizing her arm, and turning her about. "Look, how rapidly the storm is coming upon us!

That is an unusual phenomenon to see such a phosphoric-like light haloing the hilltops, with darkness rising from the valleys." As they hastened up to the pavilion, the low rumbling of thunder, that for some time they had heard in "Ricarda is always ripe for adventure," re- the distance, came nearer and nearer, while an

occasional gleam of lightning lit up the low-lying horizon like a fitful smile of Nature at the manifestation of her own power.

"There! nous nous sommes sauvés!" exclaimed Ricarda, as they finally reached shelter. Taking off her hat, she hung it on a projecting stick in the pavilion; then with a quick motion pushed her waving hair back from her forehead, and turning to the wide doorway, stood with flushed cheeks and clasped hands, rapturously gazing at the awe-inspiring scene around her. "This was worth coming for, Uncle Dick," she said at length. "I do not know-I may be all mistaken-but I never see a manifestation of electricity in nature without thinking that, in the realm of this strange and wonderful force, the greatest and most important discoveries are within the coming half century to be made. Even with the modicum of this power that men already control, how superhuman are their achievements! If the gods are ever again jealous of the power of mortals, it will be because of their ability to seize and utilize this sublime, mysterious presence that lurks all about us like a spark of heavenly fire. I can never think of Franklin, and Faraday, and Morse, and their discoveries, without fairly holding my breath. If I go into the laboratory with papa, I feel sure that my attention will all be absorbed in electricity. At Vassar, my mania for making electrical experiments was such as to win me the sobriquet of 'Electrical Eel'; and I have been so fascinated with the science as sometimes to regard it as an augury of my fitness in its pursuance as a study. Only to think, Uncle Dick, if I should succeed in solving as yet unsolved electrical problems, as in mathematics did Marie-Gaétane-Agnesi!"

"That would be electrifying, to say the least," smiled Lane, when a sudden and startling clap of thunder seemed to shake the ground under their feet, driving the color from Ricarda's cheeks and further talk out of her mind.

That was very near us," said Lane, as he observed the pallor of her face, which was most unusual in Ricarda. He feared the hurried ascent had been too great a tax upon her. "The lightning must have struck not far away, and you know," he added, with excessive exactness, as if to reassure her, "that it never strikes twice in the same place."

But a moment later, and it seemed to be striking all about the hilltop; while the increasing darkness, forming a background like night, gave an awful intensity to the fiery swiftness of the forks of lightning that flashed with zigzag outlines in the gloom, like old Semitic characters -the yet unread hieroglyphics of the skies-the language of electricity. This is too grand and awful for mortal endurance," whispered Ricarda.

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VOL. VII.-2

Then followed a lull in the thunder, and the rain, which had been falling in large and labored drops, suddenly came down in torrents, followed by a blinding flash, and a crash of splitting timber that was quickly overpowered by terrifying bursts of thunder, and a blocking up of the doorway of the pavilion by a riven limb of oak.

Unconsciously to himself, in unquestioning obedience to an all-powerful instinct of his nature, which ruled his action, as the hand is moved by the will, Lane had put his arm about Ricarda, holding her close to his side, as if to shield her from the lightning-strokes, or some indefinable harm of the storm. Both had been too greatly affected by its intensity and terrific grandeur to realize the quick, strong, and passionated infolding of the one by the other. The moment had come to Lane when love had won the mastery over intention, and, borne out to the extreme limit of his being by the overwhelming emotions of the past moments, had leaped into sudden freedom of expression, and now seemed to confront him with a victorious sense of acquired liberty.

The pallor in Ricarda's face was still unabated, and, although she had borne the terror of the tempest bravely and unflinchingly, without uttering a cry, or making a movement of alarm, she was now unable to suppress a tremor that made weakness of her strength, and which at the same time revealed to her the support she was receiving from Lane. As a recognition of this passed through her mind, she said, as if in apology for herself:

"You never thought I was so weak, Uncle Dick?" while a faint smile gleamed on her colorless lips.

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What I have thought, Ricarda-” and his voice had a strange, new sound in it, which caused her to turn her head, and look into his face— "what I have thought is of the past, Ricarda. I am weak, too; weaker than you think, and since these awful moments that I have just experienced my heart refuses longer the violence of silence. I can not let you pass from my arms without telling you that I love you—not as your

Uncle Dick,' your life-long comrade and friend, but more, a thousand times more, as a man loves the one woman in all the world whom he would call wife."

Lane's face was now paler than Ricarda's, for a quick blush overspread hers, and she made an attempt to free herself from his arm.

"You are too weak yet to stand alone, Ricarda," he said, "and there are no seats here."

But, from an innate sense of delicacy that had ever been one of the peculiar charms of his manliness, he quickly broke into short lengths the boughs of the fallen limb before the door,

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