This was a proposition of a kind that might well secure the juggler’s business-like consideration. But his eyes were fixed with a sudden untranslated thought. His pipe had turned unheeded in his hand, fire, tobacco, and ashes falling from it into the dewy weeds below the step, as he stood on the verge of the passage. His expressive face had altered. It was smitten with some prophetic thought, and had grown set and rigid. “New Helvetia Springs! Summer resort, of course. I didn’t know there was anything of the sort in the vicinity,” he said at last. “What kind of place is it?” “I dunno!” exclaimed Sims, dangling his feet briskly back and forth in an accession of contempt. “_I_ never tuk the trouble ter ride over thar in my life, though I hev knowed the hotel ter be a-runnin’, ez they call it, fur forty year an’ more.” Royce stood in silence for a time, moodily leaning his shoulder against the wall of the house, one hand thrust in his leather belt, the other holding the pipe at an angle and a poise which would seem to precede an immediate return of the stem to his mouth. But he did not smoke. Presently he put the pipe into his pocket, drew his hat over his eyes, and wandered down the road; then climbing a fence or two, he was off in the woods, as safe from interruption as if in the midst of a trackless ocean. He walked far and fast with the constraint of nervous energy, but hardly realizing the instinct of flight which informed his muscles. When at last he flung himself down at the foot of great rocks that stood high above a shelving slope in woods so dense that he could not see farther than a yard or two in any direction, for the flutter of the multitudinous leaves and the shimmer of the interfulgent sunshine, he was saying to himself that he was well quit of all the associations of his old world; that he had found safety here, a measure of content, a means of livelihood, and the prospect of a certain degree of simple happiness when he should be married to a girl whom he had learned to love and who loved him,--a beautiful girl of innate refinement, who had mind enough to understand him and to acquire an education. He would do well to still resolutely that sudden plunging of the heart which had beset him upon the knowledge that his old world was so near at hand, with all those endearing glamours as for the thing that is native. What avail for him to hover around them, to court the fate of the moth? He remembered with a sort of terror the pangs of nostalgia which at first had so preyed upon him, and should he deliberately risk the renewal of these poignant throes, now possibly spent forever? Regret, danger, despair, lay in the way thither; why should he long to look in upon scenes that were now as reminiscences, so well could he predicate them on experiences elsewhere? He wondered, fretfully, however, and with a rising doubt of himself, that when he and Euphemia had climbed the mountain and looked down at the shimmer of the small towns in the