startled.” Then, turning to the bookcase, he added sharply, looking back at me as he spoke, “Do you know anything about Russia?”      

       “No,” I answered; “that is, very little.” There were reasons why this subject was distasteful to me. Again I moved away.     

       He opened the bookcase.     

       “Phew!” he said,—“the dust of ages here! I'll have to ask Mrs. Brane to let you—”      

       I went out and shut the door.     

       But I was not so easily to escape young Dabney's determination to see more of me. Mrs. Brane, that very evening, asked me to spend my mornings dusting, her husband's books and cataloguing them. At first I dreaded these hours with our visitor, but as the days went by I came more and more to enjoy them. I found myself talking to Mr. Dabney freely, more about my thoughts and fancies than about my life, which holds too much that is painful. And he was, at first, a most frank and engaging companion. I was young and lonely, I had never had such pleasant intercourse. Well, there is no use apologizing for it, trying to explain it, beating about the bush,—I lost my heart to him. It went out irrevocably before the shadow fell. And I thought that his heart had begun to move towards mine. Sometimes there was the strangest look of troubled feeling in his eyes.     

       This preoccupation kept me from thinking of other things. I was always going over yesterday's conversation with Mr. Dabney, planning to-morrow's, enjoying to-day's. Mrs. Brane seemed to watch us with sympathy. After a week or so, she put an end to what she called “Paul Dabney's short comings and long goings” and invited him to stay with us. He accepted, and I was wonderfully happy. I felt very young for the first time in my whole sad life. I remember this period as a sort of shadowy green stretch in a long, horrible, rocky journey. It came—the quiet, shady stretch—soon enough to an end.     

  

  

       CHAPTER V—“NOT IN THE DAYTIME, MA'AM”      

 MARY'S labors and mine did not last very long. At the end of a week, a promising couple applied for the position described in Mrs. Brane's advertisement. They drove up to the house in a hired 

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