mood, aroused in her now merely a breathless satisfaction at the spectacle of her own audacity. The natural Virginia had triumphed for an instant over the Virginia whom the ages had bred. At home she found Oliver waiting for supper, and the three children in tears for fear she should decide to stay out forever. "Oh, mother, we thought you'd gone away never to come back," sobbed Lucy, throwing herself into her arms, "and what would little Jenny have done?" "Where in the world have you been, Virginia?" asked Oliver, a trifle impatiently, for he was not used to having her absent from the house at meal hours. "I was afraid somebody had been taken ill at the rectory, so I went around to inquire." "No, nobody was ill," answered Virginia quietly. Though her resolution made her tremble all over, it did not occur to her for an instant that even now she might recede from it. As the rector had gone to the war, so she was going now to battle with Abby. She was afraid, but that quality which had made the Pendletons despise fear since the beginning of Dinwiddie's history, which they had helped to make, enabled her to control her quivering muscles and to laugh at the reproachful protests with which the children surrounded her. Through her mind there shot the thought: "I have a secret from Oliver," and she felt suddenly guilty because for the first time since her marriage she was keeping something back from him. Then, following this, there came the knowledge, piercing her heart, that she must keep her secret because even if she told him, he would not understand. With the casualness of a man's point of view towards an emotion, he would judge its importance, she felt, chiefly by the power it possessed of disturbing the course of his life. Unobservant, and ever ready to twist and decorate facts as she was, it had still been impossible for her to escape the truth that men are by nature incapable of a woman's characteristic passion for nursing sentiment. To struggle to keep a feeling alive for no better reason than that it was a feeling, would appear as wastefully extravagant to Oliver as to the unimaginative majority of his sex. Such pure, sublime, uncalculating folly belonged to woman alone! When, at last, supper was over and the children were safely in bed, she came downstairs to Oliver, who was smoking a cigar over a newspaper, and asked carelessly: "At what time do you start in the morning?" "I'd like to be up by five," he replied, without lowering his paper. "We're to meet the hounds at Croswell's store at a quarter of six, so I'll have to get off by five at the latest. I wanted my horse fresh for to-morrow, that's why I only went a mile or two this afternoon," he added.