original in the story of its woes. It was the harsh recital of poverty,
of suspicion, of mean makeshifts and compromises, of low pains and lower
longings, of sorrows that were degrading, of a grief that was pitiable.
Yet it was sincere in a certain kind of vague yearning for the presence
of the degraded man to whom it was written,--an affection that was more
like a confused instinct than a sentiment.

York folded it again carefully, and placed it beneath the old man's
pillow. Then he returned to his seat by the fire. A smile that had been
playing upon his face, deepening the curves behind his mustache, and
gradually overrunning his clear gray eyes, presently faded away. It was
last to go from his eyes; and it left there, oddly enough to those who
did not know him, a tear.

He sat there for a long time, leaning forward, his head upon his hands.
The wind that had been striving with the canvas roof all at once lifted
its edges, and a moonbeam slipped suddenly in, and lay for a moment
like a shining blade upon his shoulder; and, knighted by its touch,
straightway plain Henry York arose, sustained, high-purposed and
self-reliant.


The rains had come at last. There was already a visible greenness on the
slopes of Heavytree Hill; and the long, white track of the Wingdam road
was lost in outlying pools and ponds a hundred rods from Monte Flat. The
spent water-courses, whose white bones had been sinuously trailed over
the flat, like the vertebrae of some forgotten saurian, were full again;
the dry bones moved once more in the valley; and there was joy in the
ditches, and a pardonable extravagance in the columns of "The Monte Flat
Monitor." "Never before in the history of the county has the yield