can be keeping Mr. Taylor. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘I did not write for him.’ ‘Not write!’ I answered; and I fear I used an ugly word to her face. ‘I’ll write at once,’ returned she, humbly. ‘Of course,’ said I, ‘after the horse is stolen we always shut the barn door it’s the way of the world.’” Another pause. “I would have given anything to have taken Janey from the house at the time; to take her away from the town,” observed Charles in a low tone. “I said so then, but it could not be.” “I should have done it in your place,” said the doctor; “if her mother had said no, I would have carried her away in front of her face. ‘Not married,’ you say. Rubbish to that; everybody knows she would have been safe with you, and you would have been married as soon as you could. What are forms and ceremonies and long tongues in comparison with a life like Janey’s?” Charles Taylor leaned his head upon his hand, lost in the retrospect. Oh that he had taken her, that he had set at naught what he had then bowed to, the conventionalities of society, she might have been by his side now in health and life to bless him. Doubting words interrupted the train of thoughts. “And yet I don’t know,” the doctor was repeating in a dreamy manner, “what is to be will be; we look back, all of us, and say, if I had acted thus, if I had done the other thing, it would not have happened; events would have turned out differently, but who is to be sure of it. Had you carried Janey out of harm’s way, as we might have thought, there is no telling but what she might have had the fever just the same; her blood might have become tainted before she left the house, there is no knowing, Mr. Taylor.” “True. Good evening, doctor.” He turned suddenly and hastily to go out of the door, but the doctor caught him before he had crossed the threshhold, and touched his arm to detain him. They stood there in obscurity, their faces shaded in the dusky night. “She left you a parting word, Mr. Taylor, an hour before she died; she was calm and sensible, though extremely weak. Mrs. Brewster had gone to her favorite, and I was left alone with Janey. ‘Has he not come yet?’ she asked me, opening her eyes. ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘he could not come, he was never written for,’ for I knew she alluded to you, and was determined to tell her the truth, dying though she was. ‘What shall I say to him for you?’ I continued. She raised her hand to motion my face nearer hers, for her voice was growing faint. ‘Tell him, with my dear love, not to grieve,’ she whispered between her panting breath, ‘tell him that I am but gone on before.’ I think they were almost the last words that she spoke.” Charles Taylor leaned against the post of the office entrance, and drank in the words; then he shook the doctor’s hand and departed, hurrying along like one who shrank from observation, for he did not care just then to encounter the gaze of his fellow-men. Coming with a quick step up the same