largely negative in its character; and he despised the evil in him, for the very same reason.

His last stinging remark, however, was not without a momentary effect. Rick's face flushed, and he seemed on the point of making a hasty rejoinder; but his mother laid her hand upon his arm with a firm, warning pressure, and Miss Bryer nervously sought to create a diversion by besieging me with tea-table attentions. To do Rick justice, his resentment was but a flash; and by the time I had successively declined cheese, dried-beef, pickles and jelly (some of them twice over, for Miss Bryer's anxiety confused her recollection), his wonted good-nature resumed its easy sway, and he was ready to follow up the assault with reinforcements of cake-loaf-cake, queen-cake, seed-cake, and I know not what beside.

I shall record but one other tea-table topic. In some reminiscence of New Orleans, Mrs. Thorne suddenly mentioned the name of Venner, and my start of surprise did not escape her notice,-nothing does!

"Do you know them?" she asked.

"The bankers? Only by reputation," replied I, evasively.

She looked at me with keen scrutiny. "It was the youngest partner that I knew well," she went on,-" Mr. Paul Venner. A fine young man. Did you never happen

to meet him?"

"I think I have-in New York. But he was not then connected with the house of which you speak."

"Indeed!" rejoined she, with a tone of surprise. "I understood him to say that he had grown up in it."

I made no reply. What need to discuss the matter? Of course she labored under a misapprehension, but many a worse one, involving it may be, the happiness of a lifehas had to pass without correction.

"I get

Mrs. Thorne looked dissatisfied and curious. an occasional letter from him even now," she continued,

with her eyes fixed on my face, as if bent on finding the clue to my first involuntary manifestation; "for the business in which he is my agent is still unsettled, and he keeps me informed of its progress.'

"Ah, indeed?" said I, doing my best to assume that mildly interrogative tone wherewith politeness so thinly masks indifference.

She made another attempt. "By the way, did I not hear a rumor that he was married, or about to be?"

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Very possibly," answered I, gazing absently out of the window, and thinking, not of Mrs. Thorne, not of Madame Rumor, but of Paul's face as I saw it last-as I see it now, and shall see it, I fear, always,-changing slowly from surprise to doubt-certainty-anguish; and vanishing, stern and reproachful, into the gloom. Will he wear that face at the altar, I wonder? And was it the far-off swinging of his wedding-bells that made the air so close and heavy that sultry summer afternoon-overflooded with melody, even to faintness, as sometimes with perfume! Well! what

could it possibly matter to me!

Mrs. Thorne gave it up, and rose from the table.

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Carrie," she said, presently, "it promises to be a fine sunset; suppose you and Rick take Miss Frost over to enjoy it from Sunset Rock. A spot," she added, turning to me, "where the departure of day is witnessed to great advantage, with whatever glories of light and cloud it wraps about it,--from which circumstance it derives its name."

XXVI.

SUNSET PICTURES.

HE Bryer mansion and its immediate acres occupied the flat crown of Chestnut Hill. To

the west began a gentle slope into a wide, undulating vale, robed with the varied green of forest, field, and meadow, and jeweled with tiny sheets and threads of water. On the brow of this slope was a great, rough, irregular mass of rock, with mosses and ferns clinging to its sides' and a thrifty young oak rooted in a seam at its top; under whose boughs we sat down to view the marvelous pictures that sun and cloud were jointly making. Overhead the sky was clear and rosy. To the right, large masses of cloud were rolling up,-their bossy fronts ruddy with the sun-glow, but stretching far back, dense, sombre and threatening. In the western horizon the sun hung low-a bloodred ball of fire. Just beneath him, within a hand-breadth, as it seemed, of the horizon's rim, stretched a long, narrow line of cloud, straight and black and sharp as if drawn with ink. Toward this the sun was slowly descending.

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"How strange," said Carrie Thorne, suddenly, to think that the sun which seems-and is-setting, to us, is really rising upon another hemisphere!

"I am better content to forget it," I answered, speaking out of an uncontrollable bitterness of heart (Ah! those wedding bells!). "To-night, it only saddens me to know

T

that other and fresher eyes discover, in the vanishing rose and gold of our sunset, the waking glory of their morning."

She looked at me with a gentle surprise. "I do not sec why it should," she said, simply. "It makes me glad to think that there is morning somewhere, if not just over me." Then she went to gather some wild columbines growing in the clefts of the rock; and, lured on from one tuft of ruby-colored, honey-laden blossoms to another, disappeared from sight.

Rick had thrown himself upon the rock, a little apart; and was watching the sky in silence, with a face whose quiet gravity might have beseemed a death-bed vigil. Gifted with a quick sense of beauty, and impressionable as water, his eyes dwelt admiringly on the sunset's changeful splendors, while his mood involuntarily reflected the spirit of the hour and scene.

Meantime, the sun sank steadily. Ere long, his bright rim touched the black strip of cloud, and vanished behind it,-blotted, as it were, from the universe. The landscape shuddered, and the sky grew livid. From the dusky cloud-bastion on the right, came a low roll of thunder, as if in solemn protest. In the boughs above us, a hidden bird gave a scared, uneasy twitter; and a breeze that had slept in the tree's top since morning, woke from its long dream, and stirred, and sighed. Rick threw me an awestruck, appealing glance; as if to fill up the measure of his sombre delight with the certainty of another's sympathy; but he neither spoke nor moved. I was deeply grateful to him for his silence. At that moment, a talkative or a fidgety companion would have been intolerable.

Suddenly, a faint red gleam shot from beneath the ebony cloud; and on the instant the sun's lower rim emerged, and slowly grew upon our view. The spectacle now became wondrously and weirdly beautiful. The straight, narrow cloud drew a belt of inky blackness across the sun's

broad disc; above and below which, the uncovered portions of that luminary glowed radiantly,-two distinct hemispheres of crimson splendor. Gradually the black belt crept up; little by little, the lower hemisphere broadened; the upper one diminished; and the sun reappeared to view. Round, red, and majestic, he hung for a few moments above the horizon, bathing the earth and sky in his departing glory. Every glimpse of water became a spot of roseate sheen; every leaf and grass-blade had its face of ruddy glow and reverse of purple dusk; even the gray tints of the rock whereon we sat showed dimly through a lustrous, rosy veil. Thus regal, calm, and glorious, the sun sank finally from sight,

"Beautiful! beautiful!" exclaimed Rick, drawing a long breath, and starting up. "I never saw anything like it! And I doubt if ever I do again;-however, a single sunset like that may well suffice one for a lifetime. But I would give a good deal to know what you saw in it, Miss Frost! Something more than sun and cloud and color, I'll be bound."

Involuntarily I held out my hand to him. "Let me thank you first for keeping so still. Most people would have talked, and I could not have borne it. You shall have my thoughts gratis, since you are pleased to want anything so worthless. I was only thinking how often a human life passes suddenly behind as black and opaque a cloud as did the sun yonder; and I was wondering how many of them would partially emerge, and forever present to the mind's eye the spectacle of two hemispheres of brightness, with a black belt of sorrowful experiences and memories between them. I did not think it worth while to puzzle myself with the still harder question how few of them would ever come out wholly from the cloud, to shine in undimmed and unrestricted brightness for awhile before sinking finally into the grave."

He gave me a more penetrating look than I had thought