There spoke the Spirit of the Law!  Keep us safe, O Lord! whoever may go to the devil!

In reply to questions from her companion, Miss Minorkey told the story of Albert’s conflict with Westcott—­she stated the case with all the coolness of a dispassionate observer.

There was no sign—­Albert listened for it—­of the slightest sympathy for or against him in the matter.  Then the story of little Katy was told as one might tell something that had happened a hundred years ago, without any personal sympathy.  It was simply a curious story, an interesting adventure with which to beguile a weary hour of stage riding in the darkness.  It would have gratified Albert to have been able to detect the vibration of a painful memory or a pitying emotion, but Helen did not suffer her placidity to be ruffled by disturbing emotion.  The conversation drifted to other subjects presently through Mr. Minorkey’s sudden recollection that the drowning excitement at Metropolisville had brought on a sudden attack of his complaint, he had been seized with a pain just under his ribs.  It ran up to the point of the right shoulder, and he thought he should die, etc., etc., etc.  Nothing saved him but putting his feet into hot water, etc., etc., etc.

The gray dawn came on, and Charlton was presently able to trace the lineaments of the well-known countenance.  He was not able to recognize it again without a profound emotion, an emotion that he could not have analyzed.  Her face was unchanged, there was not the varying of a line in the placid, healthy, thoughtful expression to indicate any deepening of her nature through suffering.  Charlton’s face had changed so that she would not have recognized him readily had it been less concealed.  And by so much as his countenance had changed and hers remained fixed, had he drifted away from her.  Albert felt this.  However painful his emotion was, as he sat there casting furtive glances at Helen’s face, there was no regret that all relation between them was broken forever.  He was not sorry for the meeting.  He needed such a meeting to measure the parallax of his progress and her stagnation.  He needed this impression of Helen to obliterate the memory of the row-boat.  She was no longer to remain in his mind associated with the blessed memory of little Kate.  Hereafter he could think of Katy in the row-boat—­the other figure was a dim unreality which might have come to mean something, but which never did mean anything to him.

I wonder who keeps the tavern at Cypher’s Lake now?  In those old days it was not a very reputable place; it was said that many a man had there been fleeced at poker.  The stage did not reach it on this snowy morning until ten o’clock.  The driver stopped to water, the hospitable landlord, whose familiar nickname was “Bun,” having provided a pail and cut a hole through the ice of the lake for the accommodation of the drivers.  Water for beasts—­gentlemen could meantime