Then the color would sweep over her face in a crimson drift and leave it painfully white, and she would glide to the piano like a ghost of her former self and play some sad sweet strain, and sometimes sing. She had no heart for her dear old woods in these days. She had tried it one day in spring; slipped over the back fence and away through the ploughed field where the sea of silver oats had surged, and up to the hillside and the woods; but she was so reminded of David that it only brought heart aches and tears. She wondered if it was because she was getting old that the hillside did not seem so joyous now, and she did not care to look up into the sky just for the pure joy of sky and air and clouds, nor to listen to the branches whisper to the robins nesting. She stooped and picked a great handful of spring beauties, but they did not seem to give her pleasure, and by and by she dropped them from listless fingers and walked sedately down to the house once more. On this morning she did not even care to play. She went into the parlor and touched a few notes, but her heart was heavy and sad. Life was growing too complex. Last week there had come a letter from Harry Temple. It had startled her when it arrived. She feared it was some ill-news about David, coming as it did from New York and being written in a strange hand. It had been a plea for forgiveness, representing that the writer had experienced nothing but deep repentance and sorrow since the time he had seen her last. He set forth his case in a masterly way, with little touching facts of his childhood, and lonely upbringing, with no mother to guide. He told her that her noble action toward him had but made him revere her the more, and that, in short, she had made a new creature of him by refusing to return his kiss that day, and leaving him alone with so severe a rebuke. He felt that if all women were so good and true men would be a different race, and now he looked up to her as one might look up to an angel, and he felt he could never be happy again on this earth until he had her written word of forgiveness. With that he felt he could live a new life, and she must rest assured that he would never offer other than reverence to any woman again. He further added that his action had not intended any insult to her, that he was merely expressing his natural admiration for a spirit so good and true, and that his soul was innocent of any intention of evil. With sophistry in the use of which he was an adept, he closed his epistle, fully clearing himself, and assuring her that he could have made her understand it that day if she had not left so suddenly, and he had not been almost immediately called away to the dying bed of his dear cousin. This contradictory letter had troubled Marcia greatly. She was keen enough to see that his logic was at fault, and that the two pages of his letter did not hang together, but one thing was plain, that he wished her forgiveness. The Bible said that one must