legal forms, and his indebtedness carried with it a sense of stern and
perpetual responsibility, which, alas! has not always been inherited by
the descendants of that simple and primitive period.

Mary Potter received the news with a sigh of relief. The money was again
counted, the interest which would be due somewhat laboriously computed,
and finally nothing remained but the sum which Mark Deane had promised
to furnish. This Mark expected to receive on the following Wednesday,
and Gilbert and his mother agreed that the journey to Chester should be
made at the close of the same week.

They went over these calculations in the quiet of the Sabbath afternoon,
sitting alone in the neat, old-fashioned kitchen, with the dim light of
an Indian-summer sun striking through the leafless trumpet-vines, and
making a quaint network of light and shade on the whitewashed
window-frame. The pendulum ticked drowsily along the opposite wall, and
the hickory back-log on the hearth hummed a lamentable song through all
its simmering pores of sap. Peaceful as the happy landscape without,
dozing in dreams of the departed summer, cheery as the tidy household
signs within, seemed at last the lives of the two inmates. Mary Potter
had not asked how her son's wooing had further sped, but she felt that
he was contented of heart; she, too, indulging finally in the near
consummation of her hopes,--which touched her like the pitying sympathy
of the Power that had dealt so singularly with her life,--was nearer the
feeling of happiness than she had been for long and weary years.

Gilbert was moved by the serenity of her face, and the trouble, which he
knew it concealed, seemed, to his mind, to be wearing away. Carefully
securing the doors, they walked over the fields together, pausing on the
hilltop to listen to the caw of the gathering crows, or to watch the