These June days seemed to Royce as if he held them in perpetuity,--as if there could be no change save for the slow enhancement of all the charms of nature, bespeaking further perfections. The past was so bitter; the present was so sweet; and he thought no more of the future. He was content. He had developed a certain adaptability to the uncouth conditions of the simple life here, or love had limited his observation and had concentrated it. All the artificialities of his wonted standards had fallen from him, and he was happy in the simplest way. He wondered that he should ever have thought the girl beautiful and charming hitherto, so embellished was her loveliness now; as if she too shared the ineffable radiance and grace of the June, with the fair and faintly tinted roses known as “the maiden’s-blush” that grew just outside the door. He had told her that they were like her, and when he learned the old-fashioned name he wore one always stuck in the clumsy, ill-worked buttonhole of his blue-checked cotton shirt. So pervasive was the sentiment of happiness in the house that it suffused even the consciousness of the two old people; Jane Ann accepting it willingly and with vicarious joy, and Tubal Cain yielding after many a qualm of doubt and tremor of fear, and still experiencing strong twinges of remorse. He had been led to believe, by the crafty sheriff’s show of indifference to his disclosure, and repeated rejection as naught the significant points of the suspicion he had entertained, that he had been wrong from the first in his conclusion. He had begun to argue from the officer’s standpoint, and he was amazed and somewhat dismayed to perceive how slight were the grounds on which any reasonable charge could be based. As this conviction grew more decided, he anticipated, with an ever increasing terror, the possible visit of which the sheriff had casually spoken. Although he was sure now that, officially considered, it could but be a flash in the pan, still it would reveal to the juggler his host’s hideous suspicions and flagrant breach of hospitality, and from this Tubal Sims winced as from corporeal pain. He thought that the sheriff already considered him a preposterous fool; and albeit that judgment from so great a man--for Tubal Cain Sims’s self-conceit had been much abated by his trip to Colbury--was humiliating to his pride, it would be far more poignant, multiplied by the number of inhabitants in the Cove, when published abroad and entertained by every man who dwelt in its vicinity. Moreover, the disclosure of his mission to Colbury would deliver the graceless informer, bound hand and foot as it were, into the power of Jane Ann Sims, and it might well alienate the juggler from them all and thus wreck Euphemia’s happiness and prospects in life; and he had begun of late to value these. Whenever he was not mulishly resistant, he fell much under the influence of Jane Ann Sims, and her views of the