He had that curious, disquieting touch of pure aristocracy which the humbly born sometimes have; and it makes tragedy for them. He longed quite naturally for things that should be severe yet fine. Why, he did not know; yet they seemed to be his simple right. He starved for beauty in a finished form; the lack of it was, in very subtlety, killing him. He fretted so much that sometimes he lost patience even with his dearest. Hester's complacent helplessness estranged him; Clara's sound common sense and sober spirit drove him back into himself. This sick wife of his became a bracing east wind, and his soul was of the south. He opened her bedroom door. The room was warm, with a clear fire. Clara, wrapped to her chin in a useful brown wrapper, was propped up on a couch near the window. Dimmer looked over her head before he spoke, and he saw radiating rows of new houses just like his own; a melancholy pattern of mean streets; then flat, meadlike land, and beyond that the flat sea.

Clara was unusually busy; she was stitching fast almost savagely, you might say. But directly her husband came into the room she doubled forward and hastily stuffed the garment, whatever it was, under the pillow that covered her feet above the sofa-rug.

She was always cold and always pale. Her illness was so vague, so insidious and elusive, that it seemed to John as if a touch would either kill or cure her. She tucked her work away from him, and her action was so hasty, so modestly secretive, that he was tenderly reminded of those days, years ago, when she had made baby-clothes. Deliciously then she had hidden them away if any one came in; flushing, sparkling, as she flushed and sparkled now. that had been a poetic confusion and very rosy; this was gray.

Yet

He sat down. He asked her how she was feeling, and she, with the usual uncomplaining monotony, told him. After that there seemed nothing much to say; for they were never talkers together. Also, they were heart-sick; coming more closely to them every day was the big terror. Clara felt sure and John was half persuaded that before winter was over she would be dead.

From his dear

She cuddled down on her pillows, plainly glad to be there, and lovingly she watched her husband. He was so big, so clever and strong. face her eyes traveled anxiously to the pillow which covered her feet. She was a fragile flower of a thing, and that brown dressing-gown-cobbled, since Hester had made it - was an assault to the proud, fine lily, her throat! John was thinking this; and he would have arrayed her in silk: green, perhaps, so as to make leaves for the lily!

"Tired?" she asked, and put her lean hand softly on the back of his tanned one. "Very, my dearest." "Won't the sermon run? words come right, John?"

Don't the

He spoke

"The sermon is all right." brusquely, since never could he talk of his sermons to Clara. "It is the deacons I worry about. The congregation is not satisfied with me; no congregation ever has been; you know that. Yet I have served in the ministry for twenty years. They say, the deacons, that I don't stir up souls enough. The plain truth, Clara, my dear, is just this: your John is a failure." He frowned, looking over her head again at the narrow, gray houses and the wide, gray sea.

"Don't say that-don't, don't. It hurts me, and it makes me feel so useless and such a burden."

She spoke poignantly, and all the more so, as he truly gauged, because in her heart she shared the deacons' opinion of his preaching. He had never, from the pulpit, touched Clara; and as for Hester, you could never be sure if the child ever listened. She was probably making mind-pictures of your face, and not missing one movement of your hand.

"A burden! Not a bit; my only blessing," he answered, valiantly. Then, as sounds of scouring ascended the stairs and seemed to assail the very door, he added: "And the only comfort I can come to; on Wednesdays, anyway, when the Baggage is here! She is conscientious, poor old bundle, but she emphasizes a man's miseries. I can't endure such a forlorn form of labor. As for Hester-well, the child doesn't manage very well. If brooms were pencils and our floors covered with clean paper, she would be excellent."

"She ought to be taught drawing by a good master," the mother said, sounding both proud and doleful. “I am sure she is clever. But what is the use of talking? We haven't any money—everything depends upon money-and she can't be spared from home, either, just yet.” "Why 'yet'?" he asked her, crisply. She did not answer; subtly she regarded him, and as he met the glance and became submerged by it the cold dread caught them up. It was a wave, washing cruelly over each head, and they sat drenched with agony.

He dropped his head down upon her pillow, lips touching her hair and it was thin.

"I can do nothing," he moaned, "nothing. You will die; you are slipping from me fast, my Clara, and it seems so cruel." "There is one thing we must never do: rebel against God," she returned, and spoke with vigor.

She sat suddenly up on the sofa, looking gaunt. She wrung his hand so hard that it hurt; yes, her small, weak fingers made him wince and gave him back bravery. She sat suddenly up and, doing this, shot off the pillow from where it lay across her feet.

It fell to the floor and, her round eyes closely following it, she became very white. She cried out. She curved her hands, as if to protect John from something terrible. It was an instinctive gesture, and he noticed it and pondered upon it before he understood.

The white pillow was on the floor, and the work that she had been busy upon when her husband came in was betrayed. It had fallen out. John got up. He went to the foot of the sofa and stooped. She was watching, her wasted face, so pinched, so pretty still, was sharp with torture. He picked up the pillow first and laid it across her feet, where it had been. Then he picked up her work and flung it across her tense knees, that were so straight under the striped blanket.

It was a black stuff bodice. Clara lay quite still, staring at it, and she did not seem to find sense enough to hide it away for a second time. Her eyes, very bright, filled with tears. John stared at the bodice, too; stupidly at first, uncomprehendingly, in the man's way. Then he also cried out and grew white.

VOL. CXXVI.-No. 754.-75

"Crape!" he said, foolishly. "CrapeClara-crape!"

It seemed as if he ran to her for soothing; as if he could only say that sinister word and her name; calling upon her in his dismay.

"It is old," she returned, also foolishly, in her agitation seizing upon the trivial side. "I picked it off the cloak I had for poor mother; my mourning when she died. I damped it and pressed it, John. Doesn't it look nice nearly new? Don't look so-struck, my dear. Hester can never sew properly, and she wouldn't have the heart to sew then. You"-Clara had regained her unquenchable common sense "could not afford to pay for new black. There are always so many expenses when-when anything of that sort happens."

He did not speak at first. He could enly stare at her, marvel at her, yearn for her. He loved her, and he was impatient with her. He was touched to agony, and yet he was disgusted. Was she obtuse, or was she lofty, with a loftiness far beyond his understanding?

He did not know, he could not fathom, as he sat there with his eyes fast upon that grim bodice lying across her knees. Yet of one thing he was sure. He loved this dear wife, and he was losing her. He very nearly put his weary head down; not upon the pillow this time, but, soft, upon her breast. Her steady, sane eyes prevented him. Her big, big love for him, her quiet acceptance of things, her mother-heart, reaching out to awkward Hester, doing service beyond the grave, awed him. So he remained silent and rigid. He was thinking.

Of his early youth he thought, and of all that life had promised then. His were the sad musings of a middle-aged man who has missed. He had been fervid to enter the ministry, and most ambitious. Sure he was that he must soon become a very famous preacher. And how he had worshiped Clara, decking her with poetic phrases all the time! She had accepted them prettily, yet he had felt, even then, that she was longing to utilize them. It was as if she felt that all this adulation did not bring them in a single penny, and that it was a pity. He had moved in a dream and through fire in those days. But whether he

prayed or wooed, God had been smiling on him all the time. This was sure.

"Don't let it worry you," Clara was saying.

He came out of his reverie; she dragged him from it with the wrong word.

"Worry!" he returned, almost scornfully, and stood up at once. "No, I won't. I promise you."

He stooped down and kissed her, then he went toward the door, leaving her lying straight, with the menace of that awful bodice across her knees.

"I must go and see old Voller this afternoon," he said, in a matter-of-fact voice, while his face was torn. "Shall I send Hester up to you now, dear?"

"No, not yet"; she turned and smiled brightly at him. "I shall go to sleep as like as not."

At the bottom of the stairs and outside his study door Hester was waiting, with her usual domestic expression, vague and urbane. John concluded that something was wrong. Behind her was the study interior, and the fire was out. Between them-he absorbed, she incompetentthey had done this; or was she also absorbed and with an equal right to be! She had stuck the poker between the bars, and he saw no signs of tea upon the table. "It won't be long," she said, affably, "but we never can get the kettle to boil up nicely on Wednesdays."

"Tea! I won't wait for it." He spoke vacantly and picked up his hat. Then, giving Hester an odd look, he kissed her. This was unusual. She flushed, and closely studied his face.

"I am going to Voller's," he said, brushing his soft hat upon his sleeve before he set it on his head. 'Anything I can bring?"

66

feeling, with its attendant agonies and tenderness, he had instilled into the kiss he left between her puckered brows.

As he walked through the little front garden he knew perfectly well that Clara from the window overhead was watching him. She always did, and she would expect him to look back and wave farewell as usual. He could not; to save his life he could not do this to-day. It was such a common thing to do when his soul was in very tatters.

He felt that his burden was more than he could bear. Clara was dying-and just because he had not enough money to buy life for her. Childishly, he wanted to say to God, not in rebellion but through pain, "I cannot bear any more.”

Directly he got away from his own house and from all those others that were just like it; directly he got to the sea, smelling it and feeling the clean sharpness of shingle beneath his foot, he became more calm and quite hopeful. He regained his sense of religion, and began, with joy in the free working of his brain, to think out afresh his Thursday sermon.

He had taken for his text, "For his God doth instruct him to discretion and doth teach him." He walked by the sea meditating upon this; first keeping close to the waves, and then taking a narrow path that ran along the top of the low, sandy cliff. It was fringed with tamarisk-trees. John Dimmer stood still, in a swift mood of rapture and deep thanksgiving; to look at big waves through thin tamarisk-trees was so lovely! The sea always thrilled him.

Sometimes this sea of his, the English Channel, was such a foolish little thing, with mere ripples; it just played at being a sea. Sometimes the chalk in it was deeply stirred, and it then became a bed of beautiful pale opal; lying far out, with pale sands between it and the shingly shore. Sometimes it was turbid with dark seaweeds, sullen and malevolent, making you shudder, reminding you of jealousy, that most cruel quality of the heart. Sometimes it carelessly flung at your feet delicate pink and purple flowers torn from some mermaid's garden. To-day it was rough, yet without menace, and John Dimmer, standing enthralled behind thin tamarisk - trees,