intention, and he felt enmeshed in troublous toils in the knowledge that he secretly wished to hinder that which he apparently sought to help forward. He would have given much to recall his words. He had lost all desire to assist in adjudicating public affairs in the courts of Judge Lynch, to investigate the mystery of the intrusion into his own forge, even to punish the bungling smith that surreptitiously broke and mended; these things had become repugnant to him, under the knowledge of Marcella’s disapproval. He stood for a few moments in the shadow, silently regarding Teck Jepson in the mellow splendor of the moonlight, that added its indefinite idealization to those advantages of symmetry and pose which Clem considered constituted a “powerful fine-built man.” The blacksmith turned, slouching forward his heavy shoulders, a manner he affected when displeased and out of sorts, and which had an oddly aging effect, making him appear like some burly fellow of fifty or sixty, bent with toil and trouble. He flung himself, with a short sigh, into his former nest in the hay, and upheld his head on one hand. The moonlight had shifted since he last lay there. The hay that in the semi-obscurity retained its dull amber tint, tending here and there to a dusky brown or the nullity of invisibility, was in the light a fine and fibrous silver; it gleamed with lustrous reflections as he moved, and threw his head and face into distinct relief, despite the shadow of his hat-brim. “Clem looks like ez ef he hed been a-feedin’ on ten-penny nails as his daily fare,” suggested Jube, the parson’s son, who had lately come in, and who sat upon an inverted half-bushel measure. He was amusing himself by shelling an ear of corn, and dropping the grains through the cracks in the ill-laid flooring upon the little filly in the stall below, which he could see quite distinctly; the surprise of the little animal was varied by periodic panic and flight; she would return, however, to reëxamine the phenomenon, until, finally, Jube forced the empty cob through the crevice, hitting her fairly upon the head, when, with a terrified snort and an elastic bound, she disappeared, to come back no more. Clem made no retort. He did not fail, however, so sharpened were his blunt perceptions, to notice that Teck Jepson, despite his preoccupation, glanced round at the sound of his name; he remembered, with an irritated sense of the grotesqueness of the mistake, that Jepson fancied him an accepted lover, and there was no relish in masquerading in this triumphant guise with so dreary and hopeless an identity within. “What’s the news from the forge, Teck?” demanded Jube, reaching out to the pile of corn for an ear to hold in readiness in case the filly should venture out again. Jepson once more turned to the window. “All dark thar,” he replied.