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The weary hours of her anguish wore slowly away, and as the storm beat furiously against the window panes. her pitiful cries, My husband! my husband! where can he be ?" touched the hearts of her attendants more deeply than the throes of her labor. But towards morning there came a whisper; she caught its first accent.

"What did you say of Richard?" she asked, "Is there any news of him ?"

"Calm yourself, Mrs. Glendenning," said the physician in attendance. "The Doctor is quite safe; he will be home soon."

But she read the white and startled faces about her truly. "You have not told me all," she said. "Some acci dent has happened to him; I must know the worst."

"If you will promise to control yourself," the physician said "I will tell you that he has met with an accident occasioned by the storm, and is somewhat injured, though not seriously, we hope. He will be at home soon, so quiet yourself and wait patiently. Remember how much depends upon your good sense and self-control."

Elsie closed her eyes submissively

the door and whispered incautiously loud,

"Miss Vaughan is safe."

"Eloise Vaughan," exclaimed Elsie starting up. "What has she to do with my husband?" Her eyes glis tened fearfully; and the physician after enjoining total silence upon every attendant in regard to events outside, gently quieted the sufferer, and put an end to her excitement by the free use of anesthetics. But the mischief was done, the scandal was blown. Before morning it was known to half Brackendale, not only that Dr. Glendenning and Miss Vaughan had been carried off on the bridge, and narrowly escaped death by going over the falls; the Doctor having had both his legs broken, while Miss Vaughan had marvellously escaped injury by her long garments catching in the branches of an uprooted tree, which the flood had swept away, but also that there was something wrong in the domestic relations at Briar Cottage. In short, that Mrs. Glendenning was jealous of Miss Vaughan.

As the day brcke Dr. Glendenning was laid upon a bed in his own house, and the news was brought to him that his wife had borne a fine daugh

very quietly.

"Tell Elsie" he said, "that I am sorry she suffered alone. I would have been with her if I could. When I am rested a trifle bring my little daughter to me The omens are sad for her; her father has failed her at the very outset, but thanks to the good people of Waterford Mills he is safe now, and will make it all up to her by and by."

Elsie's recovery was not rapid, but in a few weeks she was sitting up and able with assistance to get into her husband's room and show him the baby with all motherly pride and tenderness. The Doctor was still a feeble and helpless sufferer; the broken bones were doing as well as could be expected, while the face kept thin and haggard and bore deep lines of mental suffering and unrest, but at this rate the attending surgeon saw that it must be many months before the Doctor would be his old self again. His keen eye was not to be deceived, and one morning after feeling the pulse and looking critically into the eye of his patient, he exclaimed:

"Glendenning, do you know what I am going to do next?"

"I'm sure I don't," said Richard sadly.

"Send for Father Dunne to confess you."

The Doctor closed his eyes for a moment in silence

"That will do for my wife," he said at length," she is half a Catholic already."

"Very well, my man; if you cannot confess to Father Dunne, you must make up your mind what you will do with your trouble, and that right quickly, or I shall lose a patient by and by, which, under the circumstances, would be an unreasonable marring of my reputation."

"Thank you, Doctor," said Rich. ard after another momentary silence. "As you go out bid them bring me my little daughter; she shall confess me.'

They brought him the babe, and he soothed her to sleep upon his arm.

Oh! the solemn mystery of Fatherhood! God at his best and greatest is simply Our Father! Richard, lying there with the weak, wee, helpless thing upon his arm, felt an inflow upon his soul of deep momentous thought. He saw how, in the Divine order, Love is the only true source of life. Out of infinite love the worlds were first peopled; out of a love which is the truest possible reflection of the Divine impulse in its purity and unselfishness, should they be repeopled? He who fails of a love as pure as that first inspiration of life, has he any right to take upon himself the office of the re-creator? He looked steadily into the face of these great first principles of life, until they blinded him by their perfect whiteness. Then the tender appealing face of his first-born drew his gaze downwards, and he felt that somehow his human sin with all its fruits of terror and of beauty, must be made to clasp hand with the divine principles of order and harmony, and so be lifted out of its earth-born estate into the higher life of the spirit. So by patient working and waiting must each human life be regenerated and made at last to stand before the Father in a beauty and purity which shall be its own and perfect in itself.

"Little one," was Richard's inward vow, written upon his soul in most enduring characters, "if your father has wronged you in making you the offspring of a love which represented his lower and not at all his higher nature, there is only one reparation possible, and that shall be yours.

Whatever influence shall henceforth flow from him to you, shall be untainted by any impure act, so that when you shall read the record of these future years by the light of eternity, you shall confess that henceforth, at least, he has lived true to the solemn obligations of his fatherhood."

The Doctor rallied and soon began to improve, and between him and his little child there grew up a love that was tender and beautiful as the dawn. It was nearly spring before he was able to resume the labors of his profession, and when he and Elsie were again seen in public together, sharp sighted crones discovered a shadow upon the lady's brow. Strange hints were thrown out, too, by the domestics, that the separation enforced during the Doctor's illness, now that the necessity for it was removed, still remained. The truth was simply this, Richard Glendenning was conscious of being inwardly divorced from his wife. The marriage to which the law held him was to his inner sense plainly a lie. He felt therefore that to continue to recognize Elsie as his wife in the intimate relations of marriage was to wrong her purity as well as his own. No husband in all Brackendale was outwardly more kind to his wife than he to Elsie, but beyond these outward observances nature had placed a deep and wide chasm between them, a chasm which never could be naturally bridged, and which he therefore no longer endeavored to ignore.

At first Elsie strove with graces and blandishments to win him back to his allegiance. He was proof against them all. Her small arts, so available in small dilemmas, proved powerless in the face of a great emergency. Then her native shrewishness made itself manifest. But her weak repinings, her unjust reproaches, her jeal ous accusations, only steeled him against himself. Not for a woman like this would he yield principle to passion.

Then Eisie meditated whether or not should she use the scorpions of society to lash her husband back to his duty. An event occurred which turned the nearly even scale of her pros and cons.

June came again, and Mrs. Abner Vaughan went down to Philadelphia.

Soon after her return not feeling well one day, she sent for Dr. Glendenning. The Doctor was nervous that morning. The last year had aged him more than the ten which preceded it. The fresh, placid look of

his face was gone and there were seams and furrows, and sallow tints instead.

"I wish Mrs. Vaughan's megrims were at the devil," he thought as he drove slowly up the hill towards her house. "I am in no mood to talk with her. She will keep me gossiping an hour, and will say things in that calm, sensible, excellent way of hers that will torture me for weeks. A woman who has judgement but no insight is a nuisance, a monstrosity."

Suddenly he remembered that Mrs. Vaughan was after all, the last woman whom in his present circumstances he should desire to gift with more than common penetration, and tried to restrain his grumbling. But there was indeed a severe trial in store for him.

"Richard," said Mrs. Vaughan after he had written his usual prescriptions of harmless medicaments with imposing names, "I am troubied about Eloise. I am really afraid the poor child is going into a decline."

The Doctor felt a swift flush overspread his forehead, but kept his lips shut for an instant.

Indeed," he said at length, "I am pained to hear it. What are the symptoms which alarm you?"

"She has grown so thin since last summer, and her face is as white as the wall. I really think, Richard, that terrible event last fall was too great a shock for her constitution."

Richard was silent for a moment, a silence upon which Mrs. Vaughan put a professional interpretation. She went on:

"You didn't see her I believe after that night, but for the few days she remained here after the accident she seemed like another creature. She is never like other women you know, but she seemed then more like a spirit

than ever. There is something very frail about her constitution, and really I am afraid the dreadful cold she took on that occasion will be the death of her. Don't you think a change of scene would do her good?"

Richard felt instinctively what was coming, and shrank from it.

"It might," he said, "but I would not like to advise it without seeing her. How does she feel about it her self?"

case.

"That is the worst feature of the You can't convince her that anything ails her. I wanted her to give up painting and come here for the summer, but she was resolute to go on with her work. I confess I can't understand her enthusiasm. Of course we have all admired her in dependence but now it is another matter; a case I may say of life and death; and sentiment and all that ought to give way." Richard

rose hastily to leave. "If you hear anything further about Eloise" he said, " let me know. I am deeply interested. The event you speak of would have severely tried any woman's constitution, but I trust Eloise is not yet beyond help."

He went out and left Mrs. Vaughan cogitating. She was characterized by intellectual scope and activity of a rather uncommon order. An earnest and conscientious desire to promote the best interests of all around her, and a simple, straightforward habit of looking all over the surface of things, without ever penetrating a line below. Gossip could not live in her atmosphere, she was too thoroughly humane; the insight of others rarely availed her, because without being haughty she was too self-reli

suffered more than he with wanting to know how it was with Eloise. It was no common event which had revealed them to each other. The tie which the experiences of that night had formed between them was not of twisted hemp, but so to speak of welded metal. In those long hours of anguish and suspense they had been separated from all other mundane things. Thrown upon each other with an inward violence to which the outward storm was only a fitting accompaniment and type, it was simply impossible that the remembrance of that perfect union and accord should not be indelibly impressed upon the consciousness of each. Henceforth, as if by the hand of Omnipotence itself, their lives were inextricably blended. This by the law of spiric; but, oh for the insight which could harmonize this law with those outward observances which society with more or less of justice imposes on the individual. The Doctor had striven nobly through many a long hour to reach this height of vision, as have how many souls before and since! Take comfort! the height is there; it can be reached, and every noble pioneer who has with pure intent risked fortune, and home, and life itself, to find it, only to be worn out by the bristling array of native terrors, or torn in pieces by the wild beast of society, has surely advanced by just so much of true purpose as he gave to the work, the glorious realization which he sought. World workers are such; though the struggle of their lives be confined to the sacred recesses of their own bosoms or only overflow upon the spheres and rise to God. But now all abstract principles were whelmed out of sight in the one sharp fact, Eloise was suffering, dying per. haps; though he estimated Mrs. Vaughan's diagnosis of the case too truly to cherish exaggerated fears. Suffering and dying for him. There was only one thing for a man to do. It was a case wherein, let the world say what it might, the higher obliga

tion must take precedence of the lower.

Reaching home he went quietly to his room, packed a valise, bade John drive him to the depot, and say to Mrs. Glendenning on his return that he had been suddenly called away, but should return in two days. He did not care to meet Elsie's questions and it would be time enough for that by and by, when he might hope to be a little calmer. His professional affairs he had already entrusted to a student who was likely to manage them with discretion.

The next morning found him ascending, with a somewhat quicker pulse than usual, the stairs which led to Eloise's studio. He knocked at the door, and she opened it herself. She was dressed plainly in her loose working wrapper, whose flowing folds nevertheless could not conceal the attenuation of her frame. Her face was truly as white as the wall-just a line of light between the waving masses of her dark hair, and her hands, slender always, were waxen in their transparency. But as she looked up quietly into his face, Richard knew by the ray of her eye that her spirit was strong to live.

"You have come," she said simply, as she placed her hand in his.

"Yes, Eloise. Have you looked for me?"

She looked up at him and smiled for a reply.

"Was it cruel not to come before?" he asked.

"No, only right; but I am glad to see you now."

He stood holding both her hands in the clasp of his, and looking down into her face. So standing, and noting with true eye all the signs of that internal warfare which had so preyed upon her delicate physique, how could he contro! the rising flood of tenderness which made him yearn to take her to his bosom in the full assurance of love. But while Eloise was far too true and simple to live a lie by concealing her emotions, she was also

far too conscientious not to hold both herself and him to the strict restraints of purity. With a nameless grace of motion she unclasped her hands from his, and conducted him to a seat by the window in a way that negatived at once and for all present time, any lover-like expression. He knew that this was right; in a cooler moment he had foreseen that it must be so, and he acquiesced without a murmur. But if the expression of their love was thus impossible, there was left to them yet the priceless boon of friendship; that relation between man and woman which is, when through purity of heart it is possible at all, the sweetest and purest which mortals can know. There is no pure enduring love of which friendship is not the solid substantial basis, to which passion can only add a keener but not a sweeter flavor, a more thrilling but a less deep and tranquil delight.

Eloise's study was her parlor also. Here were her books, her music, her work as well as her painting. After the mutual inquiries that were natural, Dr. Glendenning began taking up these mingled threads of her daily life, and making himself familiar with them. They read together, they sang together; he criticized her paintings, and she unfolded to him all her plans for work and for recreation. By and by when her lunch came in, coffee and biscuit, and a little choice fruit, they ate it together, and were so refreshed by it as never by any meal before. So the day wore away, and as the evening drew near he rose to leave her.

"Now, Eloise," he said, as he took her hand to say good bye, "you are looking better than when I found you, and you are not going to send me any more news of consumption and early decay I trust ?"