"He moughtn't hev been acquainted with the boulder ez a monimint o' boundary," she urged; and when the fallacy of this was demonstrated, "He mought hev been sorry an' wanted to put it back, but it war too heavy an' the hill war too high." Whereupon Kenniston burst into satiric laughter. "He's sorry enough now, I'll warrant you; and he'll be sorrier still before I'm through with him." But although Adelicia's expertness in excuses for other people failed in this instance, Kenniston's purposes were frustrated by a wholesale jail delivery which occurred at Colbury shortly after, and Taft was among the jail-birds who took flight thence. He was never heard of again in the Cove. The thought of him at large and at enmity served to postpone the building of the hotel for a time. The plans for a great public edifice in Bretonville absorbed Kenniston in the immediate future, and finally he grew indifferent to the project of the mountain resort, and it was definitely abandoned. Larrabee profited by Kenniston's advice, and availed himself of the "amnesty" proffered by the government to moonshiners about that time, and thenceforward the still knew him no more. The manufacture of "brush whiskey" was never resumed at the Lost Time mine. The store there became truly a centre of barter under the ministrations of old Copley and the power behind the throne, his niece, Cornelia Taft, who developed much of her father's decision and definiteness and shrewdness of character as she grew older, always tempered by Mrs. Jiniway's precepts, to which she rigidly adhered. She received much countenance, and guidance too, in these early years, from Adelicia, who persisted in following the bent of her own lenient inclination toward others, making the most of their good qualities and light of their foibles. It was a certain solace in the bitter loss of other illusions for which she was less charitable. She never could be brought to believe that Julia had not intentionally wiled her lover's heart away from her. It was a relief when these strained relations were at an end, when Julia and Espey were married, in defiance of Cap'n Lucy's opposition, and had gone to Tanglefoot Cove. Cap'n Lucy argued their much-mooted points of difference with Adelicia less than before, and deferred in silence to her. It was only when, in the winter evenings, Jasper Larrabee was wont to come and read aloud, as in the old days, that Cap'n Lucy rose to his normal temperature of contradiction, and controverted sundry hard sayings difficult to be incorporated in the life of a willful man, and contemned Jasper Larrabee's learning, and accused him of ignorantly perverting the Scriptures. Then it was that Adelicia's talents of optimism became transcendently apparent. She developed a wonderful craft of interpretation. Leaning over one arm of Cap'n Lucy's chair, while Jasper Larrabee leaned over the other with his book and page to show,--Cap'n Lucy, flustered and red-faced, acrid and belligerent,