to get a breath."

[60]

The young fellow rose restlessly, throwing back his shoulders, and paced the little room, filling it with his mountain stride.

Eliza Brewster watched him. She thought of her mistress, and the pride and joy it would have been to her to receive this six feet of manhood under her roof.

"She wouldn't 'a' kept her sentimental dreams long," reflected Eliza bitterly. "He'd 'a' hurt her, he'd 'a' stepped on her feelin's and never known it. He walks as if he had spurs on his boots." She steeled herself against considering him through Mrs. Ballard's eyes. "He's better-lookin' than the picture," she thought, "and I wouldn't trust a handsome man as far as I could see him. They haven't any business with beauty and it always upsets 'em one way or another—yes, every time."

Her eyes wandered to the mantelpiece whose bareness was relieved only by three varying sized pieces of blank paper. She felt the slight[61]est quiver of remorse as she looked. She seemed to see her mistress's gentle glance filled with rebuke.

[61]

She stirred in her chair, folded her arms, and cleared her throat.

"You can leave the things here till I go, if you want to," she said.

Phil paused in his promenade and regarded her. Her manner was so unmistakably inimical that for the first time he wondered.

Perhaps, after all, she was not just a machine. And the same thought which had been entertained by Mrs. Fabian occurred to him.

"Twenty-five years of faithful service," he reflected. "I wonder if she expected the money? She's sore at me. That's a cinch."

Phil's artist nature grasped her standpoint in a flash. The granite face, with its signs of suffering, the loneliness, the poverty, all appealed to him to excuse her disappointment.

His eyes swept about the bare walls.

"Where are Aunt Mary's pictures?" he asked. "Was she too modest to hang them?"

"There were some up there," replied Eliza. "I took 'em down."

The visitor's quick eyes noted the white boards on the mantelpiece. With an unex[62]pected movement, he strode across to it, and turned them around.

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