not follow the Colonel's words. "Oh, you'll not understand it, Boyce - God knows your poor mind is a blank along these lines. But Cale and I - we feel deeply that this money here, if ever it is to have a consecrated use- now is the time." A flash of intelligent joy lightened Kilworth's face. Down in his heart a pump shook with a deep throb of hope. He looked a dog-like gratitude, yet uncertain, and Colonel Longford cried: "Take it take the miserable stuff — and lie - lie for the glory of God, and tell 'em it's yours; that you've always had it, and that you can pay up dollar for dollar as you said you would! Take it not for you- not for your depositors, though it's got to go that way; but take it for the sake of a miserable sinner who had God's mercy once and wants to make this small return in sustaining the faith of his fellows. Take it, you damned old scoundrel! He shoved the box across the desk, and turned to Caleb Hale who stood watching greed and self-respect - curious companions -as they were being reborn on Boyce Kilworth's face. Kilworth reached for the box, opened it, looked at a bond, held it to the light,

counted the unclipped coupons, thumbed down into the box, and spoke no word. But the pump in his heart was jumping like a machine with a shattered governor. The ashen face flushed, and his mouth watered, and he all but drooled, while the eyes of those about him saw another self coming out of the depths into the ghastly visage.

The Colonel beckoned Caleb Hale, and the two old men withdrew; the lovers, with linked hands, followed softly. The man at the desk was not aware that he was alone. He was breathing deeply and hard. The Colonel and Hale quietly closed the outer door and left the house. In the hall, where the lovers had stopped for their first fleeting, shy kiss, they heard a voice the old raucous voice of Boyce Kilworth, crying: "This ends" he seemed to stop, then he went on, those criminal charges."

They thought they heard him cry sharply in a choked voice: "Oh, my God, my merciful God," and their hands tightened; for they felt Boyce Kilworth was praying. So they sat in the deep, sweet joy of love's first deep silence.

Then, hearing no sound from within the room

beyond, they rose and went in. And there they found that Boyce Kilworth's words were not a prayer. He was only answering a bailiff who haled him to a High Court.

"A PROSPEROUS GENTLEMAN "

The Thane of Cawdor lives, a prosperous gentleman. - Macbeth.

PART I

WHEN our grandfathers -heaven rest them! -"crossed the prairies as of old our fathers crossed the sea," they brought their womankind with them, after the manner of the Teuton. The women brought their flower seeds; and where those seeds were planted civilisation came to stay. Not the schoolhouse, or the court house, or the saloon, or the statesman, or the real-estate agent proclaimed the permanency of this state-building Northern white man so indelibly as the beds of humble petunias and zinnias and larkspurs.

When these flowers blossomed in the desert, heralding the swift coming of the old-fashioned roses, there, indeed, was raised the everlasting Ebenezer of the race. There was consecrated ground. Over these Western plains of ours the Cross had come, and had crumbled and was for

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gotten. Grass had grown over the adobe walls of deserted churches and nameless forts where the sword of conquest lay rusting until the plough uncovered a degraded splendour.

The Cross and the sword came with pomp and pride; and the outcast Indian woman smiled bitterly, but took them, and her half-breed children lost the Cross and the sword in the wilderness, while a just God righted her wrongs for it is a law of progress that a wronged woman's tears shall salt the ground where they are shed. So it was not until the petunias came, and the fouro'clocks and asters-it was not until the great hollyhocks and poppies glowed about the feet of a happy, free-born womanhood that God let the land prosper and made the flower garden the sign of His covenant with men.

A long time ago in the beginning, two generations ago, in fact in those days when the grandmothers of New Raynham were young and presumably beautiful, even that first summer of the town's history, when the settlement was picketed against the Indians and mothers huddled with their young in the little stone schoolhouse many an anxious night, while the men rode the