“Have ye love for me, Donald?” she said searchingly.

“All the love left in me is for the little lad and for you, Katie,” answered Donald.  “I’ll not deceive you, Katie.  It’s but a broken man I am; but I’ve always loved ye, Katie.  I’ll be a good man t’ ye, lass.  Come and be the little lad’s mother, and let me live wi’ my own once more.  Will ye come?” As he said these words, he stretched out his arms toward Katie; and she, trembling, afraid to be glad, shadowed by the sad past, yet trusting in the future, crept into them, and was folded close to the heart she had so faithfully loved all her life.

“I promised Elspie,” she whispered, “that I’d never, never give him to another.”

“Ay,” said Donald, as he kissed her.  “He’s your bairn, my Katie.  Ye’ll be content wi’ me, Katie?”

“Yes, Donald, if I make you content,” she replied; and a look of heavenly peace spread over her face.

The next morning Katie went alone to Elspie’s grave.  It seemed to her that only there could she venture to look her new future in the face.  As she knelt by the low mound, her tears falling fast, she murmured,—­

“Eh, my bonny Elspie, ye’d the best o’ his love.  But it’s me that’ll be doin’ for him till I die, an’ that’s better than a’ the love.”

Dandy Steve.

Everything in this world is relative, and nothing more so than the significance of the same word in different localities.  If Dandy Steve had walked Broadway in the same clothes which he habitually wore in the Adirondack wilderness, not only would nobody have called him a dandy, but every one would have smiled sarcastically at the suggestion of that epithet’s being applied to him.  Nevertheless, “Dandy Steve” was the name by which he was familiarly known all through the Saranac region; and judging by the wilderness standard, the adjective was not undeserved.  No such flannel shirts, no such jaunty felt hats, no such neckties, had ever been worn by Adirondack guides as Dandy Steve habitually wore.  And as for his buck-skin trousers, they would not have disgraced a Sioux chief,—­always of the softest and yellowest skins, always daintily made, the seams set full of leather fringes, and sometimes marked by lines of delicate embroidery in white quills.  There were those who said that Dandy Steve had an Indian wife somewhere on the Upper Saranac, but nobody knew; and it would have been a bold man who asked an intrusive question of Dandy Steve, or ventured on any impertinent jesting about his private affairs.  Certain it was that none but Indian hands embroidered the fine buckskins he wore; but, then, there were such buckskins for sale,—­perhaps he bought them.  A man who would spend the money he did for neckties and fine flannel shirts would not stop at any extravagance in the price of trousers.  The buckskins, however, were not the only evidence in this case.  There was a well-authenticated tale of a brilliant red shawl—­a woman’s shawl—­and a pair of silver