become free from the Custom House at last. I fancy that he ran away for a

judicious interval. Who would not?
Was there one person to whom he told the truth before he went? Did the

girl behind the counter hear the manner in which the engagement was
broken? Ah, none of us will ever know that! But, although I could not,

without the highest impropriety, have spoken to any of the old ladies
about this business, unless they had chosen to speak to me--and somehow I

feel that after the abrupt close of it not even Mrs. Gregory St. Michael
would have been likely to touch on the subject with an outsider--there

was nothing whatever to forbid my indulging in a skirmish with Eliza La
Heu; therefore I lunched at the Exchange on my last day.

"To the mountains?" she said, in reply to my information about my plans
of travel.

"Doctor Beaugarcon says nothing else can so quickly restore me."
"Stay there for the rhododendrons, then," she bade me. "No sight more

beautiful in all the South."
"Town seems deserted," I pursued. "Everybody gone."

"Oh, not everybody!"
"All the interesting people."

"Thank you."
"I meant, interesting to you."

I saw her decide not to be angry; and her decision changed and saved our
conversation from the trashy, bantering tone which it was taking, and

brought it to a pass most unexpected to both of us.
She gave me a charming and friendly smile. "Well, you, at any rate, are

going away. And I am really sorry for that."
Her eyes rested upon me with perfect frankness. I was not in love with

Eliza La Heu, but nearer to love than I had ever been then, and it would
have been easy, very easy, to let one's self go straight onward into

love. There are for a man more ways of falling into that state than
romancers would have us to believe, and one of them is by an assent of

the will at a certain given moment, which the heart promptly follows--
just as a man in a moment decides he will espouse a cause, and soon finds

himself hotly fighting for it body and soul. I could have gone out of
that Exchange completely in love with Eliza La Heu; but my will did not

give its assent, and I saw John Mayrant not as a rival, but as one whose
happiness I greatly desired.

"Thank you," I said, "for telling me you are sorry I am going. And now,
may I treat you more than ever as a friend, and tell you of a

circumstance which Kings Port does not know?"
It put her on her guard. "Don't be indiscreet," she laughed.

"Isn't timely indiscretion discretion?"
"And don't be clever," she said. "Tell me what you have to say--if you're

quite sure you'll not be sorry."
"Quite sure. There's no reason--now that the untruth is properly and

satisfactorily established--that one person should not know that John
Mayrant broke that engagement." And I told her the whole of it. "If I'm

outrageous to share this secret with you," I concluded, "I can only say
that I couldn't stand the unfairness any longer."

"He jumped straight in?" said Eliza.
"Oh, straight!"

"Of course," she murmured.
"And just after declaring that he wouldn't."

"Of course," she murmured again. "And the current took them right away?"
"Instantly."

"Was he very tired when you got to him?"
I answered this question and a number of others, backward and forward,

until she had led me to cover the whole incident about twice-and-a-half
times. Then she had a silence, and after this a reflection.

"How well they managed it!"
"Managed what?"

"The accepted version."
"Oh, yes, indeed!"

"And you and I will not spoil it for them," she declared.
As I took my final leave of her she put a flower in my buttonhole. My

reflection was then, and is now, that if she already knew the truth from
John himself, how well she managed it!

So that same night I took the lugubrious train which bore me with the
grossest deliberation to the mountains; and among the mountains and their

waterfalls I stayed and saw the rhododendrons, and was preparing to
journey home when the invitation came from John and Eliza.

I have already said that of this wedding no word was in the papers. Kings
Port by the war lost all material things, but not the others, among which

precious privacy remains to her; and, O Kings Port, may you never lose
your grasp of that treasure! May you never know the land where the

reporter blooms, where if any joy or grief befall you, the public press
rings your doorbell and demands the particulars, and if you deny it the

particulars, it makes them up and says something scurrilous about you
into the bargain. Therefore nothing was printed, morning or evening,

about John and Eliza. Nor was the wedding service held in church to the
accompaniment of nodding bonnets and gaping stragglers. No eye not tender

with regard and emotion looked on while John took Eliza to his wedded
wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy state of

matrimony.
In Royal Street, not many steps from South Place, there stands a quiet

house a little back, upon whose face sorrow has struck many blows, but
made no deep wounds yet; no scorch from the fires of war is visible, arid

the rending of the earthquake does not show too plainly; but there hangs
about the house a gravity that comes from seeing and suffering much, and

a sweetness from having sheltered many generations of smiles and tears.
The long linked chain of births and deaths here has not been broken and

scattered, and the grandchildren look out of the same windows from which
the grandsires gazed, whose faces now in picture frames still watch

serenely the sad present from their happy past. Therefore the rooms lie
in still depths of association, and from the walls, the stairs, the

furniture, flows the benign influence of undispersed memories; it sheds
its tempered radiance upon the old miniatures, and upon every fresh

flower that comes in from the garden; it seems to pass through the open
doors to and fro like a tranquilblessing; it is beyond joy and pain,

because time has distilled it from both of these; it is the assembled
essence of kinship and blood unity, enriched by each succeeding brood

that is born, is married, is fruitful in its turn, and dies remembered;
only the balm of faith is stronger to sustain and heal; for that comes

from heaven, while it is earth that gives us this; and the sacred cup of
it which our native land once held is almost empty.

Amid this influence John and Eliza were made one, and the faces of the
older generations grew soft beneath it, and pensive eyes became lustrous,

and into pale cheeks the rosy tint came like an echo faintly back for a
short hour. They made so little sound in their quiet happiness of con-

gratulation that it might have been a dream; and they were so few that
the house with the sense of its memories was not lost with the movement

and crowding, but seemed still to preside over the whole, and send down
its benediction.

When it was my turn to shake the hands of bride and groom, John asked:--
"What did your friend do with your advice?"

And I replied. "He has taken it."
"Perhaps not that," John returned, "but you must have helped him to see

his way."
When the bride came to cut the cake, she called me to her and fulfilled

her promise.
"You have always liked my baking," she said.

"Then you made it after all," I answered.
"I would not have been married without doing so," she declared sweetly.

When the time came for them to go away, they were surrounded with
affectionate God-speeds; but Miss Josephine St. Michael waited to be the

last, standing a little apart, her severe and chiselled face turned
aside, and seeming to watch a mocking-bird that was perched in his cage

at a window halfway up the stairs.
"He is usually not so silent," Miss Josephine said to me. "I suppose we

are too many visitors for him."
Then I saw that the old lady, beneath her severity, was deeply moved; and

almost at once John and Eliza came down the stairs. Miss Josephine took
each of them to her heart, but she did not trust herself to speak; and a

single tear rolled down her face, as the boy and girl continued to the
hall-door. There Daddy Ben stood, and John's gay good-by to him was the